I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
If the schemes go beyond rules about the balance of risk and start telling people they must support this or that UK plan for extracting moonbeams from cucumbers, then when it goes wrong I think we can guess who will be making up the shortfall.
The modus operandi of the perpetually martyred right.
Elvis Buñuelo @Mr_Considerate Quoted in this article: Allison Pearson, Suella Braverman, Iain Duncan Smith, Elon Musk, Fraser Nelson, Melanie Philips. Not quoted: the tweet.
That's because no-one knows what it was? She claims she has not been told what egregious thing she said in a now deleted tweet. Somewhat Kafkaesque if true.
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
Hugo Rifkind in The Times today has an article on the idea that tech bros are becoming at least as powerful as Nation states and we need to consider how we interact with them on that basis
It does raise the question though of what happens when Musk and Trump fall out. Is that civil war?
But Zuckerberg in 2020 was just fine!
It was not fine.
But it's also orders of magnitude less egregious than what Musky Baby and his techbro shit friends have done this time.
I share others’ views about the use of the nickname “Musky Baby.” It gives me a mental image of a prostitute calling him that whilst pegging him.
FTFY
In that case I could imagine him shouting.
“Musky, Musky Baby.”
“”What’s that?”
“It’s my safe word.”
“F*ck your safe word, you little bitch!”
Musk needs treating with utter contempt. If my using a phrase like 'Musky Baby' annoys you, remember that is exactly the intent: to take the piss out of a guy who is doing everything for himself, not you. If you are one of the weird nerds who defend his every action, ask yourself at what point you would stop supporting the narcissistic liar.
As ever (and this goes back to the days of people using "Bliar", it makes the user of the nickname look bad, not the target.
If you like the target, it may. If you like Musk, then you need your head checking.
I didn't much like Blair. I found use of Bliar tiresome and childish.
I didn't like Cameron or Osborne. I found use of Chameron and Gideon boring and lame.
I felt a strong antipathy towards May. I found use of Maybot to be excruciatingly accurate, but unkind and unnecessary.
I thought that Johnson was one of the most mendacious and dangerous people to have ever been PM. I found use of FLSOJ to be immature and puerile.
Elon Musk is many things, including a complete arsehole. Every time you refer to him as Musky Baby you demean yourself and it's the textual equivalent of nails being dragged down a blackboard. Please, for the sake of my sanity, desist.
Please tell me what name of contempt I can use for Musk, that will not offend you?
Maybe try the adult thing and not be such a prat?
LOL. I assume you actually mean that, and are not being one of those weird nerds who always feel the need to protect Musk?
I see Musk as a threat to democracy and the world, and much more so than Trump. I have been saying this for some time, and it is quite a reversal from how I felt about him ten to twelve years ago.
He deserves no respect. Shame on those who do show him respect.
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
Hugo Rifkind in The Times today has an article on the idea that tech bros are becoming at least as powerful as Nation states and we need to consider how we interact with them on that basis
It does raise the question though of what happens when Musk and Trump fall out. Is that civil war?
But Zuckerberg in 2020 was just fine!
It was not fine.
But it's also orders of magnitude less egregious than what Musky Baby and his techbro shit friends have done this time.
Musk participated in a democratic process in the open. What's wrong with that?
He's done rather more than that, hasn't he? His million-dollar a day giveaway is just one egregious example.
It isn't really possible to doubt that Americans voted Trump because they wanted quite exactly what he said he would deliver. This election seems to me to have been won by a candidate and party who were infinitely more open about their precise intentions than any major UK party in July.
This of course makes the result even worse. The majority wanted this. rather than it being a misunderstanding. It was not hiding and it was in plain sight.
A fair number of Trump supporters here seemed to believe that Trump wasn't really going to do as he said. They took comfort in believing that he was lying to them.
Well to be fair they were probably looking at his track record on honesty
Sods law isn't it. The one time you want him to be lying through his back teeth and it turns out he was being honest!
I have some very good friends in the US who are Trump supporters.
Their views are - I suspect - not uncommon. They think the Democratic Party has been taken over by identity politics and woke, and they want a more businesslike administration.
They run a successful business, making clothes that are sold "own label" by large supermarkets and department stores. The clothes are all imported from low cost parts of the world, and are most commonly made in China.
In the event that Trump were to implement his tariffs they would be absolutely personally hammered. They told me - scoffing- that Trump isn't really going to implement the tariffs, he's just going to use the threat of them with the Chinese government to extract some better terms.
I hope they are right. But I can't help feel that there are a great many people who voted for Trump on the basis that he wouldn't do what he said he'll do.
It isn't possible for anyone to doubt that Trump has authoritarian and anti-democratic instincts and might act on them. It isn't possible that business people didn't know that Trump was protectionist. It isn't possible that voters didn't know Trump has particular and peculiar ideas of justice. USA voters voted thus at the very least, and on the basis of being fully informed, even if a voter felt that this or that particular detail may not be fulfilled.
What more could Trump have done to indicate he meant what he said?
If I was putting together a list of humans whose words match their deeds Trump is not getting in the top 7 billion.
Have we talked about Le Pen case in France? Seeking to bar her and 20 others from standing for office.
it will fail like the lawfare against Trump failed in the USA and it will probably have the same result, propelling her into the Elysee as Trump has made the White House
It is the last desperate swing of the Globalist Woke, try and prosecute the populists to keep them at bay. It is stupid and explosively counter productive
Have we talked about Le Pen case in France? Seeking to bar her and 20 others from standing for office.
French politician gets done for embezzlement. Is that really a story?
Not really, and normally the French legal system it gets tied up for years, but the report is they want her banned from standing immediately if found guilty.
O/T but the Democrats came *very* close to winning the House. I think the Republican majority will only be seven.
Without some gerrymandering in North Carolina, it would be down to one (albeit, offset by Democratic gerrymandering in New York).
Scotus gerrymanded an extra seat for the Dems in both Alabama and Louisiana...
There is no sense in which SCOTUS "gerrymandered". What they did - as a body with a conservative majority - is refuse to accept an unlawful gerrymander by the GOP in those two states which was too egregious even for them, sending them back for reconsideration on the proper legal basis.
Yes, the maps have been gerrymanded to give the Dems extra seats in Alabama and Louisiana.
They may be lawful gerrymanders or morally right gerrymanders but they are still gerrymanders.
Compare the numbers:
Alabama Trump wins by 30% House seats 5 GOP 2 Dem
Louisiana Trump wins by 22% House seats 4 GOP 2 Dem
Massachusettes Harris wins by 25% House seats Dem 9 GOP 0
Connecticut Harris wins by 15% House seats Dem, 5 GOP 0
The Dems are being guaranteed some House seats in southern states whereas the GOP gets nothing throughout New England.
Gerrymandering is damaging wherever it happens but it can be even more damaging when its applied in some parts of a country and not in others.
It is though interesting to see how people are willing to support gerrymanders, vote rigging, bribery, lawfare as long as it is by 'their side'.
All the time. It is only bad when GOP does it, when the Dems do it they are righting a wrong.
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
It is not so much selling out to Russia, but to the global billionaire elite. Putin, House of Saud, Musk, The Waltons, Kochs et al are becoming more important and influential in GOP politics than the UK, Germany and Japan.
That Putin is Russian is irrelevant to them, that he is in favour of autocratic kleptocracy is what is important.
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
Hugo Rifkind in The Times today has an article on the idea that tech bros are becoming at least as powerful as Nation states and we need to consider how we interact with them on that basis
It does raise the question though of what happens when Musk and Trump fall out. Is that civil war?
But Zuckerberg in 2020 was just fine!
It was not fine.
But it's also orders of magnitude less egregious than what Musky Baby and his techbro shit friends have done this time.
I share others’ views about the use of the nickname “Musky Baby.” It gives me a mental image of a prostitute calling him that whilst pegging him.
FTFY
In that case I could imagine him shouting.
“Musky, Musky Baby.”
“”What’s that?”
“It’s my safe word.”
“F*ck your safe word, you little bitch!”
Musk needs treating with utter contempt. If my using a phrase like 'Musky Baby' annoys you, remember that is exactly the intent: to take the piss out of a guy who is doing everything for himself, not you. If you are one of the weird nerds who defend his every action, ask yourself at what point you would stop supporting the narcissistic liar.
As ever (and this goes back to the days of people using "Bliar", it makes the user of the nickname look bad, not the target.
If you like the target, it may. If you like Musk, then you need your head checking.
I didn't much like Blair. I found use of Bliar tiresome and childish.
I didn't like Cameron or Osborne. I found use of Chameron and Gideon boring and lame.
I felt a strong antipathy towards May. I found use of Maybot to be excruciatingly accurate, but unkind and unnecessary.
I thought that Johnson was one of the most mendacious and dangerous people to have ever been PM. I found use of FLSOJ to be immature and puerile.
Elon Musk is many things, including a complete arsehole. Every time you refer to him as Musky Baby you demean yourself and it's the textual equivalent of nails being dragged down a blackboard. Please, for the sake of my sanity, desist.
Please tell me what name of contempt I can use for Musk, that will not offend you?
I thought my post was quite clear. I find names of contempt best avoided.
They can work as one-off verbal gags.
That's your view. Personally, I think they can be very apt. The alternative is to treat him and his views with respect they do not deserve.
And that's far more dangerous.
I want a world where people are treated with respect and dignity. That's obviously a very different world to the one Musk is after, which is why I took issue with your claim that only people who like Musk would take issue with calling him absurd names.
I'm glad that you've now dropped that justification.
The point is that “Musky Baby” is just fucking CRINGE and makes many people have a small testicular or even ovarian prolapse, as they internally shrink away from the CRINGE
Thank you for your contribution. It is valued.
The slavering fandom for Musk is what is actually the Big Cringe.
Have we talked about Le Pen case in France? Seeking to bar her and 20 others from standing for office.
French politician gets done for embezzlement. Is that really a story?
Not really, and normally the French legal system it gets tied up for years, but the report is they want her banned from standing immediately if found guilty.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
I try to be open minded - I said before the election that the range of outcomes for Trump ranged from good to apocalyptic, whereas Harris had a much narrower range from quite bad to bad. Trump would probably worse, but might not be. Which is why I think people voted for him. A 'just not more of this shit' vote.
But I haven't seen anything yet which makes me think a Trump presidency will be anything better than the absolute bottom end of how bad Kamala would have been.
What is happening in America feels like the rebirth of western civilisation. It is replacing a dead world which had lost the capacity to adapt and evolve, was consumed by internal contradictions, and was nearly certain to collapse.
I have personally felt like this is coming for a long time, and came to the view that rather than continuously mourning the loss of the familiar, it is better to just assess what is going on in neutral terms.
I think with Trump 24-28, it will be like the British Empire: Parts will be very good, parts will be very bad... it will transcend any kind of historical verdict.
The comparison with the British Empire has relevance, but rather I see it as the USA being at some point on the curve of decay that the British Empire went through in the roughly late 19C to WW2 - on which we spent the rest of our resources; as Thatcher put it to I think George Bush: "the wealth of a century".
As I see it the USA is nothing like as predominant as Trump seems to think it is, and I think that if he tries to implement his apparent belief that he can allow the dismemberment of European countries at his will, even our current sleepy-Europe might wake up.
For Trump'd regime, I think a better comparison is Venezuela or South Africa.
It is a variety of kleptocracy embedded within a 'democratic' system, with 1) the control being with a crime family who have 2) tamed and controlled a political party, 3) aided and abetted by oligarchs who will profit thereby (eg Musk), protected 4) by a corrupted judicial system.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
Tesla was a failing company retro fitting Lotus Elise with a battery. The company it itself today is nothing like it. Its a bit like saying well Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's and story of loads and loads of other companies.
Musk did start SpaceX.
You can also point to Musk original investment in OpenAI.
Its very different from Trump or Branson, where its basically all bramd deals.
Musk is also turning Grok into something very powerful very quickly such that he’s freaking out Sam Altman
I have said this before. I never believed the i'm buying twitter as i am a free speech supporter.
I think he saw a company that has always struggled to make money, thought he could hardball them into taking lower offer (which backfired). But it was really about the potential of the source of real time training data.
And pretty much straight away setup the xAI spin off and recently built 100k GPU cluster.
i half agree. I believe Musk is a genuine free speech absolutist (with some hypocritical aspects of course)
He wanted to buy Twitter for that reason, then balked at the price, but got aytpically fucked over and paid way more than it’s “worth”, at least at that point on paper
He then made several decisions that made this worse, eg the silly rebranding
HOWEVER like any really bright entrepreneur and innovator, he then foresaw the advantage where others saw nothing. He ruthlessly used TwiX to get Trump into the White House (thereby quadrupling his Twitter investment for a start and making his losses into fat profits) he got the hit on Woke he wants, and now - yes - he has endless data for Grok
This is the hallmark of very bright very successful people, they can turn the mistakes we all make into big opportunities, because they can think ahead, see opportunities and extrapolate
is he a thin skinned pillock? Yes. Is he a once-in-a-century genius? Also yes
People that deny the latter are just fools, who look foolish
The xAI spin off was setup pretty up immediately. As was the ability to scrap data via API being shut off. That suggests was part of the plan. Their first LLM was released after 12 months, given how long these things take to train, again must have moved fast.
