If debt must be repayable in local currency then – and therefore – there need be no debt. For the local government can just print more money without having to take out the debt at all.
Spud’s just solved development financing!
If debt must be repayable in local currency then – and therefore – there need be no debt. For the local government can just print more money without having to take out the debt at all.
Spud’s just solved development financing!
Well, I’d agree that countries should be free to choose policies that suit their own people.
But I’m not too sure about the rest of them.
I think you’ll find that should read “Countries should be free to choose policies that suit their own people (but only if we socialists agree with them)’
For some specialist meaning of the word “repayable” …
Apologies, completely OT but I know I can get a sensible answer here.
After the recent changeover of land lines to the dread world of the computer, I (and several others I know) have had crap connections, with a constant need to enter the usual password to connect to the router again.
My question is this: if the old (reliable) copper line system is past it’s best, then why is the same socket still being used in which to plug the router?
If I understand your question correctly, BT doesn’t want the cost and liability of the internal wiring and new box. If you go fibre you get a new box at the nearest point of entry.
I don’t having old stray wiring and box will cause you too need to keep entering a password, though. That sounds like some other problem.
Thanks, but I haven’t made my point clear. It’s not about the cost and liability of the internal wiring and new box. My point was that if the original BT wall socket and the external copper wiring system outside the house are good enough to now accept my router being plugged into it, then how come BT are saying that that very same wiring system was antiquated, had deteriorated, and needed replacing?
In other words, my router is plugged into and using a system that had previously been condemned.
They can scavenge the old copper lines. It’s harder to resell fiber optic I think.
I once wrote an article – backed by actual evidence – that the copper in BT’s cables was worth more than the company.
Before or after the cost of scavenging it?
BT separated out Openreach because OfCom and Labour governments have so discriminated against BT and in favour of its rivals that the whole company was worth less than Openreach. Spinning off Openreach, as Anglo-American has spun off Thungela and Valterra and plans to spin off De Beers would enhance shareholder value so the Board is required by law to consider/plan for it.
I’m beginning to think that that is the reason for this change, rather than any “improved service”, which I am certainly not getting at the moment.
There might be a lack of capacity somewhere upstream so that an Openreach server drops a low-priority customer connection every time a high-priority customer asks for connection while the server is fully occupied.
Sounds like their kit is treating as a new connection. Have they flushed the old one out completely?
That’s the whole point of my question. What changes have they made that now allow the use of a system that, until recently, we were told was well past its sell-by date and required complete replacement?
The logic baffles me. Why would an old wall socket, whether failing or not, lead to a situation where you need to re-enter the Wi-Fi password on an end-point to enable it to connect to a router?
Because the internet keeps dropping out, which it never did before the new system was installed.
My point relates specifically to the usage made of the original system. BT have been saying for some time now that their existing copper wire network for landlines is past its best and needs replacing.
Fine, so when I get my new router for the fibre optic replacement system, I’m told to unplug my landline phone from the BT socket, plug it in to the new router and then plug the new router back in to the very same BT socket. Nothing has been touched outside the group of houses, one of which we live in, nothing has been dug up and replaced and yet the “old” landline socket is now apparently OK to supply the new router etc.
The “old” landline socket is no longer being provided with juice from the exchange to power an analogue phone, and the analogue kit has probably been removed rom the exchange. It’s all IP telephony now, so you plug your phone into the router.
Does any of your other kit constantly require password entry? And for what? The WiFi itself, or to get past BT’s captive portal? Get your own router and ditch the BT router. Far better.
I’ve an EE router supplied by that company on the changeover, and which is now plugged into the existing telephone socket.
I know sweet FA about electrickery but unless all the old copper has been stripped out from the external system ie. on the outside of my house, then surely that must still being used to transmit to my router, irrespective of where it’s sourced? And that’s my point, that it was the copper that was supposedly the problem, but it still appears to be used.
Ah!
EE is a mobile phone company: it does not use landlines. My EE router is *supposed* to provide back up if there is an outage on the fibre/copper cable network. You could try ‘phoning BT and asking to speak to someone who knows what they are talking about.
They needed to supply the EE router so you can plug your ‘landline’ phone into it. The EE router uses VDSL over the copper wires, just like your old router did. If you want to retain your landline service you can’t use your old Internet router as it doesn’t contain the magic software and hardware that the EE router does so you can plug your phone into it.
So the ‘old and decrepit’ description relates to the old voice switching exchanges rather than your local copper wires. Though if you are lucky Openreach might get around to installing fibre in your locality sometime, and then you really can lose the copper connection.
Why it keeps dropping out I have no idea. It sounds like you need a hammering on the counter moment at the nearest EE store to get them to sort it out.
So the ‘old and decrepit’ description relates to the old voice switching exchanges rather than your local copper wires.
It could also be the cable as well which is in most cases old and decrepit.
When we moved in here 16 years ago the BI ADSL speed was about 50kbps. After I’d sorted out the rats nest of internal wiring the previous occupant had installed I dot it up to about 250kbps.
I then got Openreach in as BT reckoned I should have been getting closer to 3mbps. The Openreach guy was ex Royal Signals and we got on well so he put a bit of extra effort in and it turned out one of the multicore cables had problems and he switched me on to a new and last pair and that increased the speed considerably.
