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September 2012

Does this actually make sense?

Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.

And:

A few companies say they are using extensively re-engineered software and cooling systems to decrease wasted power. Among them are Facebook and Google, which also have redesigned their hardware. Still, according to recent disclosures, Google’s data centers consume nearly 300 million watts and Facebook’s about 60 million watts.

Now I get very confused by sciencey things. But a Watt is a rate isn\’t it?

So a watt isn\’t what you use, it\’s the rate at which you use it? What you use is some number of watt-hours isn\’t it?

Help me out here, I\’m confused. Have the NYT got their units wrong or not?

OK, thanks for the explanations. It does make sense now. They say that the US uses 1/3 or so of this 30 billion, then later they say that total usage in US is something like 76 billion Kwh over a year.

Which, working back, indicates that they\’re on average, working at about 70% of that 30 GW. Which seems to make some sort of sense to me at at least.

The John Rentoul Method Of Writing A Book

Win a signed copy of the book. Submit a Question to Which the Answer is No that John Rentoul has missed and the 10 best entries will receive copies of the book signed by the author.

Or, win a copy of my current book by writing my next book for me.

Sorry, but what\’s the complaint here?

The Ministry of Justice hopes it will help Britain become the \”largest specialist centre for the resolution of financial, business and property litigation anywhere in the world\” and on the face of it, there seems little to object to in that. I have many criticisms of the judiciary, but I have never entertained the notion that an English judge would take a bribe or succumb to pressure from the state. You cannot say the same of judges in Moscow, New Delhi or Beijing. The incorruptibility of the judiciary and the work ethic of the lawyers ensure that more international commercial disputes take place in London than in any other city in the world. And of course we need whatever taxes the lawyers\’ accountants condescend to pass to the Revenue.

We have an honest judiciary that Johnny Foreigner wishes to use.

And?

Sounds like a matter for congratulation really.

Bravo Mr Hutton, Bravo!

Congratulations on the most muddleheaded plan yet!

Let\’s start with finance. Britain now boasts two huge zombie banks, RBS and Lloyds, whose assets are close to twice the size of our economy. In particular, RBS, without government guarantees and support, could not continue to trade. The mistakes both banks made were so epic and the losses on the lending so huge that if the losses were crystallised Lloyds\’ capacity to trade would be questionable.

So, too much bank lending. Very bad idea. Gotcha.

But what is normality? British banks\’ total assets are around five times our national output and have barely contracted in size.

Oooh, very bad indeed.

Incredibly, only 5% of that lending was to British companies, perhaps 1% to innovative companies and sectors.

Er, hang on a minute. In our Anglo Saxon type economy we don\’t use commercial banks to lend, provide debt, to innovation. We use equity, derived through capital markets. You have heard of this \”stock market\” thing have you?

What\’s more, our regulators insist that banks must put prohibitive amounts of capital behind business lending. The successful applicant to succeed Mervyn King as governor must reform this system.

Err, but, up above you said that the banks went bust because they lent too much and couldn\’t handle the losses when they came. That is, they had too little capital. Now you want to lower capital requirements?

We then need to devise ways of encouraging new lending. Here, the state has to assume risk. Tim Breedon, the outgoing chief executive of Legal and General, has proposed that loans get aggregated into jumbo bonds that could be bought and sold by large investors. If, in addition, the state could guarantee part of the value of the bonds they would quickly have high-quality ratings.

Snigger. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for corporate bonds eh? That system really worked well, didn\’t it?

The government must create new public banks on top of the green bank that specialise in different parts of the market – some for housing, some for infrastructure , some for business lending.

Ooooh! Specialist banks. So, when one part of the economy tanks, say, housing, then all the specialists can go bust. As, umm, the specialists in aggressive housing lending all went bust in 2008?

I do wonder sometimes. Does Willy even read his own articles?

Resolution Foundation: the case study

They really should have thought a little more about this:

Clair Beattie, who lives in Nottingham and works part-time as a hairdresser, looks back to her parents\’ generation and wishes things could be like that now.

Her father had a good profession: he was a builder who brought home a decent wage. Her father-in-law, working in the same trade, owned his own company. His prosperity meant his family owned their own house and went away every year on holiday.

OK

By contrast, Clair and her husband Dan struggle. They don\’t complain too much, largely because they have two lovely daughters – one four and the other 17 – as well as an 18-year-old son who has left the family home. But life is tough. Dan\’s expertise is in air conditioning and because there are few jobs in that field in Nottingham he works 50 to 60 hours in London every week.

So we\’re going to compare, over the generations, the living standards of the capitalist exploiting the workers and the worker being exploited are we?

Very good matching of your comparison set there, eh?

Tosspots.

Welcome to the neo-peasantry!

The reality is that this winter, as I\’m sure you know, has been exceptionally harsh. Just doing the animals takes hours. All the water butts and hoses are frozen, so whoever is on duty has to come inside the house and fill up endless buckets and watering cans, lugging them outside to the various troughs and drinkers. It\’s almost impossible even to open the doors of the coops, as latches are frozen. One door has already broken. And cleaning out the animals requires a lot of muscle, as all the dung is rock hard. Our hob has been broken, too, by having something frozen dropped on to it.