As far as I can tell Grok is absolutely no-where in the LLM market - possibly it’s driving X/Twitter subscriptions though?
Given the demand for “quality” text to feed these things, Musk may have made some ready $ selling the Twitter archives to the other AI companies.
Meanwhile no one is making any money from AI right now: OpenAI is a hole in the ground into which money is being poured & it’s much the same for the rest of them. NVidia is making out like a bandit in the process though!
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
Tesla was a failing company retro fitting Lotus Elise with a battery. The company it itself today is nothing like it. Its a bit like saying well Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's and story of loads and loads of other companies.
Musk did start SpaceX.
You can also point to Musk original investment in OpenAI.
Its very different from Trump or Branson, where its basically all bramd deals.
Both Tesla and SpaceX came very near going bust in 2008. They were largely saved by government contracts, directly and indirectly. If Musk had started/got involved with either company a couple of years earlier, he would be a nobody today - just another name on a long list of chancers who tried and failed.
He has been lucky, and to some extent has made his own luck. But the luck was still there.
I still maintain that he owes SpaceX to the late Jerry Pournelle.
Jerry Pournelle went down the SSTO rabbithole - hence advocating for what became DC-X
Musk specifically rejected SSTO from the start.
You do now about Pournelle campaigning and lobbying to get federal funding for private spaceflight? Due to him and others, the law was changed to allow contracts such as COTS.
And if you don't think the brilliant DC-X fed into what SpaceX (and Blue Origin...) are doing, then you are being rather silly.
By all means admire Musk and SpaceX; but you don't have to demean what everybody else did, and is doing.
It's not demeaning anyone to point out what happened. Mass fractions said that SSTO was a bad idea to attempt on planet Earth. Even Gary Hudson was talking about "Zeroth" stages.
Several people in the planning stage of what became DC-X pointed out that if the DC-Y was a TSTO, then success was *inevitable*. It wouldn't have needed much of first stage. At that point, the suggestion was a vertical launch for altitude, but without boost back. So the gain was less. But for an SSTO, it meant doubling payload and making GEO achievable.
DC-X was a step on the road to reusability. It was quite entertaining to hear the story change - on USENET, we had actually NASA people posting the following....
1) Vertical landing is impossible. Except on the moon (or something)
DC-X takes off and lands
2) Vertical landing is useless, since you can't reuse the vehicle without rebuilding it
DC-X flies twice in a couple of days.
3) Vertical landing and reusability is impossible for a "Flight weight" rocket....
etc
The posts were sometimes *minutes* after the flights.
X-33 (the bizarre abortion that DC-Y became) died of mass fraction. It became Single Stage To Montana. Then failed to even get enough performance for that. Even with that ridiculous design, a TSTO would have worked.
The Reagan law change was more about Challenger - NASA had a policy of destroying any attempt to start a private launch company. They were fairly open about it - they would even offer potential clients that they (NASA) would fly the payloads ultra cheaply (or even free!).
That and offloading all satellites from the Shuttle (and the Military/NRO) kept Delta and Atlas going. But NASA was still trying to stifle third party attempts at launch companies.
Beal took a wrecking ball to that behaviour. And NASA tried very hard to stamp on his efforts. He ruined the careers of some of the blockers.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
Trump's regime is one which will appeal to Hegelians, in the same way that Napoleon appealed to them. It offers little to English Christian culture Burkean liberal incrementalists . Maybe their (my) day has gone - as evidenced by the Spectator's inscrutable political stances in recent times.
I am looking forward to Darkage's neutral and emotion free analysis of the burning of the library of Alexandria, the gulag and 20th century genocides.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
Trump's regime is one which will appeal to Hegelians, in the same way that Napoleon appealed to them. It offers little to English Christian culture Burkean liberal incrementalists . Maybe their (my) day has gone - as evidenced by the Spectator's inscrutable political stances in recent times.
I am looking forward to Darkage's neutral and emotion free analysis of the burning of the library of Alexandria, the gulag and 20th century genocides.
I thought the whole "Burning of the library of Alexandria" thing had been discredited by actual historians?
A large part of the reason the Conservatives have such high levels of unfavourability is that they have been in government for so long. The longer you are in government, the more people you piss off. Until you get turfed out of government and the other lot have their opportunity to gradually build up a well of people who resent them and memory of the lot in power fade. This isn't the whole story, but it's a large part of it.
It's a pretty damning level of unfavourability, even topping Reform.
Incumbency is quite a curse at present, whether on the left or right, and I don't see that changing any time soon because of the headwinds in terms of stagnant growth, ageing population, costs incurred because of wars and climate change etc.
But I think more to it than that. Clearly there is an electoral vote for Reform and it's fellow travellers in the Tory party, but the dislike is even stronger. Those Green and LD figures show why tactical voting is the problem that the Tories need to tackle. In 2029 it will be even more obvious who to vote for in order to keep the Tories out.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
Tesla was a failing company retro fitting Lotus Elise with a battery. The company it itself today is nothing like it. Its a bit like saying well Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's and story of loads and loads of other companies.
Musk did start SpaceX.
You can also point to Musk original investment in OpenAI.
Its very different from Trump or Branson, where its basically all bramd deals.
Musk is also turning Grok into something very powerful very quickly such that he’s freaking out Sam Altman
I have said this before. I never believed the i'm buying twitter as i am a free speech supporter.
I think he saw a company that has always struggled to make money, thought he could hardball them into taking lower offer (which backfired). But it was really about the potential of the source of real time training data.
And pretty much straight away setup the xAI spin off and recently built 100k GPU cluster.
i half agree. I believe Musk is a genuine free speech absolutist (with some hypocritical aspects of course)
He wanted to buy Twitter for that reason, then balked at the price, but got aytpically fucked over and paid way more than it’s “worth”, at least at that point on paper
He then made several decisions that made this worse, eg the silly rebranding
HOWEVER like any really bright entrepreneur and innovator, he then foresaw the advantage where others saw nothing. He ruthlessly used TwiX to get Trump into the White House (thereby quadrupling his Twitter investment for a start and making his losses into fat profits) he got the hit on Woke he wants, and now - yes - he has endless data for Grok
This is the hallmark of very bright very successful people, they can turn the mistakes we all make into big opportunities, because they can think ahead, see opportunities and extrapolate
is he a thin skinned pillock? Yes. Is he a once-in-a-century genius? Also yes
People that deny the latter are just fools, who look foolish
The xAI spin off was setup pretty up immediately. As was the ability to scrap data via API being shut off. That suggests was part of the plan. Their first LLM was released after 12 months, given how long these things take to train, again must have moved fast.
As far as I can tell Grok is absolutely no-where in the LLM market - possibly it’s driving X/Twitter subscriptions though?
Given the demand for “quality” text to feed these things, Musk may have made some ready $ selling the Twitter archives to the other AI companies.
Meanwhile no one is making any money from AI right now: OpenAI is a hole in the ground into which money is being poured & it’s much the same for the rest of them. NVidia is making out like a bandit in the process though!
It might be a situation where being initial market leader isn't the best situation as while the technology still develops, at the moment the biggest models are very inefficient, if you are the go to product you get hit the hardest in terms of running costs.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
If the schemes go beyond rules about the balance of risk and start telling people they must support this or that UK plan for extracting moonbeams from cucumbers, then when it goes wrong I think we can guess who will be making up the shortfall.
A large part of the reason the Conservatives have such high levels of unfavourability is that they have been in government for so long. The longer you are in government, the more people you piss off. Until you get turfed out of government and the other lot have their opportunity to gradually build up a well of people who resent them and memory of the lot in power fade. This isn't the whole story, but it's a large part of it.
Can't be the whole story, because, IIRC, they weren't so unpopular in either 1964 or 1997.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It mixes a good idea (merging funds, cutting costs) with the stupidity of trying to force them to invest in UK infrastucture.
Ask Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System how their investment in Thames Water is going.
"Our pension funds in Britain are too small to be making the investments that get a good return for people saving for retirement and to help our economy to grow," said Rachel Reeves.
The first part of that is a flat out lie.
Indeed. My pension fund is in a small SIPP. It will get a good return at low cost. Very likely lower cost than these mega funds will charge Joe Average.
There is little evidence of fund managers being able to consistently significantly outperform the market. Maybe a handful do. But would they really be the ones managing these funds or will we end up with the right people, with the careers and connections to appear safe and reliable.
So I would normally think it a very bad idea, not disastrous but adding extra charges for no good reason.
However, with the volatility in the US, which is where a very large chunk of our retirement funds should end up, maybe it is not a bad time to direct some of that investment back home instead, even at the expense of optimal returns and higher cost. So I would downgrade it to probably a bad idea.
I'm not sure you understand the changes.
Local Authority Pension scheme costs are low, but allowing them to be run and invest as larger schemes should make charges lower again. This is a good thing.
There are about £350bn of assets in local government pension schemes with about 6.5 million members.
About 50% are in public equities (shares), 12% bonds, 8% property, 6% private equity, 6% infrastructure and then the rest in 'other' (multi-asset credit, private debt, growth funds).
I'm not sure how any method of combining pools is going to magically make an additional £80 bn for 'british infrastucture' appear (even if this was a good thing).
The traditional idea of infrastucture investment was to provide a bit more return than gilts or high quality bonds, without much more risk. Even the most straight forward UK projects (building a road), have seen cost over runs that have brought companies down. Delays and cost over runs are a plague on the UK - and not all of it is down to 'the process state'.
A lot is down to stop/start investment by government and a huge cascade of sub contracting
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
Hugo Rifkind in The Times today has an article on the idea that tech bros are becoming at least as powerful as Nation states and we need to consider how we interact with them on that basis
It does raise the question though of what happens when Musk and Trump fall out. Is that civil war?
But Zuckerberg in 2020 was just fine!
It was not fine.
But it's also orders of magnitude less egregious than what Musky Baby and his techbro shit friends have done this time.
Musk participated in a democratic process in the open. What's wrong with that?
He's done rather more than that, hasn't he? His million-dollar a day giveaway is just one egregious example.
It isn't really possible to doubt that Americans voted Trump because they wanted quite exactly what he said he would deliver. This election seems to me to have been won by a candidate and party who were infinitely more open about their precise intentions than any major UK party in July.
This of course makes the result even worse. The majority wanted this. rather than it being a misunderstanding. It was not hiding and it was in plain sight.
A fair number of Trump supporters here seemed to believe that Trump wasn't really going to do as he said. They took comfort in believing that he was lying to them.
Well to be fair they were probably looking at his track record on honesty
Sods law isn't it. The one time you want him to be lying through his back teeth and it turns out he was being honest!
I have some very good friends in the US who are Trump supporters.
Their views are - I suspect - not uncommon. They think the Democratic Party has been taken over by identity politics and woke, and they want a more businesslike administration.
They run a successful business, making clothes that are sold "own label" by large supermarkets and department stores. The clothes are all imported from low cost parts of the world, and are most commonly made in China.
In the event that Trump were to implement his tariffs they would be absolutely personally hammered. They told me - scoffing- that Trump isn't really going to implement the tariffs, he's just going to use the threat of them with the Chinese government to extract some better terms.
I hope they are right. But I can't help feel that there are a great many people who voted for Trump on the basis that he wouldn't do what he said he'll do.
It isn't possible for anyone to doubt that Trump has authoritarian and anti-democratic instincts and might act on them. It isn't possible that business people didn't know that Trump was protectionist. It isn't possible that voters didn't know Trump has particular and peculiar ideas of justice. USA voters voted thus at the very least, and on the basis of being fully informed, even if a voter felt that this or that particular detail may not be fulfilled.
What more could Trump have done to indicate he meant what he said?
If I was putting together a list of humans whose words match their deeds Trump is not getting in the top 7 billion.
True but remarkably this does not undermine my point. USA voters all knew with substantial precision what they were doing and this is what they intended WRT the big picture, including attacks on democracy, authoritarianism, malign justice and protectionism. That much is not deniable except by the invincibly ignorant.
O/T but the Democrats came *very* close to winning the House. I think the Republican majority will only be seven.
Without some gerrymandering in North Carolina, it would be down to one (albeit, offset by Democratic gerrymandering in New York).
There are an average 6 or 7 special elections (by-elections) per year, plus plenty of opportunites for defections if Trump deports 10m or cuts $2tn from the budget (he will do neither).
I suspect the Dems take control even before the mid terms.
There will presumably be a special election in Matt Gaetz' district in the Florida panhandle after he becomes AG. He won the district by 66-34 in 2024. Wikipedia has it as the most Republican district in Florida.
I dunno. I think the GOP might hold that.
Well, unless the GOP do something mad like putting up a man credibly accused of statutory rape of a minor.
If they do that, I reckon they may only win by about 66-34.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
This has more than an element of never hating your enemies because it affects your judgement.