This…. It’s all “analogue” and the guy who understands that shifting you onto a different bundle avoids some water/rodent/weird cable shit is worth his weight….
I had a problem with ADSL dropping out but it would come back after the phone rang. Eventually a switched-on engineer came out and he did a TDR test. That wasn’t too conclusive so he started tracing it back towards the exchange (an EO line). He found the fault and swapped the pairs. The fault was around where they put in high-pressure gas pipes decades ago so the phone cable probably got damaged then. When we got a VDSL cabinet they put in a short tie cable from our DP to the cabinet to give us good service. Still waiting for fibre from CityFibre and/or OpenReach.
It’s the analogue switchover. BT/EE (now essentially the same company) can’t be arsed to renew your connection wiring because it’s not worth their while. They’ve sent you a new router for you to plug your phone into: it handles the conversion from analogue phone to IP telephony. And that’s that.
Take a look at Starlink or similar. I’m going to when I leave London.
The internet dropping out has absolutely nothing to do with the WiFi connection dropping.
How are you using the *exact same phone socket*? With the RJ11 or RJ12 plug? Not the RJ45 plug for an ethernet cable?
You have a simple twisted pair line running from your wall to the router?
300Mbps is the demonstrated maximum over a single twisted pair wire over short distances. So if you have fiber or ethernet line running to the local area and then its split and distributed to multiple residences (you all share a connection, the advertised speeds are theoretical for a single user with no one else on at the same time) its possible.
SPE (single pair ethernet) is common in the automotive industry because the distances are short and there’s significant electrical interference to deal with so I could see it being repurposed for ‘last mile’ internet connections to residences.
But how old is you place that it a) still has a landline phone jack and b) hasn’t had ethernet run?
How about that fifthly point? One of the best ways to support development IS the promotion of international markets!
More AI graphics? At least we’ve lost the “hand drawn” framing.
On the AI thing. I’ve been wrestling with AI assisted translation. I’m down to back translating from the target language into English to check whether what I’ve input bears any resemblance to the output. And having to trust the back translation’s accurate. There’s so many instances, AI has totally changed the meaning of the inputs. It’s hard to fathom out why it’s used the words it has. They bear no resemblance to the input. I have to play around with the English to force it to produce an accurate translation.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone using AI LLM for their work output is a lazy cnut & a fraud. I wouldn’t trust it for anything. If you’re capable of doing what you’re using it for, fuckin do it yourself. Why risk your customers being given a load of bollox because you’re to lazy to do it properly? They’re supposed to be able to trust you.
I use Claude and ChatGPT to help with language learning and find they’re quite good at answering questions like: “What is the significance of X word or phrase in this sentence?”
I find the answers are quite well explained and better than any teacher would give.
As for people using them blindly for work, it’s a bit like the early days of calculators where people just didn’t even bother sense-checking the answers.
You can probably use it for that. Like I input forrin because my vocabulary isn’t sufficient for some stuff. But it’s. sufficient to parse the output to see if it roughly corresponds to the input. Mostly it does. But I wouldn’t use it for anything important.
Problem is, any language is pretty ambiguous. Depends on context. An AI doesn’t understand context. Especially a language like Spanish where they don’t use pronouns. You get the gender & number of the absent pronoun from the context
“Problem is, any language is pretty ambiguous. Depends on context. An AI doesn’t understand context.”
Yarp. Some years ago, I had to get a website translated into French, as it was being sold to Canada, and I worked with a professional translator and we spent a lot of time talking about where a phrase was being used in the website.
The simple one in French is the informal and formal translation of “you”. Vous is formal, Tu is informal. Or goodbye in German. “Auf Wiedersehen” or “tschüss”. Then there’s all the weird stuff about Bernese German in Switzerland, much like Mexican Spanish deviates a lot from Spanish.
Good example. Whether it’s tu or vous in French depends on the relationship, not the context. The response to tu is not necessarily tu. Not saying incorrectly tutoyer-ing someone is the crime it used to be…
Indeed context is everything and a lot of the time words cannot be taken in isolation. If I come across a word I’m not sure of I usually drop the whole sentence into a translator as I’ve been caught out a couple of times.
Incidentally, if you are looking up individual words Linguee is an excellent dictionary because it not only gives multiple options for the translation but also provides real-life sentences in which it has been used with translations. (I’ve attached a recent example)
It’s not really a dictionary I need. It’s the grammar I have trouble with. I’ve never learned languages formally. Apart from the joke that was school French. My languages are street talk. Spanish is mostly S. American barrio. French is Paris & Marseilles street talk with an overlay of Lille ch’ti. I’m similar but a lot more restricted in Polish, Yiddish, Russian, German… The current one I’m acquiring is Salvador Bahia favela Portuguese with bits of Rio de J in it.
Trying to learn a language properly would bore me to tears. It’s not the way I think. My memory looks like a very complicated incomplete jigsaw puzzle with multiple connections between the pieces. The connections is how I remember things. Languages are too arbitrary to keep me interested.
As for paying for some service, I have lots of people would welcome being paid anything to do translation. And even S.America’s poorest write far better Spanish than the Spanish.
This is the thing. I use ChatGPT to help me solve bugs. I would otherwise be Googling for all the reasons why error code 452 appeared. But when I see the suggestions, I know if they’re reasonable or not. I can also do a dev test before applying it. Sometimes it’s just that I forgot what 452 means and it reminds me.
