*sigh* If Fox News goes pop as a result of being Sued to Death after deliberately lying, the supporters of Trump will simply blame the librul elite. Its their God Given Right to be lied to etc etc.
We aren't that far behind. There are some absolute tools out there, harrumphing away with their scarlet faces desperately blaming their personal bogeymen to try and hide their sense of inadequacy. People have decided what the facts are and aren't going to stop passing off their opinions as facts no matter how flat-earther they look.
I would have been proud to have made that rant - thank you.
Just wondering what percentage of the Fox viewers use alternative loony sources of news. Other than the conspiracy web sites,which I assume have a small subset of the Fox audience (Am I right?) is there any other mainstream media like Fox? Sorry I have no idea, just in case this is a stupid question.
I do wonder which large company will be the first to abandon Chinese manufacturing and where they will shift to. SE Asia and India could benefit a lot in the next few years if they play things right.
SpaceX, Tesla to the Green Courtesy Phone, SpaceX, Tesla to the Green Courtesy Phone.
Ex-SpaceX and Ex-Tesla engineers are already in very high demand. Their supply chain people may be next up...
I can't work out if we're going to have rampant deflation or rampant inflation from this. I think house prices could take a hit mind.
Who knows. But I reckon it will be inflation.
There's almost no velocity of money now though. Unless you're trying to buy PPE, inflation needs to have a large velocity of money and that has almost stopped.
High unemployment + negative economic growth = downwards pressure on inflation, usually. Oil prices are also at recent lows, and as you say spending is grinding to a halt. The main upwards indicator right now is low interest rates, bu they were already pretty low to start with, so the minor cut shouldn't change much. The massive increase in government spending is mostly just replacing what would've been regular income. My vote is for deflation.
So those people who spent all weekend moving money out of their bank accounts are ahead of the game and writing mug on our foreheads for being slow to act on this? Moving it it to what though? What assets won’t depreciate? jewellery? Water?
Remember again there's someone still working in Downing Street who said Britain didn't really need its farms and fishing fleet.
Sigh - that was in the context of an extreme hypothetical - quite common in Operational Research. You ask - if we take X to an extreme, what is the result Y.
In the case of farming - a large amount of money is spent on subsidy. What do we get for it? What would the landscape be, if we removed it?
A classic in this field was the study in WWII proposing to remove all defensive armament from RAF bombers. If you went all the way to redesigning the planes to not have the structural capability to carry the armament, then they would be 100mph faster and have half the crew. While not adopted, due to the politics of the matter, it is noteworthy that the Air Ministry dropped defensive armament for future designs.
If I recall correctly that was the Mossie, and de Havilland had to virtually build it themselves (full size mockup?) before the Air Ministry would order a single prototype.
Nope - later, after the Mosquito. The idea had been mooted several times by aircraft designers - the basic reasoning was that if you designed for speed, a bomber would be as fast as a fighter. Or nearly. So the intercept curve would be close to impossible.
The Mosquito was nearly binned by the failure of the Blenheim to do exactly that - survive by speed. It worked because the onset of compression effects made speeds above 400mph really, really difficult - otherwise by the time it was in production, speeds would have jumped again, and it would have been another Blenheim. The Mosquito survived with clever lobbying and the promise of testing armament - got as far as a mocked up turret in one prototype IIRC.
De Havilland had some idea of compression issues. As did Supermarine. Famously, Hawker didn't.
The study to remove all defensive armament was after Mosquitos demonstrated *cruise* speeds north of 300, while loaded.
The Mosquito is one of my two fave aircraft of WW2, the other being the Short Sunderland.
A few years I did knock up a spreadsheet of the (my estimated) cumulative effect of hypothentically replacing all our 4 engned bombers with Mossies. The initial total bombload was much lower but with a much smaller rate of loss I think I had the Mosquitoes overtaking within about 6-12 months. Can't remember my input parameters though.
Not enough piano makers...
The study I am talking of was essentially - 4 Merlins, 10K payload, 3 crew, metal construction. Think Lancaster with a much smaller and lighter fuselage.
IIRC De Havilland did some sketches for a 4 engined Super Mosquito. Along with a Sabre engined derivative.
The Mosquito got its performance from being the minimum aircraft to carry the load, not from the wooden construction.
At a tangent, has anyone looked at giving Coastal Command some Lancasters to close the submarine gap much earlier in the Battle of the Atlantic?
Yes - war-gamed by the pros quite frequently. Just keeping the uboats underwater all the time, crawling around at 5 knots makes a huge difference.
Another win for questioning the conventional wisdom of Captain Obvious
The B24 Liberator, with its longer range was extensively used for that role as I recall.
IIRC none of the big bombers had the range to cover the gap? Didn't it come down to carrier protection in the end? Long time since I've read anything about the Battle of the Atlantic so I could be wrong.
My knowledge is based on extensive Airfix activity in the 1970's, rather than anything professional!
Very Long Range (VLR) Liberators could and did close the air gap in 1943. Escort carriers were becoming available in numbers at a similar time. I think the former were more significant.
Could have been 1941 - pulling guns, seats etc out and filling half the bomb bay with ferry tanks (which already existed) was known as a way to create a long range patrol plane.
The VLR conversions were nice - and could have followed within a couple of months of starting ops with stripped down bombers.
I can't work out if we're going to have rampant deflation or rampant inflation from this. I think house prices could take a hit mind.