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the production line either. He actually wasn't that great a CEO either and was certainly a piss-poor political interventionist. But he did spot an opportunity and exploited it ruthlessly - and to argue otherwise is pretty fatuous given Ford's dominance of the early motorcar market.
Likewise, Musk. I saw someone recently try to argue that actually Boeing might be more successful as an aeronautical / space firm because it spends more and has greater workforce diversity, and that these can be pointers to success. Which is fine if that's *all* the data you have to go on but it's not. The actual relevant data is that SpaceX mounts more than half of rocket launches globally and runs the world's biggest satellite network, has innovated in ways people thought impossible, has brought the costs of launches down by at least 80% and now has a technological lead over entire countries. Whereas Boeing builds planes that crash and fall apart in the air.
Leadership in industry, as in politics, is about vision as well as administration. It seems to me unlikely to the point of impossibility that someone else would have done what Musk did on SpaceX. Somebody probably would have done what he did at Tesla, sooner or later - but the crucial point is still that they didn't: he did it first.
As for X, that was never a commercial purchase: that was about buying political influence and insurance, not just in the US but globally - particularly when allied to SpaceX and Starlink.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
Don’t take this the wrong way but this has to go down as the least surprising post of the year. It’s quite obvious that you are a fan of his and Musk’s. There is no shame in that but why the need to hide it?
It’s the same with your voting Labour. I don’t really believe you did if I am honest because it just seems to contradict your entire world view. And there’s no shame in that either.
I guess I just find some of these posts quite difficult to understand.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
Trump's regime is one which will appeal to Hegelians, in the same way that Napoleon appealed to them. It offers little to English Christian culture Burkean liberal incrementalists . Maybe their (my) day has gone - as evidenced by the Spectator's inscrutable political stances in recent times.
I am looking forward to Darkage's neutral and emotion free analysis of the burning of the library of Alexandria, the gulag and 20th century genocides.
I thought the whole "Burning of the library of Alexandria" thing had been discredited by actual historians?
Simple accounts are discredited but it still occurred more than once. Contemplate the destruction of Nalanda and its library if you want an alternative. More recent examples exist from the 20th century.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
This has more than an element of never hating your enemies because it affects your judgement.
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the production line either. He actually wasn't that great a CEO either and was certainly a piss-poor political interventionist. But he did spot an opportunity and exploited it ruthlessly - and to argue otherwise is pretty fatuous given Ford's dominance of the early motorcar market.
Likewise, Musk. I saw someone recently try to argue that actually Boeing might be more successful as an aeronautical / space firm because it spends more and has greater workforce diversity, and that these can be pointers to success. Which is fine if that's *all* the data you have to go on but it's not. The actual relevant data is that SpaceX mounts more than half of rocket launches globally and runs the world's biggest satellite network, has innovated in ways people thought impossible, has brought the costs of launches down by at least 80% and now has a technological lead over entire countries. Whereas Boeing builds planes that crash and fall apart in the air.
Leadership in industry, as in politics, is about vision as well as administration. It seems to me unlikely to the point of impossibility that someone else would have done what Musk did on SpaceX. Somebody probably would have done what he did at Tesla, sooner or later - but the crucial point is still that they didn't: he did it first.
As for X, that was never a commercial purchase: that was about buying political influence and insurance, not just in the US but globally - particularly when allied to SpaceX and Starlink.
Eloquently put and well said
As has been pointed out on PB before, the correct term for Musk is “visionary”
For that is what he is. He may also be a knob, genius, Sperg, wanker, brainiac, weirdo, Trumpite, geek, womanizer, whatever
But, in essence, he is a visionary. He sees into the future, and acts on it. He extrapolates, and turns that into things which then turn into cash
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
Tesla was a failing company retro fitting Lotus Elise with a battery. The company it itself today is nothing like it. Its a bit like saying well Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's and story of loads and loads of other companies.
Musk did start SpaceX.
You can also point to Musk original investment in OpenAI.
Its very different from Trump or Branson, where its basically all bramd deals.
Both Tesla and SpaceX came very near going bust in 2008. They were largely saved by government contracts, directly and indirectly. If Musk had started/got involved with either company a couple of years earlier, he would be a nobody today - just another name on a long list of chancers who tried and failed.
He has been lucky, and to some extent has made his own luck. But the luck was still there.
I still maintain that he owes SpaceX to the late Jerry Pournelle.
Jerry Pournelle went down the SSTO rabbithole - hence advocating for what became DC-X
Musk specifically rejected SSTO from the start.
You do now about Pournelle campaigning and lobbying to get federal funding for private spaceflight? Due to him and others, the law was changed to allow contracts such as COTS.
And if you don't think the brilliant DC-X fed into what SpaceX (and Blue Origin...) are doing, then you are being rather silly.
By all means admire Musk and SpaceX; but you don't have to demean what everybody else did, and is doing.
It's not demeaning anyone to point out what happened. Mass fractions said that SSTO was a bad idea to attempt on planet Earth. Even Gary Hudson was talking about "Zeroth" stages.
Several people in the planning stage of what became DC-X pointed out that if the DC-Y was a TSTO, then success was *inevitable*. It wouldn't have needed much of first stage. At that point, the suggestion was a vertical launch for altitude, but without boost back. So the gain was less. But for an SSTO, it meant doubling payload and making GEO achievable.
DC-X was a step on the road to reusability. It was quite entertaining to hear the story change - on USENET, we had actually NASA people posting the following....
1) Vertical landing is impossible. Except on the moon (or something)
DC-X takes off and lands
2) Vertical landing is useless, since you can't reuse the vehicle without rebuilding it
DC-X flies twice in a couple of days.
3) Vertical landing and reusability is impossible for a "Flight weight" rocket....
etc
The posts were sometimes *minutes* after the flights.
X-33 (the bizarre abortion that DC-Y became) died of mass fraction. It became Single Stage To Montana. Then failed to even get enough performance for that. Even with that ridiculous design, a TSTO would have worked.
The Reagan law change was more about Challenger - NASA had a policy of destroying any attempt to start a private launch company. They were fairly open about it - they would even offer potential clients that they (NASA) would fly the payloads ultra cheaply (or even free!).
That and offloading all satellites from the Shuttle (and the Military/NRO) kept Delta and Atlas going. But NASA was still trying to stifle third party attempts at launch companies.
Beal took a wrecking ball to that behaviour. And NASA tried very hard to stamp on his efforts. He ruined the careers of some of the blockers.
And then there was Kistler.
I know. I was there as well. DC-X was an amazing project that showed the way. The fact it was a prototype for an SSTO is fairly irrelevant when it comes to its impact. And as Pournelle was very directly involved, it seems an odd criticism.
And I'm not talking about the Reagan law change; but things like the Commercial Space Act of 1998, which fed into the ?2005? NASA authorisation act that essentially forced NASA to consider private alternatives. Again, Pournelle was there fighting the good fight.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
This has more than an element of never hating your enemies because it affects your judgement.
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the production line either. He actually wasn't that great a CEO either and was certainly a piss-poor political interventionist. But he did spot an opportunity and exploited it ruthlessly - and to argue otherwise is pretty fatuous given Ford's dominance of the early motorcar market.
Likewise, Musk. I saw someone recently try to argue that actually Boeing might be more successful as an aeronautical / space firm because it spends more and has greater workforce diversity, and that these can be pointers to success. Which is fine if that's *all* the data you have to go on but it's not. The actual relevant data is that SpaceX mounts more than half of rocket launches globally and runs the world's biggest satellite network, has innovated in ways people thought impossible, has brought the costs of launches down by at least 80% and now has a technological lead over entire countries. Whereas Boeing builds planes that crash and fall apart in the air.
Leadership in industry, as in politics, is about vision as well as administration. It seems to me unlikely to the point of impossibility that someone else would have done what Musk did on SpaceX. Somebody probably would have done what he did at Tesla, sooner or later - but the crucial point is still that they didn't: he did it first.
As for X, that was never a commercial purchase: that was about buying political influence and insurance, not just in the US but globally - particularly when allied to SpaceX and Starlink.
The issue with much of this is culture.
The auto industry had a culture of being not interested in EVs. The reason was organisational inertia and momentum. To start with you are destroying the empires of the engine and transmission builders within the companies. In the early 2000s the makers of the risible Italian Job remake commissioned the conversion of some Minis to electric - for use in the tunnel scenes. The work was done by the custom EV industry in LA - who would take a car and make it into high performance EV for a long price. When the makers of the Mini were asked if they wanted to look at the result, they were completely disinterested.
Similarly, with space, it was about the billions invested in the current way of doing things. Huge costs were assumed and provided everyone with a taste. See the saga of the Russian engines, and how they got passed from one firm to another, gaining nothing except cost at each step.
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
Hugo Rifkind in The Times today has an article on the idea that tech bros are becoming at least as powerful as Nation states and we need to consider how we interact with them on that basis
It does raise the question though of what happens when Musk and Trump fall out. Is that civil war?
But Zuckerberg in 2020 was just fine!
It was not fine.
But it's also orders of magnitude less egregious than what Musky Baby and his techbro shit friends have done this time.
Musk participated in a democratic process in the open. What's wrong with that?
He's done rather more than that, hasn't he? His million-dollar a day giveaway is just one egregious example.
It isn't really possible to doubt that Americans voted Trump because they wanted quite exactly what he said he would deliver. This election seems to me to have been won by a candidate and party who were infinitely more open about their precise intentions than any major UK party in July.
This of course makes the result even worse. The majority wanted this. rather than it being a misunderstanding. It was not hiding and it was in plain sight.
A fair number of Trump supporters here seemed to believe that Trump wasn't really going to do as he said. They took comfort in believing that he was lying to them.
Well to be fair they were probably looking at his track record on honesty
Sods law isn't it. The one time you want him to be lying through his back teeth and it turns out he was being honest!
I have some very good friends in the US who are Trump supporters.
Their views are - I suspect - not uncommon. They think the Democratic Party has been taken over by identity politics and woke, and they want a more businesslike administration.
They run a successful business, making clothes that are sold "own label" by large supermarkets and department stores. The clothes are all imported from low cost parts of the world, and are most commonly made in China.
In the event that Trump were to implement his tariffs they would be absolutely personally hammered. They told me - scoffing- that Trump isn't really going to implement the tariffs, he's just going to use the threat of them with the Chinese government to extract some better terms.
I hope they are right. But I can't help feel that there are a great many people who voted for Trump on the basis that he wouldn't do what he said he'll do.
It isn't possible for anyone to doubt that Trump has authoritarian and anti-democratic instincts and might act on them. It isn't possible that business people didn't know that Trump was protectionist. It isn't possible that voters didn't know Trump has particular and peculiar ideas of justice. USA voters voted thus at the very least, and on the basis of being fully informed, even if a voter felt that this or that particular detail may not be fulfilled.
What more could Trump have done to indicate he meant what he said?
Humans have an immense capacity for self-delusion. It should surprise no-one that many voters would have deluded themselves about the consequences of voting for Trump. It's not unusual. You see it in every sort of context.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
This has more than an element of never hating your enemies because it affects your judgement.
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the production line either. He actually wasn't that great a CEO either and was certainly a piss-poor political interventionist. But he did spot an opportunity and exploited it ruthlessly - and to argue otherwise is pretty fatuous given Ford's dominance of the early motorcar market.
Likewise, Musk. I saw someone recently try to argue that actually Boeing might be more successful as an aeronautical / space firm because it spends more and has greater workforce diversity, and that these can be pointers to success. Which is fine if that's *all* the data you have to go on but it's not. The actual relevant data is that SpaceX mounts more than half of rocket launches globally and runs the world's biggest satellite network, has innovated in ways people thought impossible, has brought the costs of launches down by at least 80% and now has a technological lead over entire countries. Whereas Boeing builds planes that crash and fall apart in the air.
Leadership in industry, as in politics, is about vision as well as administration. It seems to me unlikely to the point of impossibility that someone else would have done what Musk did on SpaceX. Somebody probably would have done what he did at Tesla, sooner or later - but the crucial point is still that they didn't: he did it first.
As for X, that was never a commercial purchase: that was about buying political influence and insurance, not just in the US but globally - particularly when allied to SpaceX and Starlink.
Eloquently put and well said
As has been pointed out on PB before, the correct term for Musk is “visionary”
For that is what he is. He may also be a knob, genius, Sperg, wanker, brainiac, weirdo, Trumpite, geek, womanizer, whatever
But, in essence, he is a visionary. He sees into the future, and acts on it. He extrapolates, and turns that into things which then turn into cash
See David Bowie's character in The Man who Fell to Earth (1976). The blueprint for Musk is there in plain sight.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
So its just luck that he is rich beyond imagination? You don't have to like someone to recognise that they have been very successful.
It is surely not controversial to think that luck plays the biggest part in becoming a billionaire? To what extent is debatable but it would seem quite absurd to think it is mostly down to "brilliance" or "hard work". There are far more brilliant and hard working non billionaires.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
Why is there such hostility to a four day week when it has been tried and was successful?
It seems a bit like dogmatic opposition.