I was styling up a website last night and decided to use Tailwind, which is a bit new to me, and it didn’t work. and Gemini got me through it after a few attempts. Turned out I’d done the package loader for Tailwind and PostCSS, and one was v3 the other was v4. Not sure how I did that, but it basically explained that both versions must be the same. Which is a not uncommon thing, so made sense to give it a go. Downgraded PostCSS to v3 and it worked.
A lot of the code for the website was built with Google AI Studio. But, I know when it’s wrong. It does a lot of the typing, looking up API calls for me. But now that it’s pretty much built, I’m tweaking it manually. Some of what it did is really impressive. Like I needed a toggle for USA or UK, and if that is done, the calculation of cost for a journey is slightly different as fuel is priced in dollars per gallon there. Google AI Studio changed the calculation for the USA automatically. it also tells you when it’s doing a thing, so you know. And you have to review it all.
I find your answer fascinating. Why don’t you just do the work you’ve been paid for?
Whys should he? His customer is buying output. Who cares how it was created, so long as it’s to spec. and works properly?
Actually I don’t have a customer for this. It’s a Western Bloke original idea. Bit of learning, bit of marketing, might make some affiliate money.
I built a thing to tell you about a bottle of wine by scanning a label, but can’t figure out how to monetize it.
Vivino does that, but they try to seel you wine. Why not licence the code as a plug-in to the Waitrose app, or M&S, or one of the wine merchants? Tiny royalty every time the scan turns into a sale?
What? He *is* doing the work he’s being paid for – just not the way that you would have done it.
Well, for one thing, this is my project. But secondly, that’s like asking a carpenter why he uses electric tools. Without Gemini, I can figure this out, but it takes more time. I had this turned around in about 90 minutes. As a technology I’m not that familiar with, I think it would have taken as much as a day to get it fixed, probably had to get other mates to take a look.
It depends what your relationship with your customers is. Ethics. (Not the county) In business I made no secret the “me” they were dealing with was a firm employing a considerable number of presumably competent people who used some pretty expensive kit produced good results, mostly better than doing it by hand. But with a CNC machine, it moulds & cuts to the dimensions you’ve entered. You don’t have to wonder if it’s machining something else because that’s statistically more probable. Ditto the blokes, mostly!
I just don’t regard AI LLM as a reliable tool. And I don’t employ unreliable tools. Because I’m the “me’ my clients had confidence in.
Calling every AI user a fraud sounds great until you look at the reality of modern engineering and sales. I handle multi-million-pound bids single-handedly, doing the work of five people on deadlines that should take a quarter of a year-automation sector so none of this is new.
Using LLMs and agentic AI to survive an absurd workload isn’t laziness, it’s absolutely necessary. Plus LLM output requires deep subject-matter expertise to review and correct what it generates. It’s usually wise to understand how a tool works before offering an opinion on the people who use it.
You’re not paying all the costs of that. All this AI is burning cash, hyping it for IPO. After that, everyone is going to find out the real price.
Not saying it still won’t add up for you, but a lot of people are hitting LLMs hard because they’re subsidised.
Sorry but you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re conflating personal usage with corporate. I’m not paying for anything, the company I work for does. Our systems are predominantly built on the Microsoft tech stack and set up in Azure.. last time I checked MS was already listed. I also know full well the cost of compute, it’s my job to know.
Then you’re quoting for something you’re incapable of doing. As far as I’m concerned that’s blatant fraud.
Is it blatant fraud for a woodsman to use an axe instead of uprooting trees by hand?
Personally I hate AI which claims I am two people but it clearly has its uses for someone who is not blind to its faults.
What a stupid comment. I am graded on what I achieve. It doesn’t matter how it gets done. Should we all be providing work done in ink on vellum? Pressed into clay?
AI is a tool that makes it easier and quicker to achieve things.
Of course I’m quoting for what I personally cannot do. What absolute drivel you are spouting. I work for a multi-million pound engineering company and I quote multi-million pound national infrastructure projects that are delivered by teams of engineers.
It depends on what people think they’re paying for. If someone wanted me to make shelves & put them up I’d make shelves & put them up. I wouldn’t go & buy & re-label IKEA.
Eventually, your customers are going to realise they can use AI directly & cut you out the loop.
Trouble is, so many of these so called “professions” really do only consist of little more than following some simple rules. Any idiot could learn them & does.
It’s one thing about the “trades” as opposed to “professions” They do take actual skills that are difficult to acquire.
Professions DO take actual skills that are difficult to acquire. You are spouting the sort of envy-driven drivel that i expect from Neil Kinnock. It takes a lot longer to qualify as an Actuary than as a pattern-maker (the most highly skilled manual work)
No. They won’t. You are demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how actual engineering, procurement and industry operate.
I work in automation. Saying a customer will “just use AI directly and cut out the consultant/engineer” is as absurd as saying factory owners will “just do their own automation.” If they could, they’d already be integrating the complex technologies we install, program and support longterm on their sites every day. They don’t, because they lack the specialised expertise, time, and risk appetite.
Delivering an engineering project isn’t just “wiring and programming stuff”, it’s a huge documentation and compliance effort.