Who knows. But I reckon it will be inflation.
There's almost no velocity of money now though. Unless you're trying to buy PPE, inflation needs to have a large velocity of money and that has almost stopped.
High unemployment + negative economic growth = downwards pressure on inflation, usually. Oil prices are also at recent lows, and as you say spending is grinding to a halt. The main upwards indicator right now is low interest rates, bu they were already pretty low to start with, so the minor cut shouldn't change much. The massive increase in government spending is mostly just replacing what would've been regular income. My vote is for deflation.
So those people who spent all weekend moving money out of their bank accounts are ahead of the game and writing mug on our foreheads for being slow to act on this? Moving it it to what though? What assets won’t depreciate? jewellery? Water?
Remember again there's someone still working in Downing Street who said Britain didn't really need its farms and fishing fleet.
Sigh - that was in the context of an extreme hypothetical - quite common in Operational Research. You ask - if we take X to an extreme, what is the result Y.
In the case of farming - a large amount of money is spent on subsidy. What do we get for it? What would the landscape be, if we removed it?
A classic in this field was the study in WWII proposing to remove all defensive armament from RAF bombers. If you went all the way to redesigning the planes to not have the structural capability to carry the armament, then they would be 100mph faster and have half the crew. While not adopted, due to the politics of the matter, it is noteworthy that the Air Ministry dropped defensive armament for future designs.
If I recall correctly that was the Mossie, and de Havilland had to virtually build it themselves (full size mockup?) before the Air Ministry would order a single prototype.
Nope - later, after the Mosquito. The idea had been mooted several times by aircraft designers - the basic reasoning was that if you designed for speed, a bomber would be as fast as a fighter. Or nearly. So the intercept curve would be close to impossible.
The Mosquito was nearly binned by the failure of the Blenheim to do exactly that - survive by speed. It worked because the onset of compression effects made speeds above 400mph really, really difficult - otherwise by the time it was in production, speeds would have jumped again, and it would have been another Blenheim. The Mosquito survived with clever lobbying and the promise of testing armament - got as far as a mocked up turret in one prototype IIRC.
De Havilland had some idea of compression issues. As did Supermarine. Famously, Hawker didn't.
The study to remove all defensive armament was after Mosquitos demonstrated *cruise* speeds north of 300, while loaded.
The Mosquito is one of my two fave aircraft of WW2, the other being the Short Sunderland.
A few years I did knock up a spreadsheet of the (my estimated) cumulative effect of hypothentically replacing all our 4 engned bombers with Mossies. The initial total bombload was much lower but with a much smaller rate of loss I think I had the Mosquitoes overtaking within about 6-12 months. Can't remember my input parameters though.
Not enough piano makers...
The study I am talking of was essentially - 4 Merlins, 10K payload, 3 crew, metal construction. Think Lancaster with a much smaller and lighter fuselage.
IIRC De Havilland did some sketches for a 4 engined Super Mosquito. Along with a Sabre engined derivative.
The Mosquito got its performance from being the minimum aircraft to carry the load, not from the wooden construction.
At a tangent, has anyone looked at giving Coastal Command some Lancasters to close the submarine gap much earlier in the Battle of the Atlantic?
Yes - war-gamed by the pros quite frequently. Just keeping the uboats underwater all the time, crawling around at 5 knots makes a huge difference.
Do people war game this kind of thing? That is interesting, I never knew that kind of retrospective thing went on. Any YouTube channels or anything like that about that kind of thing?
War gaming is borrowed from real life military planning. The Sandhurst game of Operation Sealion was annual event - not sure if they still run it.
Did you know that before the battle of Midway, the Japanese gamed the battle. Yamamoto "fixed" the results when he lost massively.
That's interesting, thanks. I never knew about the Yamamoto fix either. Maybe the success of the raid shows the limits of war gaming!
You are thinking of Pearl Harbour
Midway was the battle where the Japanese lost all the carriers deployed - most of their front line carrier strength. Which ensured they lost the war a year earlier, if nothing else.
There was a major worrying development in the current crisis this weekend. My mum has worked out how to make WhatsApp video calls.
Whoever is out there in the land teaching these skills, we need to isolate them....from all technology.
Talking of learning skills this would be a good time for those who claim they can’t cook to learn, as with the washing machine etc. Also those that leave the ‘finances’ to the other half to get a grip on where they are and how it’s spent. You never know when you are going to need these skills.
A post appeared on my Facebook page, to the effect that at the end of this crisis 50% of us will have become excellent cooks and 50% alcoholics.
That leaves some of us very little room for maneuver.
In other news Alex Salmond's defence counsel has got into hot water for some revealing comments.
Various commentators up here contrasting the dignified comments of the disbelieved witnesses with Salmond's high fiving outside the court after the verdict.
Can SNP really be serious about rehabilitating him and letting him run in next year's Holyrood elections?
Comments
Just wondering what percentage of the Fox viewers use alternative loony sources of news. Other than the conspiracy web sites,which I assume have a small subset of the Fox audience (Am I right?) is there any other mainstream media like Fox? Sorry I have no idea, just in case this is a stupid question.
Ex-SpaceX and Ex-Tesla engineers are already in very high demand. Their supply chain people may be next up...
The VLR conversions were nice - and could have followed within a couple of months of starting ops with stripped down bombers.