I remember a few of them in May/June 2023 around the Bank Holidays and King's Coronation.
Never worked so hard. Just more stressful than the 3 day weekends gave back.
I was able to use it at my last job (albeit I just worked the 5 day hours over 4 days) and it wasn’t for me but it worked brilliantly for others.
If organisations want to offer it, I’m struggling to see the issue myself.
I think its about trust (misguidedly, in the most part). A lot of bad managers don't think people will do the 5 days work in the 4 days, they will do 4 days. We see similar with some people attitudes to working from home. Years back I knew a guy who lived on Hayling Island* but worked on the Isle of Wight. First manager was happy for him to work from home for 19 days out of 20, and pop in once a fortnight. Manager changed, and insisted he attended every day. Which required getting the ferry too and fro from Portsmouth. Which led to valuable employee leaving.
As an academic I don't really have set hours and days, so its not a real issue for me, but I think it can work for some people. I worry about my wife as she is officially 0.6 FTE. The worry is that the workload isn't 0.6 FTE.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
Tesla was a failing company retro fitting Lotus Elise with a battery. The company it itself today is nothing like it. Its a bit like saying well Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's and story of loads and loads of other companies.
Musk did start SpaceX.
You can also point to Musk original investment in OpenAI.
Its very different from Trump or Branson, where its basically all bramd deals.
Both Tesla and SpaceX came very near going bust in 2008. They were largely saved by government contracts, directly and indirectly. If Musk had started/got involved with either company a couple of years earlier, he would be a nobody today - just another name on a long list of chancers who tried and failed.
He has been lucky, and to some extent has made his own luck. But the luck was still there.
I still maintain that he owes SpaceX to the late Jerry Pournelle.
Jerry Pournelle went down the SSTO rabbithole - hence advocating for what became DC-X
Musk specifically rejected SSTO from the start.
You do now about Pournelle campaigning and lobbying to get federal funding for private spaceflight? Due to him and others, the law was changed to allow contracts such as COTS.
And if you don't think the brilliant DC-X fed into what SpaceX (and Blue Origin...) are doing, then you are being rather silly.
By all means admire Musk and SpaceX; but you don't have to demean what everybody else did, and is doing.
It's not demeaning anyone to point out what happened. Mass fractions said that SSTO was a bad idea to attempt on planet Earth. Even Gary Hudson was talking about "Zeroth" stages.
Several people in the planning stage of what became DC-X pointed out that if the DC-Y was a TSTO, then success was *inevitable*. It wouldn't have needed much of first stage. At that point, the suggestion was a vertical launch for altitude, but without boost back. So the gain was less. But for an SSTO, it meant doubling payload and making GEO achievable.
DC-X was a step on the road to reusability. It was quite entertaining to hear the story change - on USENET, we had actually NASA people posting the following....
1) Vertical landing is impossible. Except on the moon (or something)
DC-X takes off and lands
2) Vertical landing is useless, since you can't reuse the vehicle without rebuilding it
DC-X flies twice in a couple of days.
3) Vertical landing and reusability is impossible for a "Flight weight" rocket....
etc
The posts were sometimes *minutes* after the flights.
X-33 (the bizarre abortion that DC-Y became) died of mass fraction. It became Single Stage To Montana. Then failed to even get enough performance for that. Even with that ridiculous design, a TSTO would have worked.
The Reagan law change was more about Challenger - NASA had a policy of destroying any attempt to start a private launch company. They were fairly open about it - they would even offer potential clients that they (NASA) would fly the payloads ultra cheaply (or even free!).
That and offloading all satellites from the Shuttle (and the Military/NRO) kept Delta and Atlas going. But NASA was still trying to stifle third party attempts at launch companies.
Beal took a wrecking ball to that behaviour. And NASA tried very hard to stamp on his efforts. He ruined the careers of some of the blockers.
And then there was Kistler.
I know. I was there as well. DC-X was an amazing project that showed the way. The fact it was a prototype for an SSTO is fairly irrelevant when it comes to its impact. And as Pournelle was very directly involved, it seems an odd criticism.
And I'm not talking about the Reagan law change; but things like the Commercial Space Act of 1998, which fed into the ?2005? NASA authorisation act that essentially forced NASA to consider private alternatives. Again, Pournelle was there fighting the good fight.
The reason that DC-X didn't go further was that the X-33 (like all the other SSTO projects) of the time failed to show a path to flight weight. Same reason HOTOL failed.
The Reagan law change was bigger in some ways. "The United States encourages domestic commercial exploitation of space capabilities, technology, and systems for national economic benefit.". Ask Beal about how he used to quote that back at direct attempts to shut him down. Did you know that some NASA officials attempted to prevent him building the rocket test site in Texas? They actually spoke to the local government there and said that it wasn't in the interests of the nation....
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
Hugo Rifkind in The Times today has an article on the idea that tech bros are becoming at least as powerful as Nation states and we need to consider how we interact with them on that basis
It does raise the question though of what happens when Musk and Trump fall out. Is that civil war?
But Zuckerberg in 2020 was just fine!
It was not fine.
But it's also orders of magnitude less egregious than what Musky Baby and his techbro shit friends have done this time.
Musk participated in a democratic process in the open. What's wrong with that?
He's done rather more than that, hasn't he? His million-dollar a day giveaway is just one egregious example.
It isn't really possible to doubt that Americans voted Trump because they wanted quite exactly what he said he would deliver. This election seems to me to have been won by a candidate and party who were infinitely more open about their precise intentions than any major UK party in July.
This of course makes the result even worse. The majority wanted this. rather than it being a misunderstanding. It was not hiding and it was in plain sight.
A fair number of Trump supporters here seemed to believe that Trump wasn't really going to do as he said. They took comfort in believing that he was lying to them.
Well to be fair they were probably looking at his track record on honesty
Sods law isn't it. The one time you want him to be lying through his back teeth and it turns out he was being honest!
I have some very good friends in the US who are Trump supporters.
Their views are - I suspect - not uncommon. They think the Democratic Party has been taken over by identity politics and woke, and they want a more businesslike administration.
They run a successful business, making clothes that are sold "own label" by large supermarkets and department stores. The clothes are all imported from low cost parts of the world, and are most commonly made in China.
In the event that Trump were to implement his tariffs they would be absolutely personally hammered. They told me - scoffing- that Trump isn't really going to implement the tariffs, he's just going to use the threat of them with the Chinese government to extract some better terms.
I hope they are right. But I can't help feel that there are a great many people who voted for Trump on the basis that he wouldn't do what he said he'll do.
It isn't possible for anyone to doubt that Trump has authoritarian and anti-democratic instincts and might act on them. It isn't possible that business people didn't know that Trump was protectionist. It isn't possible that voters didn't know Trump has particular and peculiar ideas of justice. USA voters voted thus at the very least, and on the basis of being fully informed, even if a voter felt that this or that particular detail may not be fulfilled.
What more could Trump have done to indicate he meant what he said?
Yeah if any group of people is less worthy of pity when he fucks them over than the "Trump realists in the business community" crowd I really can't think of it right now.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
All (3) of my employer pensions are 1% or more.
Has anyone got an example where government forcing mergers in an industry, to reduce it to a few giants, has created a success?
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
Hugo Rifkind in The Times today has an article on the idea that tech bros are becoming at least as powerful as Nation states and we need to consider how we interact with them on that basis
It does raise the question though of what happens when Musk and Trump fall out. Is that civil war?
But Zuckerberg in 2020 was just fine!
It was not fine.
But it's also orders of magnitude less egregious than what Musky Baby and his techbro shit friends have done this time.
Musk participated in a democratic process in the open. What's wrong with that?
He's done rather more than that, hasn't he? His million-dollar a day giveaway is just one egregious example.
It isn't really possible to doubt that Americans voted Trump because they wanted quite exactly what he said he would deliver. This election seems to me to have been won by a candidate and party who were infinitely more open about their precise intentions than any major UK party in July.
This of course makes the result even worse. The majority wanted this. rather than it being a misunderstanding. It was not hiding and it was in plain sight.
A fair number of Trump supporters here seemed to believe that Trump wasn't really going to do as he said. They took comfort in believing that he was lying to them.
Well to be fair they were probably looking at his track record on honesty
Sods law isn't it. The one time you want him to be lying through his back teeth and it turns out he was being honest!
I have some very good friends in the US who are Trump supporters.
Their views are - I suspect - not uncommon. They think the Democratic Party has been taken over by identity politics and woke, and they want a more businesslike administration.
They run a successful business, making clothes that are sold "own label" by large supermarkets and department stores. The clothes are all imported from low cost parts of the world, and are most commonly made in China.
In the event that Trump were to implement his tariffs they would be absolutely personally hammered. They told me - scoffing- that Trump isn't really going to implement the tariffs, he's just going to use the threat of them with the Chinese government to extract some better terms.
I hope they are right. But I can't help feel that there are a great many people who voted for Trump on the basis that he wouldn't do what he said he'll do.
It isn't possible for anyone to doubt that Trump has authoritarian and anti-democratic instincts and might act on them. It isn't possible that business people didn't know that Trump was protectionist. It isn't possible that voters didn't know Trump has particular and peculiar ideas of justice. USA voters voted thus at the very least, and on the basis of being fully informed, even if a voter felt that this or that particular detail may not be fulfilled.
What more could Trump have done to indicate he meant what he said?
Humans have an immense capacity for self-delusion. It should surprise no-one that many voters would have deluded themselves about the consequences of voting for Trump. It's not unusual. You see it in every sort of context.
Of course, if you take it far enough there is a sort of truth in this, but not entire. When X murders Y and X tells himself he has done no such thing, and comes to give mental assent to that view and actually believe it, he will despite that be convicted by a jury who need to be sure that he both did the deed and had the necessary intent. They will be right to do so. The murderer will in truth usually have a divided mind, not a single one, and it is the same with voters. It is quite possible to give belief (mental assent) to something you know perfectly well is not true. Funny things people.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
This has more than an element of never hating your enemies because it affects your judgement.
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the production line either. He actually wasn't that great a CEO either and was certainly a piss-poor political interventionist. But he did spot an opportunity and exploited it ruthlessly - and to argue otherwise is pretty fatuous given Ford's dominance of the early motorcar market.
Likewise, Musk. I saw someone recently try to argue that actually Boeing might be more successful as an aeronautical / space firm because it spends more and has greater workforce diversity, and that these can be pointers to success. Which is fine if that's *all* the data you have to go on but it's not. The actual relevant data is that SpaceX mounts more than half of rocket launches globally and runs the world's biggest satellite network, has innovated in ways people thought impossible, has brought the costs of launches down by at least 80% and now has a technological lead over entire countries. Whereas Boeing builds planes that crash and fall apart in the air.
Leadership in industry, as in politics, is about vision as well as administration. It seems to me unlikely to the point of impossibility that someone else would have done what Musk did on SpaceX. Somebody probably would have done what he did at Tesla, sooner or later - but the crucial point is still that they didn't: he did it first.
As for X, that was never a commercial purchase: that was about buying political influence and insurance, not just in the US but globally - particularly when allied to SpaceX and Starlink.
The issue with much of this is culture.
The auto industry had a culture of being not interested in EVs. The reason was organisational inertia and momentum. To start with you are destroying the empires of the engine and transmission builders within the companies. In the early 2000s the makers of the risible Italian Job remake commissioned the conversion of some Minis to electric - for use in the tunnel scenes. The work was done by the custom EV industry in LA - who would take a car and make it into high performance EV for a long price. When the makers of the Mini were asked if they wanted to look at the result, they were completely disinterested.
Similarly, with space, it was about the billions invested in the current way of doing things. Huge costs were assumed and provided everyone with a taste. See the saga of the Russian engines, and how they got passed from one firm to another, gaining nothing except cost at each step.
This is interesting. I know the head of Bath's Mechanical Engineering Dept quite well. He has always been vey sniffy about EVs. There was and is a big automotive section. He was always down on range, charging times etc, as if those problems were insurmountable. They clearly are not, and are being solved right now. I wonder how much of his attitude came from his automotive colleague?
As an aside I met one of the automotive guys in hospital when I was receiving treatment. His magazine of choice? Top Gear...
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
So its just luck that he is rich beyond imagination? You don't have to like someone to recognise that they have been very successful.
It is surely not controversial to think that luck plays the biggest part in becoming a billionaire? To what extent is debatable but it would seem quite absurd to think it is mostly down to "brilliance" or "hard work". There are far more brilliant and hard working non billionaires.
But Musk has been "lucky" four times - PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX - and now, it turns out, Twitter.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
So its just luck that he is rich beyond imagination? You don't have to like someone to recognise that they have been very successful.
It is surely not controversial to think that luck plays the biggest part in becoming a billionaire? To what extent is debatable but it would seem quite absurd to think it is mostly down to "brilliance" or "hard work". There are far more brilliant and hard working non billionaires.
It's a lot to do with timing.
Tesla launched 10 years earlier would have been a complete failure. SpaceX likewise
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
So its just luck that he is rich beyond imagination? You don't have to like someone to recognise that they have been very successful.