Taking a real-world scenario in my line of work: you are bidding for a 50-site cybersecurity and automation upgrade across Critical National Infrastructure under an NEC4 contract. To win and deliver that, you need to, in this instance:
Produce a cost-resourced MSP programme showing the entire project lifecycle (Proof of Concept to site commissioning) by a March 2029 deadline.
Draft a Project Execution Plan, compliance matrices, example test procedures, risk registers, RACI matrices and a Bill of Materials.
Answer 500 bespoke tender questions (100–500 words each), estimate engineering hours, sort NDAs, negotiate with site contractors, align supply chains and pass corporate governance.
According to you, these “so-called professions” are just following simple rules that “any idiot can learn.” Really? If it’s that trivial, off you go. Put your brain in gear and pull that entire bid together. You’ve got 4 weeks and you will get zero support from any of your colleagues because they are all as stacked out as you are!
Here is what you miss: there is a massive national shortage of engineers. My company is growing rapidly, but we hit a brick wall without enough skilled hands. We aren’t using AI to replace ourselves; we use AI to strip away the repetitive documentation grind so our engineers can actually engineer.
It lets us do significantly more with less, drastically boosting productivity, which, last time I checked is something the UK economy desperately needs.
As for your claim that professions are just “following rules”: knowing the rules isn’t the skill. Knowing how, when, and why to apply them safely under real-world constraints is.
Take BS 7671 (Wiring Regs) or BS EN 61508 / BS EN 61511 (Functional Safety for Safety Instrumented Systems in industrial environments).
Reading a standard isn’t engineering. Anyone can look up a PFDavg table in BS EN 61511. But an idiot won’t understand how common-cause failures, proof-test coverage or spurious trip rates affect a live plant. If you just copy-paste rules without understanding system architecture, your “compliant” safety system either fails to trip when there’s a real emergency or shuts the whole CNI facility down every Tuesday by mistake. And while for me, in sales I only have to have an overall appreciation of a whole raft of standards, technologies, programme delivery etc (so call me an idiot then, I don’t mind), our functional safety engineers do have have to have expert-level understanding in what they are delivering and our customers pay handsomely for that –
Customers don’t pay us to “re-label IKEA.” They pay us for accountability, safety, precision, and the hard-earned ability to turn complex tech into working infrastructure
Using modern tools like AI to handle heavy paperwork isn’t “cheating” or “scamming” PMSL, it’s smart working. Customers pay us for the end-to-end delivery, safety, precision, and ultimate accountability of complex infrastructure. AI is just a tool in the toolbox, and if you think leveraging modern automation tools to deliver better engineering faster is a trick, you’re going to get left behind very quickly.
For a start you really do not understand how people think. Your perception of the world is built up by the discovery of simple rules. Starts sometime after you’re born & proceeds throughout your life. More complicated rules are simple rules built on top of each other.
Here’s a rule string.
Touch an object: Hot/Cold?
If hot Ouch! Don’t touch again.
Objects on the cooker Hot/Cold?
Hot Ouch! Don’t touch again.
So we have a rule. Objects on the cooker hot. Don’t touch.
Next rule:
Objects on the floor. Hot/Cold?
Cold, no ouch.
So a rule. Objects on the floor cold. Can touch.
Next rule.
Objects on the table Hot/Cold?
Tricky one this. Experiment reveals objects on the table an be either hot or cold. ouch/not ouch.
So a rule
Objects on the table. Treat with caution. Check hot/cold first.
And if you can actually think about it everything you do is built up from very simple Y/N choices. Whole strings of them. You can flow chart them.
With the “professions”, because the choices are “intellectual” the choices tend to be clear binaries
So the flow chart looks like this
1 Y/N?
If yes go to 2
If no go to 3
2 Y/N?
If yes go to 4
If no go to 5
3 Y/N
If yes go to 6
If no go to 7
And on & on & on…
So to learn the “professions” it’s just a case of memorising rule. upon rules, upon rules… Depends on how good your memory is & probably how low your boredom threshold is. They’re not intrinsically difficult.
Dealing with the real, non – “intellectual” world can be a lot harder. Because the Y/N choice are far less clearly defined. How hot is hot? How cold is cold? Does this thing here fit in that gap there?
Here’s a puzzle for you. Does this sofa go up that staircase with a 180deg return in it? It’s a problem of meshing two, three dimensional objects through a large number of irregular three dimensional arcs centered on irregular arcs without them intersecting. How many supposedly “ïntelligent” professional people can’t manage to park a car despite it only being four, two dimensional arcs & they’ve had 30 years to practice?. Yet a removal guy, who nobody is going to regard as a member of the “professions” & will be thought as their intellectual inferior will be able to tell you “It won’t go up there mate. Either buy a different sofa or a different house”. Without measuring the sofa or the staircase. Or have it up there in 5 minutes, done & dusted.
(Now try & write a flow chart for what was going on in the removal guy’s head.)
Of course you could get a mathematician to work it out for you. if you’ve a day or two to wait for the answer.But of course the mathematician’s “intelligent” isn’t he?
Ok. It’s Sunday evening and this Grand Prix is a bit dull so far so I’ll bite.
I really, really appreciate you taking the time to write, what? 400–500 words explaining how a decision tree works to a person who works in automation PMSL.
It’s truly revolutionary stuff, right up there with the discovery of gravity or the general theory of relativity.
The irony here is so thick you could slice it!