Other jobs also take twice as long. We\’re at the end of a long, steep cul-de-sac which the car simply can\’t make it up any more. So we\’ve been walking the girls to school and going shopping with rucksacks on our backs. We\’re constantly lighting fires and so spend a lot of time splitting logs for kindling, bringing more wood indoors, and so on. The wood-fuel boiler gets through two or three barrows a day. Only now we\’ve run out of wood. It sounds daft, as we live in a wood, but we didn\’t fell anything like enough last winter to have sufficient seasoned logs for the boiler this winter. I knew we were going to be short at some point, that we would have to buy in some logs towards the end of the winter, maybe in February or March. I didn\’t expect that all the log sheds would be empty by the New Year.

There\’s cunts out there that want to force us all to live like this.

Hang them all.

Resolution Foundation: Yup, nonsense

Living standards for low- and middle-income households will fall until 2020, even if the country enters a golden period of steady economic growth, according to an incendiary analysis of deepening income inequality in Britain.

Scary, eh?

Why?

The study identifies several reasons for the deepening divide in living standards. While new jobs are being created, it finds that many are at the top and the bottom of the income scale, with few in the middle. By 2020, it says, Britain can expect 2m more jobs in high-paid professional and managerial occupations and also growth in low-skilled service roles, with more than 700,000 new positions in retail, caring and leisure. But more traditional jobs in the middle – from skilled administrative roles to skilled manufacturing – are drying up.

Is there a solution for this dreadful prediction?

It also projects a future in which Britain matches the proportion of women in work achieved by the best-performing OECD countries, such as the Scandinavians, which is likely to require a big expansion of childcare provision.

Oh well done there that man. So, we\’ll solve the problem of having an increasing number of low skill and low wage jobs by creating a raft of low skill and low wage jobs in which women look after other peoples\’ children.

Very well done that man. Total friggin\’ genius.

Look, fool,

Davey says, however, that there are huge opportunities for the British economy from investment in low-carbon energy infrastructure projects, including wind and solar energy, carbon capture storage and new nuclear power, all of which make up a large part of projected spending of £118bn in the sector over the next decade. Last year alone £12.7bn was invested in this country by the renewable energy industry, creating 20,000 jobs.

Davey says he fears these opportunities will be lost if the pre-election consensus on climate change and green policies continues to be questioned. \”If there is not seen to be that consensus investors are going to balk. When you hear all that noise on the right of politics that worries investors. They think, \’Well if I am going to put all this money in – it is a 30-year investment – I need to know that if the government changes we are not going to have some rightwing Tea Party tendency taking over.\’ \”


You can spray
money around all you like, government has never been shy of doing that.

But the important thing is \”what are you investing in?\” not \”how much are you investing?\”*

And by definition what you are trying to get people to invest in is a very bad idea indeed. No, not particularly green stuff, some of that\’s just great. No, the definition is that in order to get people to stick the cash in you\’re having to rig the market. You\’re having to insist that investors get to rook consumers.

And that\’s not something that\’s sustainable. Even the proles wake up sometimes. That\’s why it is, by definition, a bad investment. One\’s that depend upon government screwing people always are.

You could, and should, achieve the same goal – the optimal reaction of the British economy to the threat of climate change – simply by instituting a proper, economy wide, carbon tax at $80 per tonne CO2-e.

What entirely beggars belief is that we\’ve got the sodding Liberal party refusing to support something so wonderfully both liberal and correct. Externalities: intervene once, through the price system, then leave well alone. For the market is the only method we actually have of calculating how the market should react.

* Please leave the short term Keynes stuff out of this.

Bit hopeful Mr. Carswell

The digital revolution will reinvigorate the West, lifting us out of our big-government-induced stupor. The West arose because Europe, unlike the empires of the Ming, the Mughals or the Ottomans, was never politically centralised. Europe progressed because no oligarchy could ever impose its idea of what progress should look like. Since the Treaty of Rome, Europe has stagnated because a centralised elite is trying to run a whole continent on the basis of blueprints.

Maths and technology are about to do to the grand planners in the West what the collapse of Communism did to the socialist planners in the old Soviet bloc. We are about to be set free not only from the grand plans, but from the conceit of the grand planners.

I agree that it\’s a possible outcome.

But sadly it\’s not an assured one.

The trick will be to ensure that there is a market in everything. Yes, including tax rates, tax systems, systems of governance. There must be exit, at least the possibility of it, for anyone from any of these.

Above all, the fight is against those who would impose one system upon the entire world. Any system at all: whether it be about the legality of drugs (currently covered by a UN treaty) or who is allowed to have what money in which bank. For monopoly is the very antithesis of markets.