It is surely not controversial to think that luck plays the biggest part in becoming a billionaire? To what extent is debatable but it would seem quite absurd to think it is mostly down to "brilliance" or "hard work". There are far more brilliant and hard working non billionaires.
I'm trying the counter the absurd idea that Musk haters have that he somehow isn't very good at what he does.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
I try to be open minded - I said before the election that the range of outcomes for Trump ranged from good to apocalyptic, whereas Harris had a much narrower range from quite bad to bad. Trump would probably worse, but might not be. Which is why I think people voted for him. A 'just not more of this shit' vote.
But I haven't seen anything yet which makes me think a Trump presidency will be anything better than the absolute bottom end of how bad Kamala would have been.
My comment on this, is that all he has demonstrated so far is a sense of seriousness about wanting to achieve fundamental change. That is as far as it goes, and it is what you would expect at this point. There isn't going to be any kind of reversion to business as usual.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
Tesla was a failing company retro fitting Lotus Elise with a battery. The company it itself today is nothing like it. Its a bit like saying well Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's and story of loads and loads of other companies.
Musk did start SpaceX.
You can also point to Musk original investment in OpenAI.
Its very different from Trump or Branson, where its basically all bramd deals.
Both Tesla and SpaceX came very near going bust in 2008. They were largely saved by government contracts, directly and indirectly. If Musk had started/got involved with either company a couple of years earlier, he would be a nobody today - just another name on a long list of chancers who tried and failed.
He has been lucky, and to some extent has made his own luck. But the luck was still there.
I still maintain that he owes SpaceX to the late Jerry Pournelle.
Jerry Pournelle went down the SSTO rabbithole - hence advocating for what became DC-X
Musk specifically rejected SSTO from the start.
You do now about Pournelle campaigning and lobbying to get federal funding for private spaceflight? Due to him and others, the law was changed to allow contracts such as COTS.
And if you don't think the brilliant DC-X fed into what SpaceX (and Blue Origin...) are doing, then you are being rather silly.
By all means admire Musk and SpaceX; but you don't have to demean what everybody else did, and is doing.
It's not demeaning anyone to point out what happened. Mass fractions said that SSTO was a bad idea to attempt on planet Earth. Even Gary Hudson was talking about "Zeroth" stages.
Several people in the planning stage of what became DC-X pointed out that if the DC-Y was a TSTO, then success was *inevitable*. It wouldn't have needed much of first stage. At that point, the suggestion was a vertical launch for altitude, but without boost back. So the gain was less. But for an SSTO, it meant doubling payload and making GEO achievable.
DC-X was a step on the road to reusability. It was quite entertaining to hear the story change - on USENET, we had actually NASA people posting the following....
1) Vertical landing is impossible. Except on the moon (or something)
DC-X takes off and lands
2) Vertical landing is useless, since you can't reuse the vehicle without rebuilding it
DC-X flies twice in a couple of days.
3) Vertical landing and reusability is impossible for a "Flight weight" rocket....
etc
The posts were sometimes *minutes* after the flights.
X-33 (the bizarre abortion that DC-Y became) died of mass fraction. It became Single Stage To Montana. Then failed to even get enough performance for that. Even with that ridiculous design, a TSTO would have worked.
The Reagan law change was more about Challenger - NASA had a policy of destroying any attempt to start a private launch company. They were fairly open about it - they would even offer potential clients that they (NASA) would fly the payloads ultra cheaply (or even free!).
That and offloading all satellites from the Shuttle (and the Military/NRO) kept Delta and Atlas going. But NASA was still trying to stifle third party attempts at launch companies.
Beal took a wrecking ball to that behaviour. And NASA tried very hard to stamp on his efforts. He ruined the careers of some of the blockers.
And then there was Kistler.
I know. I was there as well. DC-X was an amazing project that showed the way. The fact it was a prototype for an SSTO is fairly irrelevant when it comes to its impact. And as Pournelle was very directly involved, it seems an odd criticism.
And I'm not talking about the Reagan law change; but things like the Commercial Space Act of 1998, which fed into the ?2005? NASA authorisation act that essentially forced NASA to consider private alternatives. Again, Pournelle was there fighting the good fight.
The reason that DC-X didn't go further was that the X-33 (like all the other SSTO projects) of the time failed to show a path to flight weight. Same reason HOTOL failed.
The Reagan law change was bigger in some ways. "The United States encourages domestic commercial exploitation of space capabilities, technology, and systems for national economic benefit.". Ask Beal about how he used to quote that back at direct attempts to shut him down. Did you know that some NASA officials attempted to prevent him building the rocket test site in Texas? They actually spoke to the local government there and said that it wasn't in the interests of the nation....
The law changes were a progression; but the 1998 change was an absolutely key victory. The Conestoga debacle (an early SpaceX) shows why it was so needed.
You are missing the point about DC-X: yes, it was an evolutionary dead-end in the form it was. But the capabilities it exhibited in hovering and vertical landing were absolutely key to future knowledge and developments.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
I can see where that perspective comes from and yet there's a huge difference between what Trump may do in theory to just reset identity politics and all of the shit that comes with and the reality of Tulsi Gabbard being the director of nation security and selling Ukraine out to Putin.
The Conservative Party is hated. If you are a PB Tory the exercise shouldn't be to blame the voter, or the left, or the media, or any other factor than the person in the mirror.
Why is what I believe in so hated, and how do I change that?
What the average Tory believes in isn't hated. Their failure to enact once elected what they 'believe in' is hated.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
Since we are doing broad debate this morning, what do PBers think of the possibility of Putin being assassinated, at the behest of Ukraine or somebody in his own arena?
Given the position Ukraine has been placed in - always insufficient arms, and now an imminent US Govt potentially green-flagging their dismemberment as a country plus the handing over of part of their population to the Putin regime - I can see how knocking out Putin, who is personally the hinge around which all aspects rotate, would be an attraction.
What would happen were he to be suddenly removed from the board?
I think the democratic party needs to take a very hard look at what Labour did this year wrt identity politics and purity testing. They adopted a centre right position on both which allowed them to win the election. Had they gone all in on identity politics and had the mental positions the Dems had going into July I think the vote shares for Tory and Labour would probably have been about the same. Those million voters who stayed home and the million who reluctantly went to Labour would have showed up on the day for the Tories.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
This has more than an element of never hating your enemies because it affects your judgement.
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the production line either. He actually wasn't that great a CEO either and was certainly a piss-poor political interventionist. But he did spot an opportunity and exploited it ruthlessly - and to argue otherwise is pretty fatuous given Ford's dominance of the early motorcar market.
Likewise, Musk. I saw someone recently try to argue that actually Boeing might be more successful as an aeronautical / space firm because it spends more and has greater workforce diversity, and that these can be pointers to success. Which is fine if that's *all* the data you have to go on but it's not. The actual relevant data is that SpaceX mounts more than half of rocket launches globally and runs the world's biggest satellite network, has innovated in ways people thought impossible, has brought the costs of launches down by at least 80% and now has a technological lead over entire countries. Whereas Boeing builds planes that crash and fall apart in the air.
Leadership in industry, as in politics, is about vision as well as administration. It seems to me unlikely to the point of impossibility that someone else would have done what Musk did on SpaceX. Somebody probably would have done what he did at Tesla, sooner or later - but the crucial point is still that they didn't: he did it first.
As for X, that was never a commercial purchase: that was about buying political influence and insurance, not just in the US but globally - particularly when allied to SpaceX and Starlink.
The issue with much of this is culture.
The auto industry had a culture of being not interested in EVs. The reason was organisational inertia and momentum. To start with you are destroying the empires of the engine and transmission builders within the companies. In the early 2000s the makers of the risible Italian Job remake commissioned the conversion of some Minis to electric - for use in the tunnel scenes. The work was done by the custom EV industry in LA - who would take a car and make it into high performance EV for a long price. When the makers of the Mini were asked if they wanted to look at the result, they were completely disinterested.
Similarly, with space, it was about the billions invested in the current way of doing things. Huge costs were assumed and provided everyone with a taste. See the saga of the Russian engines, and how they got passed from one firm to another, gaining nothing except cost at each step.
This is interesting. I know the head of Bath's Mechanical Engineering Dept quite well. He has always been vey sniffy about EVs. There was and is a big automotive section. He was always down on range, charging times etc, as if those problems were insurmountable. They clearly are not, and are being solved right now. I wonder how much of his attitude came from his automotive colleague?
As an aside I met one of the automotive guys in hospital when I was receiving treatment. His magazine of choice? Top Gear...
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke.
To me, the defining moment was the Mini conversions (done around 2001) - you ended up with high performance cars with a 75 mile range (IIRC). There was less than no interest.
Tesla was about produtionising this cottage industry - at the time, you could take a car to the various specialists in this and they would turn it into an EV. For about $250,000.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
How much of that is down to the starvation diet they have been on for 15-20 years wrt funding undermining capacity to manage such initiatives, and are there any counter examples?
The only one I know about close to me is Mansfield investing in a hotel in Edinburgh, and I don't know the result.
Sorry for O/T but find it odd that the Today programme seem more focussed on Gaetz nomination when the one everyone outside the US (apart from Russia) should be worried about is Gabbard.
No doubt in a few days time when there is analysis and opinion elsewhere pointing this nightmare out then the Beeb will go hard on it as if they’ve just dug the appointment out without anyone else seeing it.
Both appointments are terrifying. There’s plenty of horror to go around. I suggest our focus should be on the appointments and not on criticising the BBC for being slightly overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all.
Putin must have some SERIOUS hold over Trump.
Both are appointments that cast democratic government in the worst possible light.
And Musky Baby as well. Who, it should be noted, had prominent Russian investors into Twix, and who apparently has talked to Putin and Putin's representatives.
The GOP are selling out American democracy to Russia.
Hugo Rifkind in The Times today has an article on the idea that tech bros are becoming at least as powerful as Nation states and we need to consider how we interact with them on that basis
It does raise the question though of what happens when Musk and Trump fall out. Is that civil war?
But Zuckerberg in 2020 was just fine!
It was not fine.
But it's also orders of magnitude less egregious than what Musky Baby and his techbro shit friends have done this time.
I share others’ views about the use of the nickname “Musky Baby.” It gives me a mental image of a prostitute calling him that whilst pegging him.
FTFY
In that case I could imagine him shouting.
“Musky, Musky Baby.”
“”What’s that?”
“It’s my safe word.”
“F*ck your safe word, you little bitch!”
Musk needs treating with utter contempt. If my using a phrase like 'Musky Baby' annoys you, remember that is exactly the intent: to take the piss out of a guy who is doing everything for himself, not you. If you are one of the weird nerds who defend his every action, ask yourself at what point you would stop supporting the narcissistic liar.
As ever (and this goes back to the days of people using "Bliar", it makes the user of the nickname look bad, not the target.
If you like the target, it may. If you like Musk, then you need your head checking.
I didn't much like Blair. I found use of Bliar tiresome and childish.
I didn't like Cameron or Osborne. I found use of Chameron and Gideon boring and lame.
I felt a strong antipathy towards May. I found use of Maybot to be excruciatingly accurate, but unkind and unnecessary.
I thought that Johnson was one of the most mendacious and dangerous people to have ever been PM. I found use of FLSOJ to be immature and puerile.
Elon Musk is many things, including a complete arsehole. Every time you refer to him as Musky Baby you demean yourself and it's the textual equivalent of nails being dragged down a blackboard. Please, for the sake of my sanity, desist.
Please tell me what name of contempt I can use for Musk, that will not offend you?
'Musk', just type it contemptuously. We promise to read it contemptuously. Pop it in a <span class="contemptuous">Musk</span> if it helps
I'm still hoping for a proper Musk scandal so we can all talk about Elongate
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
All (3) of my employer pensions are 1% or more.
That's unusual. Old pension plans I'm guessing. There has been a trend towards lower charges, hastened by stakeholder plans then auto enrolment. Auto enrolment charges are capped at 0.75% but most are much lower. NEST is 0.3%.
Whether to move plans into the self-managed world of a SIPP needs careful consideration. Generally I'm in favour of a decision driven by charges, but this comes with the rider that you must understand investments well enough and have the time and inclination to manage a SIPP.
Some fall into the trap of moving to a SIPP and then using funds which have high charges, thus defeating the object. Individual company shares and ETFs are the way to go. ETFs have no stamp duty. You should diversify adequately. Higher yields make sense given the taxation of pension funds. Beware possible benefits you may lose from the old employer scheme (esp old ones) such as higher than 25% tax free cash entitlement and pension guarantees at retirement (you would lose such benefits if you transferred away).
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
Thurrock are currently suing various councils who were part of the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) claiming that the APSE over valued the solar farms.
The APSE are saying they only used the data that was provided to them and they didn't know (or have reason to believe) it was a pack of lies...
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
Tesla was a failing company retro fitting Lotus Elise with a battery. The company it itself today is nothing like it. Its a bit like saying well Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's and story of loads and loads of other companies.
Musk did start SpaceX.
You can also point to Musk original investment in OpenAI.