You’ve painstakingly laid out a nursery-school flowchart about hot cookers (wow), only to completely dismantle your own argument with the sofa example. Are you related to Spud?
As I see it, your removal chap isn’t following a binary Y/N flowchart at all. He’s using spatial intuition, physical context and years of experience to solve a dynamic 3D geometry problem in his head with incomplete data.
That is literally what engineering is, you absolute plank!
If engineering was just “memorising Y/N rules,” we wouldn’t need engineers – we’d just hire anyone who can read a flowchart and hand them the keys to Sellafield.
A rigid flowchart falls apart in the real world because industrial plants, physics and CNI don’t operate on a tidy binary switch. That is PRECISELY why using AI isn’t “cheating” or “replacing the engineer.” AI handles the massive, tedious documentation grind in minutes so the actual engineer can focus on the non-binary physical reality that a flowchart can’t solve.
How hot is hot, exactly, when a temperature sensor degrades by 2% over three years?
What happens to a safety-instrumented system when a VSD dumps a pile of second-order harmonic noise onto a line?
None of it is a memory test. It’s managing physical chaos, edge cases and human life under real-world constraints – which is the exact same non-binary, intuitive problem-solving your removal hero is doing, except with electricity and explosive atmospheres instead of a three-seater leather settee. There’s just a little bit more at stake.
You’ve absolutely confused reading a dictionary with writing literature. Rules give you the alphabet and that’s it. Engineering is knowing how to build the system so it doesn’t blow up when reality completely ignores your precious flowchart – because it does, almost every time.
So please, keep explaining “hot vs cold” to someone who puts together the initial system architectures for automated infrastructure (onshore and offshore oil and gas, petrochemical, energy, nuclear) for a living. It’s really quite entertaining.
Ok. It’s Sunday evening and this Grand Prix is a bit dull so far so I’ll bite.
I really, really appreciate you taking the time to write, what? 400–500 words explaining how a decision tree works to a person who works in automation PMSL.
It’s truly revolutionary stuff, right up there with the discovery of gravity or the general theory of relativity.
The irony here is so thick you could slice it! You’re trying to be clever while demonstrating that you are not.
You’ve painstakingly laid out a nursery-school flowchart about hot cookers (wow), only to completely dismantle your own argument with the sofa example. Are you related to Spud?
As I see it, your removal chap isn’t following a binary Y/N flowchart at all. He’s using spatial intuition, physical context and years of experience to solve a dynamic 3D geometry problem in his head with incomplete data.
That is literally what engineering is, you absolute plank!
If engineering was just “memorising Y/N rules,” we wouldn’t need engineers – we’d just hire anyone who can read a flowchart and hand them the keys to Sellafield.
A rigid flowchart falls apart in the real world because industrial plants, physics and CNI don’t operate on a tidy binary switch. That is PRECISELY why using AI isn’t “cheating” or “replacing the engineer.” AI handles the massive, tedious documentation grind in minutes so the actual engineer can focus on the non-binary physical reality that a flowchart can’t solve.
How hot is hot, exactly, when a temperature sensor degrades by 2% over three years?
What happens to a safety-instrumented system when a VSD dumps a pile of second-order harmonic noise onto a line?
None of it is a memory test. It’s managing physical chaos, edge cases and human life under real-world constraints – which is the exact same non-binary, intuitive problem-solving your removal hero is doing, except with electricity and explosive atmospheres instead of a three-seater leather settee. There’s just a little bit more at stake.
You’ve absolutely confused reading a dictionary with writing literature. Rules give you the alphabet and that’s it. Engineering is knowing how to build the system so it doesn’t blow up when reality completely ignores your precious flowchart – because it does, almost every time.
So please, keep explaining “hot vs cold” to someone who puts together the initial system architectures for automated critical national infrastructure (onshore and offshore oil and gas, petrochemical, energy, nuclear) for a living. It’s really quite entertaining, more entertaining than this race anyway.
There seems to unwritten rule in life. People will never agree on an explanation that doesn’t prove they’re clever. I have never claimed I’m clever. But I do have an open mind.
There was an old Punch cartoon in a Jeeves and Wooster setting with four house guests choosing partners for mixed tennis doubles..
HG1: I’m not much good.
HG2: Haven’t played for years.
HG3: Don’t expect too much from me.
Bright Young Thing: I’m pretty hot. Shall we start again?
I do not need to prove that I am clever – I don’t care whether or not anyone thinks I am clever, so your self-congratulatory comment falls flat on its face.
Is your mind so open that it can tolerate the idea that the reason clever people do “intellectual”/”professional” jobs is that they add more value by doing so than they would as manual labourers – in fact they have to add *a lot more* value per day to justify spending extra years in education and having a shorter working life. The guys who left school at 15 had a far better time for the next half-dozen/dozen years that those who stayed on and took dozens of exams with a few shillings (pounds these days, but it used to be shillings) of pocket money.
Nobody would choose to do that unless there were rewards at the end of it and the only plausible reason for those rewards is that the job we do is worth more to our employer/society/the country than a bricklayer or a carpenter or a removal man.
Open-minded” people don’t start debates by dismissing entire professions as “idiots following simple rules,” only to play the humble victim when someone in the industry explains why they’re wrong.