How absolutely glorious: permission to not need permission

But I’m not. I’m typing it in a wall-ridden 1930s semi, with the plans for the extension lying, thus far untroubled by builder’s hand, next to me on the table. Planning permission may be unnecessary, but you still require the approval of the council’s building officer before you start work. And that takes a very long time.

I can’t get my head around this – my partner has explained the process to me 100 times, but I find the delays so frustrating that I don’t really listen. I think that we have to gain permission for the exemption from planning permission: permission not to require permission, as it were.

Reminds me of a story from 1992 or so Russia.

Anatoly Sobchak, Mayor of St Petersburg, announces that you no longer need a licence or permission to set up in business. Just get on with it and send us a letter to register for tax etc.

Next morning the licence office is besieged. With people demanding a licence not to need a licence.

If you want to reform planning then you\’ve got to really change the system. Build whatever you like unless the council objects. You can even give them the power to insist it must be torn down if you like. But if you leave them with the power to grant approval for not needing approval then nothing will change.

Anyone running iOS 6 yet?

If so, can you have a look at the clock? This one that\’s supposedly based on hte SBB watch?

The real trick is to look at the second hand. In the SBB watch it moves smoothly (not ticking) until 0.59. At which point it stops and then ticks over to 1.00. Then moves smoothly on to 1.59. Ticks, etc.

Can someone have a look and tell me?

Seems fair enough

A father who faces being restricted from seeing his daughter after an unidentified woman made sexual abuse claims against him has won the right to be told the name of his accuser.

Three Court of Appeal judges also said social workers must disclose the identity of the woman despite her refusal to be named.

The man, who is Australian, has so far also been denied any details of the claims against him, making it almost impossible for him to fight them.

He vociferously denies sexually abusing \”anybody\”.

In what was acknowledged as a “highly unusual” situation, a High Court judge ruled earlier this year that the woman’s identity could not be disclosed because she suffered mental and physical problems which were \”towards the top end of the spectrum\”.

It\’s possible to describe this two ways.

1) Woman so harmed by sexual abuse struggles to prevent this from happening to another. Bravely identifies her abuser. Her identity is protected to protect her fragile state.

2) Known nutter makes allegation. No one to know what it is, who she is, making it entirely impossible to prove allegations or to defend against them.

It seems the lower court and the social workers went with 1). The higher court with 2).

As it should be of course: any and everyone has a right to know the allegations, the person making them, so that they can be defended against.

Dear God this woman is stupid

The government argues that this move will benefit consumers by bringing down food and other prices as well as help farmers and other small suppliers. (An unstated motive is that it will bring in more capital from large corporations eyeing the potentially huge Indian market.) But these arguments can all be challenged.

OK, challenge it.

The employment impact is likely to be very negative. The retail trade in India employs about 40 million – mostly very small-scale traders who are largely self-employed, who would not be able to compete with large organised corporations. It has been estimated that one Walmart can displace up to 1,400 small stores, costing around 5,000 jobs.

Facepalm.

Yes, jobs are very nice things for the people that have them. But to the consumer or producer jobs are a cost, not a benefit. Taking 5,000 jobs out of the cost structure by building a supermarket thus benefits consumers by taking the cost of 5,000 jobs out of the cost structure.

You fool.

On free trade in tungsten

This is rather fun:

In 1910 the British journalist Norman Angell published a book called “The Great Illusion”. It\’s thesis was that the integration of the European economy, and by implication the global economy too, had become so all-embracing and irreversible that future wars were all but impossible. The book perfectly captured the zeitgeist of its time and fast became a best seller.

I can\’t point to a source for what follows but I\’ve been told it often enough that I\’m sure it\’s true.

You pretty much always find a little bit of tungsten in tin ores. And a bit of tin in tungsten ores. And back a century tungsten was really only used for light bulbs and the military.

The centre of the world\’s tungsten industry was the German/Czech border. Cornwall was very important for tin. No one bothered to extract the tungsten from the Cornish tin: it sat there in the slags. Until, in the 1905-1912 period, the Germans/Czechs bought all the slags up and shipped them off to be processed for the tungsten.

Excellent free trade, division of labour and specialisation in action. As Angell says.

But that tungsten was then used to build the military that refuted the thesis……

Yes love, they can

Have we reached a watershed? Can anyone other than pornographers justify printing pictures of naked women when there has been such an uproar over the topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge?

It\’s a simple matter of acknowledging human beings as they are. The male of the species enjoys looking at nekkid baps. Indeed, there is strong (although perhaps not conclusive) evidence that baps are there for men to enjoy. Other primates suckle their young with very similar milk glands but without the presence of protuberant titties after all.

And one of the hallmarks of a free society, of a liberal one, is that people should be able to and indeed can get on with what they enjoy as long as that enjoyment is not coming from direct harm to either the persons or rights of others.

And no, being made uncomfortable doesn\’t cut it.

Thus, yes, nekkid baps, they are printable, as long as it is with the consent of the owner of said titties. And most certainly, you do not get to say what any other woman gets to do with her baps, photoed, pictured, printed or not.

Case closed.