Its very different from Trump or Branson, where its basically all bramd deals.
Both Tesla and SpaceX came very near going bust in 2008. They were largely saved by government contracts, directly and indirectly. If Musk had started/got involved with either company a couple of years earlier, he would be a nobody today - just another name on a long list of chancers who tried and failed.
He has been lucky, and to some extent has made his own luck. But the luck was still there.
I still maintain that he owes SpaceX to the late Jerry Pournelle.
Jerry Pournelle went down the SSTO rabbithole - hence advocating for what became DC-X
Musk specifically rejected SSTO from the start.
You do now about Pournelle campaigning and lobbying to get federal funding for private spaceflight? Due to him and others, the law was changed to allow contracts such as COTS.
And if you don't think the brilliant DC-X fed into what SpaceX (and Blue Origin...) are doing, then you are being rather silly.
By all means admire Musk and SpaceX; but you don't have to demean what everybody else did, and is doing.
It's not demeaning anyone to point out what happened. Mass fractions said that SSTO was a bad idea to attempt on planet Earth. Even Gary Hudson was talking about "Zeroth" stages.
Several people in the planning stage of what became DC-X pointed out that if the DC-Y was a TSTO, then success was *inevitable*. It wouldn't have needed much of first stage. At that point, the suggestion was a vertical launch for altitude, but without boost back. So the gain was less. But for an SSTO, it meant doubling payload and making GEO achievable.
DC-X was a step on the road to reusability. It was quite entertaining to hear the story change - on USENET, we had actually NASA people posting the following....
1) Vertical landing is impossible. Except on the moon (or something)
DC-X takes off and lands
2) Vertical landing is useless, since you can't reuse the vehicle without rebuilding it
DC-X flies twice in a couple of days.
3) Vertical landing and reusability is impossible for a "Flight weight" rocket....
etc
The posts were sometimes *minutes* after the flights.
X-33 (the bizarre abortion that DC-Y became) died of mass fraction. It became Single Stage To Montana. Then failed to even get enough performance for that. Even with that ridiculous design, a TSTO would have worked.
The Reagan law change was more about Challenger - NASA had a policy of destroying any attempt to start a private launch company. They were fairly open about it - they would even offer potential clients that they (NASA) would fly the payloads ultra cheaply (or even free!).
That and offloading all satellites from the Shuttle (and the Military/NRO) kept Delta and Atlas going. But NASA was still trying to stifle third party attempts at launch companies.
Beal took a wrecking ball to that behaviour. And NASA tried very hard to stamp on his efforts. He ruined the careers of some of the blockers.
And then there was Kistler.
I know. I was there as well. DC-X was an amazing project that showed the way. The fact it was a prototype for an SSTO is fairly irrelevant when it comes to its impact. And as Pournelle was very directly involved, it seems an odd criticism.
And I'm not talking about the Reagan law change; but things like the Commercial Space Act of 1998, which fed into the ?2005? NASA authorisation act that essentially forced NASA to consider private alternatives. Again, Pournelle was there fighting the good fight.
The reason that DC-X didn't go further was that the X-33 (like all the other SSTO projects) of the time failed to show a path to flight weight. Same reason HOTOL failed.
The Reagan law change was bigger in some ways. "The United States encourages domestic commercial exploitation of space capabilities, technology, and systems for national economic benefit.". Ask Beal about how he used to quote that back at direct attempts to shut him down. Did you know that some NASA officials attempted to prevent him building the rocket test site in Texas? They actually spoke to the local government there and said that it wasn't in the interests of the nation....
The law changes were a progression; but the 1998 change was an absolutely key victory. The Conestoga debacle (an early SpaceX) shows why it was so needed.
You are missing the point about DC-X: yes, it was an evolutionary dead-end in the form it was. But the capabilities it exhibited in hovering and vertical landing were absolutely key to future knowledge and developments.
Oh, it was a key step on the road. The next step, perhaps, was Armadillo showing that you could do it for peanuts.
Some would argue that the two big failures at Conestoga were
1) not to listening to Gary Hudson. Who wanted do a MCD Kero/LOX TSTO. 2) The other was not expecting and tolerating failures in development.
I'm interested that they have Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani as top of the list. She is a bit of a Michael Nazir-Ali figure (he is of Pakistani background) in background but perhaps not views, in that her father was the Bishop of Iran and they were forced to flee at the revolution in 1980 when she was a girl, after an assassination attempt.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
So its just luck that he is rich beyond imagination? You don't have to like someone to recognise that they have been very successful.
It is surely not controversial to think that luck plays the biggest part in becoming a billionaire? To what extent is debatable but it would seem quite absurd to think it is mostly down to "brilliance" or "hard work". There are far more brilliant and hard working non billionaires.
It's a lot to do with timing.
Tesla launched 10 years earlier would have been a complete failure. SpaceX likewise
In technical terms, Tesla depended on the state of Lithium battery development.
SpaceX could have been done any time from the 60s. Controlling the landings without modern computers would be very hard (probably no tower catch), but TSTO was solved design. It was group think that said VTVL was the wrong way to go.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
Which is why those pension schemes are not bankrupt.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
Well, they do to the extent that they pick fund managers. (They are, of course, advised by extremely expensive and generally useless consultants.)
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
As they shouldn't, it would be a huge conflict of interest and result in the impoverishment of pension holders. Local councils are shit at investing.
Since we are doing broad debate this morning, what do PBers think of the possibility of Putin being assassinated, at the behest of Ukraine or somebody in his own arena?
Given the position Ukraine has been placed in - always insufficient arms, and now an imminent US Govt potentially green-flagging their dismemberment as a country plus the handing over of part of their population to the Putin regime - I can see how knocking out Putin, who is personally the hinge around which all aspects rotate, would be an attraction.
What would happen were he to be suddenly removed from the board?
That would be to play 52 card pickup.
You might well end up with someone less rational at the top. Plus a civil war in Russia - which would then become an intensified external war, "to bring the country together".
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
Yes I'm aware of that.
I do worry about scheme managers being "encouraged" to invest in British Infrastucture particularly at the scale suggested.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
Yes I'm aware of that.
I do worry about scheme managers being "encouraged" to invest in British Infrastucture particularly at the scale suggested.
It's more that once the politicians started dictating the investment, they will be unable to resist Picking The Winners themselves.
Which they will do worse than the average fund manager. Which is already pretty bad.
I think the democratic party needs to take a very hard look at what Labour did this year wrt identity politics and purity testing. They adopted a centre right position on both which allowed them to win the election. Had they gone all in on identity politics and had the mental positions the Dems had going into July I think the vote shares for Tory and Labour would probably have been about the same. Those million voters who stayed home and the million who reluctantly went to Labour would have showed up on the day for the Tories.
I'm a bit unsure about this.
I think a lot of the culture war/identity stuff is projection from the Right. I don't think Labour under Starmer have ever been particularly hot on it, and the Conservatives got frustrated when they simply refused to engage with their baiting.
The same goes with MAGA. It's not like Harris was running round the country talking about Trans rights or something. The difference perhaps is that the US population is much more divided*, with less shared media like the BBC. That means that right-wing tropes can gain currency.
*Facebook is going this way in the UK though. I just explained to someone that the local parties that opposed cycle lanes in my ward got 8% of the vote in the local election, and the consultation on them found 85% support. You would get the inverse impression on FB.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
As they shouldn't, it would be a huge conflict of interest and result in the impoverishment of pension holders. Local councils are shit at investing.
Local councils are not shit at investing. They are much, much worse than that.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
So its just luck that he is rich beyond imagination? You don't have to like someone to recognise that they have been very successful.
It is surely not controversial to think that luck plays the biggest part in becoming a billionaire? To what extent is debatable but it would seem quite absurd to think it is mostly down to "brilliance" or "hard work". There are far more brilliant and hard working non billionaires.
It's a lot to do with timing.
Tesla launched 10 years earlier would have been a complete failure. SpaceX likewise
In technical terms, Tesla depended on the state of Lithium battery development.
SpaceX could have been done any time from the 60s. Controlling the landings without modern computers would be very hard (probably no tower catch), but TSTO was solved design. It was group think that said VTVL was the wrong way to go.
As the so-near-success Conestoga showed, the problem was not the technology, but funding and NASA buy-in. The law changes forced NASA to rethink its approach to private industry, which in turn unlocked funding.
As for: "It was group think that said VTVL was the wrong way to go"; SpaceX was part of that group at first, as they were looking to do parachute landings with F1 and F9.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
To be honest merging the existing Local Authority pension funds into fewer larger funds makes sense on many levels. Ultimately the only folk likely to lose out are the fund managers who lose the mandates of the smaller funds but fail to land one of the bigger ones - presumably the larger funds will have greater negotiating power when selecting fund managers and so get a better price (although whether they get better fund managers is open to speculation).
The Government has long wanted a Canadian Teachers or Calpers type fund. The point isn’t to direct these bigger funds into specific investments. More that they could be an anchor investor in bigger projects - as a) they’ll want to match liabilities, b) they’ll have more cash to lock up c) there will be incentive to invest in sterling denominated assets.
Loads have people have thought this for ages but for whatever reason (egos probably) the smaller funds have resisted. It reminds me of the GP practices in the town I live. The NHS built are huge polyclinic to move all the GPs (and other services). The GPs refused to merge. So now you have five or so separate waiting rooms and five or so different booking services. Not great for efficiency.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
I can see where that perspective comes from and yet there's a huge difference between what Trump may do in theory to just reset identity politics and all of the shit that comes with and the reality of Tulsi Gabbard being the director of nation security and selling Ukraine out to Putin.
Not just selling out Ukraine. Selling out supposed US allies too. The UK and other governments would be mad to share secrets that she may have access to. It's very hard to see how the Five Eyes survives the next Trump administration.
any books yet on the next Archbishop of Canterbury?
I haven't seen any. If/when it does happen I may lay the Bishop of Newcastle on the basis that organisations punish whistleblowers while punters will probs be behind her. But it'll depend on odds and I don't know anything much about this.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
I can see where that perspective comes from and yet there's a huge difference between what Trump may do in theory to just reset identity politics and all of the shit that comes with and the reality of Tulsi Gabbard being the director of nation security and selling Ukraine out to Putin.
Defeating "woke" — if such a thing truly even exists — by destroying the government of the world's most important democracy seems like quite a high price to pay in my opinion.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
All (3) of my employer pensions are 1% or more.
Has anyone got an example where government forcing mergers in an industry, to reduce it to a few giants, has created a success?
Sure: by forcing the various British motor companies to merge into British Leyland created a very successful Japanese auto maker in the UK.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
If the schemes go beyond rules about the balance of risk and start telling people they must support this or that UK plan for extracting moonbeams from cucumbers, then when it goes wrong I think we can guess who will be making up the shortfall.
The politicians personal money, of course. Right?
I can imagine that there is also going to be lots of fun lobbying about whether this or that investment is ethical or not.
This has the air of a Gordon Brown wheeze that causes massive problems 20 years down the line.
I think Musk is vastly overrated as a successful business person.
The only business he’s ran entirely himself is X which has from the perspective of a company, been a disaster.
Tesla - didn’t start and arguably stole it
Space X - didn’t start and doesn’t run it day to day
PayPal - got kicked out for being a loon and wanting to call it X
Tesla was a failing company retro fitting Lotus Elise with a battery. The company it itself today is nothing like it. Its a bit like saying well Ray Kroc didn't start McDonald's and story of loads and loads of other companies.
Musk did start SpaceX.
You can also point to Musk original investment in OpenAI.
Its very different from Trump or Branson, where its basically all bramd deals.
Both Tesla and SpaceX came very near going bust in 2008. They were largely saved by government contracts, directly and indirectly. If Musk had started/got involved with either company a couple of years earlier, he would be a nobody today - just another name on a long list of chancers who tried and failed.
He has been lucky, and to some extent has made his own luck. But the luck was still there.
I still maintain that he owes SpaceX to the late Jerry Pournelle.
Jerry Pournelle went down the SSTO rabbithole - hence advocating for what became DC-X
Musk specifically rejected SSTO from the start.
You do now about Pournelle campaigning and lobbying to get federal funding for private spaceflight? Due to him and others, the law was changed to allow contracts such as COTS.
And if you don't think the brilliant DC-X fed into what SpaceX (and Blue Origin...) are doing, then you are being rather silly.
By all means admire Musk and SpaceX; but you don't have to demean what everybody else did, and is doing.
It's not demeaning anyone to point out what happened. Mass fractions said that SSTO was a bad idea to attempt on planet Earth. Even Gary Hudson was talking about "Zeroth" stages.
Several people in the planning stage of what became DC-X pointed out that if the DC-Y was a TSTO, then success was *inevitable*. It wouldn't have needed much of first stage. At that point, the suggestion was a vertical launch for altitude, but without boost back. So the gain was less. But for an SSTO, it meant doubling payload and making GEO achievable.
DC-X was a step on the road to reusability. It was quite entertaining to hear the story change - on USENET, we had actually NASA people posting the following....