It wasn’t about “proving I’m clever” , I’ve already told you I’m an “idiot” in sales, it was about correcting a massive misconception from someone talking confidently about a field they clearly know nothing about. Glad “we” could clear up how engineering actually works!
Aren’t you being a little harsh? Never go full allahu akbar.
😉 Not really. If you’re going to start a fight with a chap you don’t stop hitting him until you’re damn sure he’s not getting up. Anything less is suicidal.
You do not know what you are talking about. You are demonstrating your ignorance by making statements that are blatantly false. My professional work required thought and judgement – it could not be done by simply following a set of rules. On occasion I had to create a technique to deal with a situation that nobody had previously encountered so there were no rules to follow.
It helped that I was good at maths but maths on its own would rarely have been enough.
So you created your own set of rules. That’s the scientific approach to problem-solving.
Sorry John but I really don’t believe in comparative “intelligence”. The metric always seems to define the setters as near the top of the scale. I’ve never seen any evidence that anyone can’t learn anything, given the opportunity & the effort. Is mathematics difficult? It never seemed so at school. Never paid much attention to it because seemed so trivial & pointless. It was was a route to spending the rest of my life working for somebody else. The odd bits I’ve needed later seemed pretty easy. Took a few minutes to pick up. It has that property that the more you look it, the more obvious it becomes.It’s avoiding the temptation to get lost in it. Like I’ve just wasted an hour or two trying to visualise 4-space geometry.
I like synthesis. Taking aspects of widely different fields, putting them together & see what happens. Had a lot of fun & made some money doing that.
As far as I am concerned maths is the easy option but I have known people who struggled with simple arithmetic. That is just as irrelevant as the whole of your reply.
I did NOT mention, let alone talk about, comparative intelligence. I pointed out that the logical explanation for (in the pre-Blair era) guys staying at school after 15 and putting up with relative poverty and (in some cases) spending evenings studying after coming home was that the professional skills they gained were worth so much more than your removal man’s that they got paid enough as professionals to persuade them to dedicate an extra three or six or twelve or more years of their life to education. When I was studying for ‘A’ levels the boy next door became a steel erector – I was approaching 40 by the time my accumulated pay (adjusted for inflation and accruing interest at building society deposit rates) caught up with his – and he had the money to enjoy when he was young enough to enjoy it..
I spent years doing what you call synthesis, never bothered to give it a name because it was just a part of my job.
I can imagine 4-space geometry as it is a relatively trivial example of a multi-dimensional vector space but I cannot *visualise* it because visualising involves interpreting a two-dimensional vision of a three-dimensional space. If you just relax and forget about visualisation it shouldn’t be too difficult.
You’re prey to the Labour Theory of Value here. Your customer is not paying you to make shelves and put them up. They’re paying for nice shelves on their wall they can use. They don’t care about your labour, unless you’re also offering an unusual style which is hard to duplicate, or a bit of extracurricular that’s personal to you.
Exactly. They’re paying for a solution.
No, not exactly Norm. It’s when give you a task there’s a presumption that you (personally or as a business) are performing it. Since there seem to be a lot of doubts, often heard here, about the reliability of AI, it’s whether the commissioner is aware that you’re using it. It’s an ethical problem. If the people who are wanting the work done are aware that AI is being used, fair do’s. It’s if their not. It’s not what they think they’re paying for. It’s very much not the Labour Theory of value. It’s the value of the end product because, ultimately, the value of anything is the confidence you have in it That’s why I used the shelves analogy. My customer might have confidence in what I produce on the basis of previous examples. If I substitute IKEA, they may be similar shelves but it’s not what he’s paid for.
I don’t know. Does Phil or whoever his working for tell the end user their using AI? That he never mentions. WB says he’s working for himself. So it’s his problem.; Has he got confidence in it.
LOL. You’ve shifted from “any idiot can do your job” to “it’s an ethical crime not to tell clients you use modern software.”
Clients pay for results not for manual keyboard strokes. Nobody asks an accountant if they used Excel or a calculator and no procurement team cares if AI helped draft a PEP, as long as the company delivering the project takes full legal accountability for the delivery.
AI is a tool, period. The fact that you think using a productivity tool is “substituting IKEA” just shows you still don’t understand what clients are actually paying for.
Lawyers and barristers are another example. Nobody asks if that legal brief your defence lawyer has just submitted to the court in your defence was written by AI or whether she actually looked up all the laws and cases it cites personally and checked they existed and were relevant, do they?
They’re not using AI to actually replace an expensive lawyer, just to speed up the boring repetitive supporting documentation.
Visualising 4-space geometry is easy – just drop two of the dimensions and plot that. It’s the same as visualising 3-space geometry by dropping one dimension. It’s rather harder to look at a 2D projection of 4-space and interpret it as a 4D object, but it can be done. Think about photos of traffic showing motion blur.
Exactly. But the lawyer should be wise enough to check and edit any output before submitting, and that requires the specialist domain knowledge s/he has spent years acquiring.
It’s no different to employing a subcontractor. All subcontractor documentation output goes through a thorough internal review before submittal to the client review process.
But I guess using subcon is also “fraud” or “cheating” somehow too…
“But I guess using subcon is also “fraud” or “cheating” somehow too…”
It is from where I’m standing. If I employ a builder to do a job, its because I value his skill at what he does. Some random off the street who he gets in as a subbie, not so much. If he told me at the start ‘I won’t be doing the job myself, I’ll be getting someone else in’ then he wouldn’t get the work, and if he didn’t tell me he’s just lost a customer.