1) Vertical landing is impossible. Except on the moon (or something)
DC-X takes off and lands
2) Vertical landing is useless, since you can't reuse the vehicle without rebuilding it
DC-X flies twice in a couple of days.
3) Vertical landing and reusability is impossible for a "Flight weight" rocket....
etc
The posts were sometimes *minutes* after the flights.
X-33 (the bizarre abortion that DC-Y became) died of mass fraction. It became Single Stage To Montana. Then failed to even get enough performance for that. Even with that ridiculous design, a TSTO would have worked.
The Reagan law change was more about Challenger - NASA had a policy of destroying any attempt to start a private launch company. They were fairly open about it - they would even offer potential clients that they (NASA) would fly the payloads ultra cheaply (or even free!).
That and offloading all satellites from the Shuttle (and the Military/NRO) kept Delta and Atlas going. But NASA was still trying to stifle third party attempts at launch companies.
Beal took a wrecking ball to that behaviour. And NASA tried very hard to stamp on his efforts. He ruined the careers of some of the blockers.
And then there was Kistler.
I know. I was there as well. DC-X was an amazing project that showed the way. The fact it was a prototype for an SSTO is fairly irrelevant when it comes to its impact. And as Pournelle was very directly involved, it seems an odd criticism.
And I'm not talking about the Reagan law change; but things like the Commercial Space Act of 1998, which fed into the ?2005? NASA authorisation act that essentially forced NASA to consider private alternatives. Again, Pournelle was there fighting the good fight.
The reason that DC-X didn't go further was that the X-33 (like all the other SSTO projects) of the time failed to show a path to flight weight. Same reason HOTOL failed.
The Reagan law change was bigger in some ways. "The United States encourages domestic commercial exploitation of space capabilities, technology, and systems for national economic benefit.". Ask Beal about how he used to quote that back at direct attempts to shut him down. Did you know that some NASA officials attempted to prevent him building the rocket test site in Texas? They actually spoke to the local government there and said that it wasn't in the interests of the nation....
The law changes were a progression; but the 1998 change was an absolutely key victory. The Conestoga debacle (an early SpaceX) shows why it was so needed.
You are missing the point about DC-X: yes, it was an evolutionary dead-end in the form it was. But the capabilities it exhibited in hovering and vertical landing were absolutely key to future knowledge and developments.
Oh, it was a key step on the road. The next step, perhaps, was Armadillo showing that you could do it for peanuts.
Some would argue that the two big failures at Conestoga were
1) not to listening to Gary Hudson. Who wanted do a MCD Kero/LOX TSTO. 2) The other was not expecting and tolerating failures in development.
I have a lot of time for the Conestoga project and their achievements. I think their problems were circular: they needed funding (which you need to tolerate failures...) but they were doing something unique, which makes it hard to attract funding. This meant they had to rely on NASA, who did not like the lack of control they had over the project, and that in turn deterred investors. If NASA has played nicer with them, then Conestoga could have attracted more outside funding.
The law changes forced NASA to play nicely with private industry, and even industry newbies. Some of these failed, one in particular did not...
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
As they shouldn't, it would be a huge conflict of interest and result in the impoverishment of pension holders. Local councils are shit at investing.
Ideally keep any form of government as far away from anybody else's money as possible.
The list of disasters is endless but we never seem to learn.
any books yet on the next Archbishop of Canterbury?
I haven't seen any. If/when it does happen I may lay the Bishop of Newcastle on the basis that organisations punish whistleblowers while punters will probs be behind her. But it'll depend on odds and I don't know anything much about this.
I am coming to the reluctant conclusion that Trump winning was probably for the best, for the same reasons that @darkage adduces
I can see where that perspective comes from and yet there's a huge difference between what Trump may do in theory to just reset identity politics and all of the shit that comes with and the reality of Tulsi Gabbard being the director of nation security and selling Ukraine out to Putin.
Not just selling out Ukraine. Selling out supposed US allies too. The UK and other governments would be mad to share secrets that she may have access to. It's very hard to see how the Five Eyes survives the next Trump administration.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
All (3) of my employer pensions are 1% or more.
Has anyone got an example where government forcing mergers in an industry, to reduce it to a few giants, has created a success?
Sure: by forcing the various British motor companies to merge into British Leyland created a very successful Japanese auto maker in the UK.
The downside to that being we don't know what would have happened if they had not done the mergers. Were the private companies capable of withstanding the changing market without a merger, or were they just doomed?
In the case of British shipbuilding, which I've looked into previously, it was pretty much doomed. The way the industry was going wrt ship sizes was too far away from what the government, local councils, unions and management could condone.
(There's a good piccie somewhere of the land take of an 'old' 1950s-style large shipyard versus a modern one. The old-style one is linear along the river, with slipways and docks for ships and houses behind. The modern one has much greater depth inland, where modules are constructed and taken out to the fewer slipways and docks.)
Since we are doing broad debate this morning, what do PBers think of the possibility of Putin being assassinated, at the behest of Ukraine or somebody in his own arena?
Given the position Ukraine has been placed in - always insufficient arms, and now an imminent US Govt potentially green-flagging their dismemberment as a country plus the handing over of part of their population to the Putin regime - I can see how knocking out Putin, who is personally the hinge around which all aspects rotate, would be an attraction.
What would happen were he to be suddenly removed from the board?
That would be to play 52 card pickup.
You might well end up with someone less rational at the top. Plus a civil war in Russia - which would then become an intensified external war, "to bring the country together".
One can see how where that could be attractive for Ukraine, as a less worse option.
Russia's capacity to broaden an external war is not what it was, and the Chinese might mount a "distraction". They are only a very small number of miles from the Sea of Japan, and still aiui resent the Russian invasion in 189x .
2008 - Minimum wage full time: £11,918 2008 - Police Constable Pay Point 1: £22,104
2024 - Minimum wage full time: £23,795 2024 - Police Constable Pay Point 1: £29,907
Google tells me that yearly increments push the police constable pay up to £48k after seven years (with normal pay rises on top). The prospects for a minimum wage full-time worker would not be as rosy, I'd suggest.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
All (3) of my employer pensions are 1% or more.
Has anyone got an example where government forcing mergers in an industry, to reduce it to a few giants, has created a success?
Sure: by forcing the various British motor companies to merge into British Leyland created a very successful Japanese auto maker in the UK.
The downside to that being we don't know what would have happened if they had not done the mergers. Were the private companies capable of withstanding the changing market without a merger, or were they just doomed?
In the case of British shipbuilding, which I've looked into previously, it was pretty much doomed. The way the industry was going wrt ship sizes was too far away from what the government, local councils, unions and management could condone.
(There's a good piccie somewhere of the land take of an 'old' 1950s-style large shipyard versus a modern one. The old-style one is linear along the river, with slipways and docks for ships and houses behind. The modern one has much greater depth inland, where modules are constructed and taken out to the fewer slipways and docks.)
Dinosaurs Mating was the term for this - American, I think. A dying industry contracts by merger.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
The standard of financial journalism at the BBC is mediocre. They will probably just be recycling a press release.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
On private sector DC schemes I genuinely do not know what they are talking about and I'm pretty sure they don't either.
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
Thanks, that's good advice. I will do so. I have printed off all of the fund data sheets for the funds the company one invests in.
Yeah, I have a couple of SIPP's already as well as an S&S ISA. I am just happy to bung in a low cost tracker fund with both of them to be honest.
I am not impressed with my company one. It has consistently underperformed similar funds. We used to be Prudential and moved to Fidelity. It has not been good.
I am also concerned about a potential move to CDC's as well.
any books yet on the next Archbishop of Canterbury?
I haven't seen any. If/when it does happen I may lay the Bishop of Newcastle on the basis that organisations punish whistleblowers while punters will probs be behind her. But it'll depend on odds and I don't know anything much about this.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
I haven't noticed any comments yet on Reeves's pension fund proposals. I don't know enough about it to judge whether the proposals are a good idea, but does the absence of withering criticism from the normal critics thus far indicate anything?
It's not getting the attention it deserves because it's so boring - I hope the Opposition is all over the detail of this.
From what I can make out I think Reeves thinks she has found gold in them there hills enabling her to spend more money.
This is about public sector pensions which are funded (Local Government and Teachers). These are massive funds. There are employer and employee contributions (mostly employer) but the retirees pensions are not dependant on funding levels or investment returns because despite the existence of a fund they are Defined Benefit schemes (pensions are a function of years of service and salary not the investment fund).
If the funds underperform or, worse, contain a bunch of unlisted ‘investments’ that fail completely then oh dear no matter, any fund shortfall is made up from the employer (i.e. general taxation years away a future government’s problem), the retirees still get the same so no one will notice.
So when Ed Miliband wants money for a start up to punt on with government funding – to reach some environmental target or whatever – then as if by magic there is a pot of money to access without recourse to normal taxation or borrowing or spending cut-backs elsewhere.
Unlisted investments (whether startups or not) are very high risk and is why Neil Woodford got in trouble and lost his reputation. Reeves wants to take such risks on steroids but without obvious consequence because future taxpayers will have to bail this out.
Meanwhile, a select few fund managers will make a mint. This isn’t a pensions shake-up for growth – this is nonsense, it is fiscal vandalism.
The article below is so full of inaccuracy, ignorance and word salad I don’t know where to start.
No, PFI is the new PFI. It’s still an on-going thing.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
Local authorities have tested to destruction that they aren't skilled in investing.
Thurrock - solar farms Warrington - energy company Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Local authorities do not direct the investments of their pension schemes.
Yes I'm aware of that.
I do worry about scheme managers being "encouraged" to invest in British Infrastucture particularly at the scale suggested.
Especially "local" schemes as mentioned on the government web page.
Comments
The bed has been well and truly soiled but the majority of American voters are clean.
BBC News - Prosecutor seeks jail and election ban for Le Pen
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg0q711vl2o
I see Musk as a threat to democracy and the world, and much more so than Trump. I have been saying this for some time, and it is quite a reversal from how I felt about him ten to twelve years ago.
He deserves no respect. Shame on those who do show him respect.
It is the last desperate swing of the Globalist Woke, try and prosecute the populists to keep them at bay. It is stupid and explosively counter productive
Which is why I think people voted for him. A 'just not more of this shit' vote.
But I haven't seen anything yet which makes me think a Trump presidency will be anything better than the absolute bottom end of how bad Kamala would have been.
As I see it the USA is nothing like as predominant as Trump seems to think it is, and I think that if he tries to implement his apparent belief that he can allow the dismemberment of European countries at his will, even our current sleepy-Europe might wake up.
For Trump'd regime, I think a better comparison is Venezuela or South Africa.
It is a variety of kleptocracy embedded within a 'democratic' system, with 1) the control being with a crime family who have 2) tamed and controlled a political party, 3) aided and abetted by oligarchs who will profit thereby (eg Musk), protected 4) by a corrupted judicial system.
I think that analogy is clear in its elements.
Given the demand for “quality” text to feed these things, Musk may have made some ready $ selling the Twitter archives to the other AI companies.
Meanwhile no one is making any money from AI right now: OpenAI is a hole in the ground into which money is being poured & it’s much the same for the rest of them. NVidia is making out like a bandit in the process though!
Several people in the planning stage of what became DC-X pointed out that if the DC-Y was a TSTO, then success was *inevitable*. It wouldn't have needed much of first stage. At that point, the suggestion was a vertical launch for altitude, but without boost back. So the gain was less. But for an SSTO, it meant doubling payload and making GEO achievable.
DC-X was a step on the road to reusability. It was quite entertaining to hear the story change - on USENET, we had actually NASA people posting the following....
1) Vertical landing is impossible. Except on the moon (or something)
DC-X takes off and lands
2) Vertical landing is useless, since you can't reuse the vehicle without rebuilding it
DC-X flies twice in a couple of days.
3) Vertical landing and reusability is impossible for a "Flight weight" rocket....
etc
The posts were sometimes *minutes* after the flights.
X-33 (the bizarre abortion that DC-Y became) died of mass fraction. It became Single Stage To Montana. Then failed to even get enough performance for that. Even with that ridiculous design, a TSTO would have worked.
The Reagan law change was more about Challenger - NASA had a policy of destroying any attempt to start a private launch company. They were fairly open about it - they would even offer potential clients that they (NASA) would fly the payloads ultra cheaply (or even free!).
That and offloading all satellites from the Shuttle (and the Military/NRO) kept Delta and Atlas going. But NASA was still trying to stifle third party attempts at launch companies.
Beal took a wrecking ball to that behaviour. And NASA tried very hard to stamp on his efforts. He ruined the careers of some of the blockers.
And then there was Kistler.
I am looking forward to Darkage's neutral and emotion free analysis of the burning of the library of Alexandria, the gulag and 20th century genocides.
Incumbency is quite a curse at present, whether on the left or right, and I don't see that changing any time soon because of the headwinds in terms of stagnant growth, ageing population, costs incurred because of wars and climate change etc.
But I think more to it than that. Clearly there is an electoral vote for Reform and it's fellow travellers in the Tory party, but the dislike is even stronger. Those Green and LD figures show why tactical voting is the problem that the Tories need to tackle. In 2029 it will be even more obvious who to vote for in order to keep the Tories out.