There’s also the issue that the sub-contractor has no direct commercial relationship to me, the client. I’m not making the decision to hire and pay him, the contractor is. So the subbie only has to keep the contractor sweet. If that means some kickbacks etc, so be it. Me as final customer who will actually be paying for it all gets screwed. Half arsed jobs, lazy workers, damage to property etc etc. I get it all the time on my farm – I have a contractor to do work for me, and sometimes he’s too busy so gets in sub-contractors. They always make a mess and ignore the rules I set, because they know there’s little I can do about it, I’m not the one paying their bills.
Its like the relationship between a patient and their NHS GP – the GP is a subbie for the State. And guess who the GP answers to? Hint: its not the patient, even though they are the ultimately paying for the whole shebang.
Comparing a multi-million-pound Critical National Infrastructure delivery to hiring a local builder is genuinely off-the-scale daft.
You seem to think a Principal Contractor using a specialised supply chain is the same as a cowboy builder bringing a random bloke off the street to lay some bricks. So, by that logic, I assume you think an outfit like Balfour Beatty is just a massive fraud operation? Because, breaking news: that is how the overwhelming majority of major infrastructure projects get built.
In the real world of industrial engineering, turnkey delivery relies on specialised supply chains.
According to your logic: Should an automation contractor design, manufacture and assemble every single silicon chip, relay and terminal block in-house?
Should we employ our own full-time groundworks and civils teams to sit around doing nothing for three years between site builds?
Is it “fraud” if we don’t own the crane company, manufacture the cable or build the welfare cabins on site ourselves?
Of course clients don’t have a direct contract with subcontractors – that is the entire point of hiring a Principal Contractor!
When a client awards an NEC3/4 contract to us, or whatever other form of contract whether it’s IChemE or something bespoke, they aren’t paying us to personally turn every screwdriver. They are paying us to project manage, integrate, validate and assume 100% legal, financial and operational liability for the entire delivery.
If a subcontractor messes up on a CNI site, the client doesn’t care who pulled the cable – they hold us contractually and financially accountable under millions of pounds of Delay Damages, Professional Indemnity and Performance Bonds.
If you as a customer don’t want a Principal Contractor managing a supply chain of subcontractors, you’re welcome to act as your own Principal Designer and Principal Contractor. You can go out and directly manage every civil gang, software house, specialist panel builder and cable puller yourself. Good luck taking on that web of individual contracts and massive legal liability when the plant trips out or fails a regulatory audit.
Turnkey delivery means there’s a single-point of accountability, not a company that mines its own copper and writes its own operating systems.
“Because, breaking news: that is how the overwhelming majority of major infrastructure projects get built.”
And in other news HS2 is set to cost £100bn for a train set that is half as long as the original one quoted for.
I’m not surprised you want to defend the current way of doing things, its a gravy train for those employed in it; the poor old client (often the tax payer), not so much……
Sorry, no, not sorry. That’s complete and utter boxllox.
This is peak armchair economics. If you genuinely think HS2 ran over budget because Tier 1 contractors used specialist subcontractors, you really have no idea how major projects operate. Zero. Nilch. Nada!
HS2 blew out because of under budgeting, endless scope changes, political meddling, shifting specifications, ground condition surprises and years of planning delays – not because a contractor brought in a specialist team or a civils firm brought in a crane operator.
If you actually understood NEC contracts, you’d know that when costs rise due to scope changes, it’s because the CLIENT formally issued a change to the Scope/Works Information, triggering a Compensation Event. The Principal Contractor doesn’t just arbitrarily jack up prices or send in subbies to milk a “gravy train”, it’s not allowed! Every penny is audited against strict contractual target costs or fixed prices. So explain that one!
And here’s the bit you miss: fixed-price contracts are priced against the information available AT THE TIME, which always includes unknowns, and any decent proposal is belts and braces in defining exactly what is and isn’t included – and lowest price nearly always wins the tender regardless. When prices rise afterwards, that’s not the supply chain “milking” anything – it’s a failure at client level to properly define scope and complete FEED to a sufficient level before going out to tender and then procurement thinking they’re clever going with the lowest tendered price regardless. It is not the job of a Principal Contractor or its supply chain to absorb the cost of a client not knowing what it actually wants. If the scope wasn’t nailed down, that risk sits with whoever failed to nail it down.
In fact, your fantasy alternative – where a client directly manages hundreds of individual trades, equipment manufacturers and specialist suppliers without a Principal Contractor to integrate them and hold the risk – is the exact recipe for turning every regional project into an instant, catastrophic money pit.
Clients pay a PC precisely so that we absorb the financial risk, performance bonds and delay damages when things go wrong, rather than the client carrying that open-ended risk on their own balance sheet.
You seem to think a PC managing a supply chain is the same as a cowboy builder bringing a random bloke off the street to lay some bricks on a farm or something. Try explaining to an energy operator or nuclear site that they shouldn’t hire a PC because you reckon supply chains are a “gravy train”. It’s absolutely laughable tbh.
It’s fascinating watching people try to lecture about multi-million to billion-pound infrastructure projects when their entire baseline experience appears to be watching a local builder lay a patio.
And on that I’m out because every post is getting more and more ludicrous. Yes, I know you won’t realise you’ve just been ripped a new hole.
“In fact, your fantasy alternative – where a client directly manages hundreds of individual trades, equipment manufacturers and specialist suppliers without a Principal Contractor to integrate them and hold the risk – is the exact recipe for turning every regional project into an instant, catastrophic money pit.”
Every major construction project in the UK is already a catastrophic money pit, or haven’t you noticed?
I use DeepL professionally, but you absolutely MUST check everything it translates. It saves enough time to be worth the USD 34 a month it costs tho.
I like the way DeepL lets you mess around with alternatives. When I writing something for my fortnightly German lesson I could spend quite a bit of time going backwards and forwards between English and German to make sure I got the right sense. I treated it as part of the learning process.
He’s trying to prop up the ‘AI Bubble (TM)’ that he states bi-weekly will bring about the end times.
See also: “reparations”. Print up the desired amount of local currency, fly it out in cargo planes, dump the pallets on the tarmac, enjoy the spectacle and consequences. Cost: a million or so. Value: priceless.
Come now Norman. You’d be wanting to give the “reparations” to the people of the country, not its government. Just dump the stuff out a altitude so it’s delivered directly into their hands. Why even inform the government? .
I just want cretins like Murphy to see exactly what happens when you bomb a country with its own money. Either inflation goes stratospheric or the (inevitably lefty) governmental class steals it all. Or, more likely, both.
From point 1 it looks like he’s finally sen a bit of sense and become a Leaver.
Lefties might still think of themselves as pro-EU, but they’re using the powers of being outside to do things like renationalising the railways as a single entity. Not possible if the rail competition directive applies (91/440/EEC). Could the government go throwing money into British Steel, or would they have to get approval from Brussels?
We’re going to see lots of this over time. Politicians doing things because it wins votes, or makes sense, and we’ll gradually become less aligned with the EU, and anyone wanting to go back in will be confronted with “but we’d have to privatise the railways” or other things.
See also: removing VAT from stuff. EU no-no.
” Countries should be free to choose policies which suit their own people.”
An end to third-world immigration it is then!
Whilst his focus is the UK there are 194 other sovereign states in the world where this could be applied. None of them buy into his ideas either. Discuss.
Everything circles back to Spud bonds, it always does. Zee Final Solution.
‘Finance should serve society, not control it’
Well, it would if ‘society’ just borrowed what it needed to do essential works that couldn’t be funded otherwise and then paid it back promptly.
But ‘society’ insists on running up hundreds of billions in debt and then whining about the interest.
As the late Lord Bauer (the anti- Murphy in that he was right about everything whereas Murphy is right about nothing) said – apparently aid is like Champagne, when you succeed you deserve ie, when you fail you require it as consolation.
I have to say if a GCSE student produced this I’d point out it’s over simplistic, for a septuagenarian who claims to be an expert to produce it is genuinely pitiful. Has he considered volunteering in his local charity shop?
The local charity shop would be anathema to him. All must be run by the state, and the state must install him as the Fat Controller.
So I think he’d last about 10 minutes, until he got into a screaming match with everyone in the shop and got banned.
He has an intern (his sons mate probably ) and I guess he’s the one knocking out this crap. Perhaps the potato died of the kidney stone and the kids are left using AI to squeeze out what revenue they can, occasionally propping up his corpse in front of a camera, a bit like weekend at Bernie’s. Who would know the difference?
I thought the nurses at my vet’s did that. His death was announced last year, but before that no-one had seen him since lockdown. His professional qualification was presumably useful for signing off on medicines.
Last I heard his, can I say right-hand man or is it left-hand in this instance, was his otherwise unemployable son. Some sort of disability benefit claimant.
Why are we supposed to respect the government? It has so far shown itself to be the enemy.
Because Murphy fancies the role of “Il Duce”
Ah, so he’s now in favour of tax havens?
Southern Ireland now has a higher GDP/head than the UK thanks to its role as an EU-approved tax haven – so of course he is in favour.
Well, he has just ended the need for the EU then. And ‘tax harmonization’ he wants so badly. His hated tax havens choose policies that suit their own people, not The Tater.
So he’s just ended globalism right there.
“Investment should create value within the country” – so there should be no railroads in America (North or South) – they would not exist without the investments by the Scots? So India and later Europe should have been ruled by the bloodthirsty Jacobins? Victorian shipping lines that helped millions out of malnutrition and poverty are anathematised. The diaspora should have been forbidden to invest in Israel and bring thousands of hectares back to fertility from semi-desert. We should have no electric cables, no modern electronics, no aluminium cookware because almost all mines are financed by people who want to buy the output not by the miners themselves (yes, I know there are illegal mines in various places and I also know they have terrible records of death and injury and produce a trivial amount).
American railroads are not a good example as they were often funded by zealous governors of the same kind that today back sports stadia, cougar bridges, renewables projects, data centers, etc. Vote for me, see how much progress I’ve done. Railroaders got paid by the mile, and you got oddities like railroads between two towns not a hundred miles apart, across level prairie, that had five times that distance in track laid.
In my happy country the illegal miners, known as Zama Zamas, work only abandoned gold mines. If you’re interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilfontein_mine_deaths
DRC has a wider variety of illegal mines