This strikes me as a concern, although worth noting the Tories are broadly supportive. Who decides what to invest in and how ? The govt and local authorities have a pretty poor record in investing.
"Pension megafunds will be created as part of the biggest set of pension reforms in decades, unlocking billions of pounds of investment in exciting new businesses and infrastructure and local projects. "
What about risk ? What about fiduciary duty ? The govt may say this will deliver better returns but by the time we find out no one involved in this will be there to account for it. Neil Woodford on steroids as you say. If we invest in illiquid assets how can those funds be quickly realised if needed.
Alex Brummer in the Mail writing about this is saying "There will be a similar approach for the assets in smaller defined contribution plans."
I will ensure my DC when I leave this job is moved to my SIPP.
And Good Morning everyone.
Local Authority Pension scheme costs are low, but allowing them to be run and invest as larger schemes should make charges lower again. This is a good thing.
There are about £350bn of assets in local government pension schemes with about 6.5 million members.
About 50% are in public equities (shares), 12% bonds, 8% property, 6% private equity, 6% infrastructure and then the rest in 'other' (multi-asset credit, private debt, growth funds).
I'm not sure how any method of combining pools is going to magically make an additional £80 bn for 'british infrastucture' appear (even if this was a good thing).
The traditional idea of infrastucture investment was to provide a bit more return than gilts or high quality bonds, without much more risk. Even the most straight forward UK projects (building a road), have seen cost over runs that have brought companies down.
Delays and cost over runs are a plague on the UK - and not all of it is down to 'the process state'.
A lot is down to stop/start investment by government and a huge cascade of sub contracting
If they do that, I reckon they may only win by about 66-34.
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the production line either. He actually wasn't that great a CEO either and was certainly a piss-poor political interventionist. But he did spot an opportunity and exploited it ruthlessly - and to argue otherwise is pretty fatuous given Ford's dominance of the early motorcar market.
Likewise, Musk. I saw someone recently try to argue that actually Boeing might be more successful as an aeronautical / space firm because it spends more and has greater workforce diversity, and that these can be pointers to success. Which is fine if that's *all* the data you have to go on but it's not. The actual relevant data is that SpaceX mounts more than half of rocket launches globally and runs the world's biggest satellite network, has innovated in ways people thought impossible, has brought the costs of launches down by at least 80% and now has a technological lead over entire countries. Whereas Boeing builds planes that crash and fall apart in the air.
Leadership in industry, as in politics, is about vision as well as administration. It seems to me unlikely to the point of impossibility that someone else would have done what Musk did on SpaceX. Somebody probably would have done what he did at Tesla, sooner or later - but the crucial point is still that they didn't: he did it first.
As for X, that was never a commercial purchase: that was about buying political influence and insurance, not just in the US but globally - particularly when allied to SpaceX and Starlink.
If organisations want to offer it, I’m struggling to see the issue myself.
The pensions thing is simultaneously sensible & worrying. DB Pension funds should be using their cash to buy real long term assets: They’re exactly the kind of institutions that have the kind of very long term time horizons where funding something like a reservoir (or whatever) in return for an income stream makes sense. Having them stuff themselves to the gills with the safest assets known to mankind & refuse to invest in the real economy is counterproductive over the long term.
The problem is exactly as you say: directing their investments into whatever the government of the day thinks is the new hotness (carbon capture being the most obvious boondoggle right now, but I’m sure there are others!) is just leaving the taxpayer on the hook for paying these pensions after these “investments” blow up in everyone‘s faces: We should remember the great “lets grow groundnuts in west Africa” scheme from the immediate post-war period as a warning to us all: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collections/ransomes-sims-and-jefferies-ltd/groundnut-film/
It really is going to depend on how the scheme is implemented & who gets to direct where the investment goes.
It’s the same with your voting Labour. I don’t really believe you did if I am honest because it just seems to contradict your entire world view. And there’s no shame in that either.
I guess I just find some of these posts quite difficult to understand.
Fun in Brussels. France tries to scupper Free Trade deal with Mercosur.
Barnier advances the argument on "we're France and you should remember how special we think we are "
https://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/je-recommande-qu-on-ne-passe-pas-outre-la-position-d-un-pays-comme-la-france-michel-barnier-defend-la-voix-de-paris-a-bruxelles-20241113
A SIPP is a DC plan. Just a homemade one. And higher risk usually because you have to decide where to invest. Charges may be less but not necessarily (will likely be higher if you use funds). Employer arranged DC scheme are often close to nil charges, even to leavers of that employer. They are rarely above 0.75% pa. Before you move an ex employer DC scheme to a SIPP check the charges and if you do move it be aware that you have to select the underlying investments yourself so there are issues over diversification and time-spent by you.
As has been pointed out on PB before, the correct term for Musk is “visionary”
For that is what he is. He may also be a knob, genius, Sperg, wanker, brainiac, weirdo, Trumpite, geek, womanizer, whatever
But, in essence, he is a visionary. He sees into the future, and acts on it. He extrapolates, and turns that into things which then turn into cash
And I'm not talking about the Reagan law change; but things like the Commercial Space Act of 1998, which fed into the ?2005? NASA authorisation act that essentially forced NASA to consider private alternatives. Again, Pournelle was there fighting the good fight.
The auto industry had a culture of being not interested in EVs. The reason was organisational inertia and momentum. To start with you are destroying the empires of the engine and transmission builders within the companies. In the early 2000s the makers of the risible Italian Job remake commissioned the conversion of some Minis to electric - for use in the tunnel scenes. The work was done by the custom EV industry in LA - who would take a car and make it into high performance EV for a long price. When the makers of the Mini were asked if they wanted to look at the result, they were completely disinterested.
Similarly, with space, it was about the billions invested in the current way of doing things. Huge costs were assumed and provided everyone with a taste. See the saga of the Russian engines, and how they got passed from one firm to another, gaining nothing except cost at each step.
Years back I knew a guy who lived on Hayling Island* but worked on the Isle of Wight. First manager was happy for him to work from home for 19 days out of 20, and pop in once a fortnight. Manager changed, and insisted he attended every day. Which required getting the ferry too and fro from Portsmouth. Which led to valuable employee leaving.
As an academic I don't really have set hours and days, so its not a real issue for me, but I think it can work for some people. I worry about my wife as she is officially 0.6 FTE. The worry is that the workload isn't 0.6 FTE.
The Reagan law change was bigger in some ways. "The United States encourages domestic commercial exploitation of space capabilities, technology, and systems for national economic benefit.". Ask Beal about how he used to quote that back at direct attempts to shut him down. Did you know that some NASA officials attempted to prevent him building the rocket test site in Texas? They actually spoke to the local government there and said that it wasn't in the interests of the nation....
As an aside I met one of the automotive guys in hospital when I was receiving treatment. His magazine of choice? Top Gear...
Just born lucky I guess.
Tesla launched 10 years earlier would have been a complete failure.
SpaceX likewise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_(rocket)
You are missing the point about DC-X: yes, it was an evolutionary dead-end in the form it was. But the capabilities it exhibited in hovering and vertical landing were absolutely key to future knowledge and developments.
I have contradictory set of emotions: a deep sense of relief, mixed with anxiety and terror.
Lionel Shriver explained it well on the Spectator podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhZK1lM0pyk&t=23s
Thurrock - solar farms
Warrington - energy company
Woking - town centre development - yay "growth"
All flavours of the day, all disasters.
Given the position Ukraine has been placed in - always insufficient arms, and now an imminent US Govt potentially green-flagging their dismemberment as a country plus the handing over of part of their population to the Putin regime - I can see how knocking out Putin, who is personally the hinge around which all aspects rotate, would be an attraction.
What would happen were he to be suddenly removed from the board?
To me, the defining moment was the Mini conversions (done around 2001) - you ended up with high performance cars with a 75 mile range (IIRC). There was less than no interest.
Tesla was about produtionising this cottage industry - at the time, you could take a car to the various specialists in this and they would turn it into an EV. For about $250,000.
The only one I know about close to me is Mansfield investing in a hotel in Edinburgh, and I don't know the result.
I'm still hoping for a proper Musk scandal so we can all talk about Elongate
Whether to move plans into the self-managed world of a SIPP needs careful consideration. Generally I'm in favour of a decision driven by charges, but this comes with the rider that you must understand investments well enough and have the time and inclination to manage a SIPP.
Some fall into the trap of moving to a SIPP and then using funds which have high charges, thus defeating the object. Individual company shares and ETFs are the way to go. ETFs have no stamp duty. You should diversify adequately. Higher yields make sense given the taxation of pension funds. Beware possible benefits you may lose from the old employer scheme (esp old ones) such as higher than 25% tax free cash entitlement and pension guarantees at retirement (you would lose such benefits if you transferred away).
The APSE are saying they only used the data that was provided to them and they didn't know (or have reason to believe) it was a pack of lies...
Some would argue that the two big failures at Conestoga were
1) not to listening to Gary Hudson. Who wanted do a MCD Kero/LOX TSTO.
2) The other was not expecting and tolerating failures in development.
There's this, which is odds but not a market:
https://www.olbg.com/news/next-archbishop-canterbury-betting-odds-dr-guli-francis-dehqani-leads-betting-odds-be-first-female-archbishop-canterbury-after-1400-years
I'm interested that they have Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani as top of the list. She is a bit of a Michael Nazir-Ali figure (he is of Pakistani background) in background but perhaps not views, in that her father was the Bishop of Iran and they were forced to flee at the revolution in 1980 when she was a girl, after an assassination attempt.
SpaceX could have been done any time from the 60s. Controlling the landings without modern computers would be very hard (probably no tower catch), but TSTO was solved design. It was group think that said VTVL was the wrong way to go.
See the caja collapses in Spain......
You might well end up with someone less rational at the top. Plus a civil war in Russia - which would then become an intensified external war, "to bring the country together".
I do worry about scheme managers being "encouraged" to invest in British Infrastucture particularly at the scale suggested.
Which they will do worse than the average fund manager. Which is already pretty bad.
I think a lot of the culture war/identity stuff is projection from the Right. I don't think Labour under Starmer have ever been particularly hot on it, and the Conservatives got frustrated when they simply refused to engage with their baiting.
The same goes with MAGA. It's not like Harris was running round the country talking about Trans rights or something. The difference perhaps is that the US population is much more divided*, with less shared media like the BBC. That means that right-wing tropes can gain currency.
*Facebook is going this way in the UK though. I just explained to someone that the local parties that opposed cycle lanes in my ward got 8% of the vote in the local election, and the consultation on them found 85% support. You would get the inverse impression on FB.
As for: "It was group think that said VTVL was the wrong way to go"; SpaceX was part of that group at first, as they were looking to do parachute landings with F1 and F9.
The Government has long wanted a Canadian Teachers or Calpers type fund. The point isn’t to direct these bigger funds into specific investments. More that they could be an anchor investor in bigger projects - as a) they’ll want to match liabilities, b) they’ll have more cash to lock up c) there will be incentive to invest in sterling denominated assets.
Loads have people have thought this for ages but for whatever reason (egos probably) the smaller funds have resisted. It reminds me of the GP practices in the town I live. The NHS built are huge polyclinic to move all the GPs (and other services). The GPs refused to merge. So now you have five or so separate waiting rooms and five or so different booking services. Not great for efficiency.
NB there was blatant insider dealing on the last one.
The strange politics of wage compression
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/11/13/britains-big-squeeze-middle-class-and-minimum-wage
https://archive.is/JJVnX
Comment from elsewhere:
2008 - Minimum wage full time: £11,918
2008 - Police Constable Pay Point 1: £22,104
2024 - Minimum wage full time: £23,795
2024 - Police Constable Pay Point 1: £29,907
This has the air of a Gordon Brown wheeze that causes massive problems 20 years down the line.
Has he been giving advice?
The law changes forced NASA to play nicely with private industry, and even industry newbies. Some of these failed, one in particular did not...
The list of disasters is endless but we never seem to learn.
In the case of British shipbuilding, which I've looked into previously, it was pretty much doomed. The way the industry was going wrt ship sizes was too far away from what the government, local councils, unions and management could condone.
(There's a good piccie somewhere of the land take of an 'old' 1950s-style large shipyard versus a modern one. The old-style one is linear along the river, with slipways and docks for ships and houses behind. The modern one has much greater depth inland, where modules are constructed and taken out to the fewer slipways and docks.)
Russia's capacity to broaden an external war is not what it was, and the Chinese might mount a "distraction". They are only a very small number of miles from the Sea of Japan, and still aiui resent the Russian invasion in 189x .
The prospects for a minimum wage full-time worker would not be as rosy, I'd suggest.
Yeah, I have a couple of SIPP's already as well as an S&S ISA. I am just happy to bung in a low cost tracker fund with both of them to be honest.
I am not impressed with my company one. It has consistently underperformed similar funds. We used to be Prudential and moved to Fidelity. It has not been good.
I am also concerned about a potential move to CDC's as well.
No?