The latest is that you should save in bonds in order to back quantum computing.
I dunno, really. I find it difficult to think of something so much more suited to risk capital…..
The latest is that you should save in bonds in order to back quantum computing.
I dunno, really. I find it difficult to think of something so much more suited to risk capital…..
Bonds and Quantum Computing – a match made in heaven. He doesn’t understand either.
He does know that with bonds you have to give the money back at the end?
No, it’s quantum. They send your returns in a box…
To trust the British government with your money, you’d have to be thick as a planck.
Martin, I don’t know that he does know that. And to be fair what with rolling over debt, liquidation haircuts for creditors and the like, maybe he has a point. I think Spud just sees it as free money.
I’ll freely admit my ignorance on this stuff, but there are people here who know better. Do you expect a bond to be paid back at maturity? Does it ever happen?
In the meantime, fusion is apparently just around the corner. Bond issues will appear on your quantum computer shortly.
Most bonds are repaid at maturity: look at the Lloyds Banking Group plc RNS feed over the last few years and you will find plenty of examples.
I expect bonds to be repaid at maturity: some are rolled over into new debt instruments but the overwhelming majority are repaid. Private sector bonds yield more than gilt-edged or US Treasuries for two reasons, one is the risk of default and the second is liquidity risk (that if the holder wants to sell before the maturity date he/she/it might have difficulty finding a buyer at the price he/she/it wants. Most decent bonds yield 1-2% more than gilt-edged implying that the risk of default is about 1%.
Thanks john77
All bonds are repaid. “Rolling over” means issuing new bonds and repaying the maturing ones with the cash.
You might purchase the new ones, but you might not.
The only exceptions are ones where the issuer went bankrupt. Or the equivalent for a country.
E.g. Many of the bonds the Confederate States of America issued were not repaid. But the US had to amend the constitution to put that to rest.
Unfortunately we had a Lehman bond as part of our portfolio. Though it took years, we eventually got back about 60c on the dollar.
Some countries have defaulted without going bankrupt: Russia is the best-known example.
M seems unaware that non-recourse lending carries the risk that the project might not be profitable and the lender only gets repaid a fraction of his/her/its capital.
In a few cases the bondholders are not given the option of receiving cash and are handed new bonds in lieu. Look at the history of “Consols”.
So I stated that *I expect* bonds to be repaid at maturity. You really do not want a five-page article from me on the topic at this time of night.
You can do stripped Bonds and only sell the coupons so there is nothing to pay back at the end.
To be pendentic, all capital carries risk.
So if your investment pays off and breaks all ecommerce?
Quantum economics gave way to the economics of hope, so will he be inventing hope computing?
“What’s it doing now?” – said the Airbus pilot.
“It does that sometimes.”
The supposed need for increased UK defence spending – although on what no one seems to know
Candidly, noone knows eh?
Well, it would be nice if the Royal Navy could have new destroyers. But they’ve been cancelled in favour of fantasies and dreams about building drone ships.
Because it’s “cheaper” to develop and build a completely new, completely unproven, class of ships using bleeding edge technology, and they’ll be ready in the 2030’s would you believe?
Whaddyamean, “no”?
It would be nice if the British Army included more than a handful of self-propelled artillery guns, and more than the tiny bespoke number of Chally 3 tanks they’re upgrading.
It would be good if the British Army was big enough to fill Wembley stadium.
It would be good to build more domestic munitions capacity that can be rapidly scaled up in time of emergency, and some sort of reasonable stockpile, to ensure we don’t run out of missiles and shells in 3 weeks.
It would be great if the MoD and defence contractors partnered much more with British universities, to use the brains of all our cleverest cyber, electrical engineering, and aeronautics science postgrads as incubators for new ideas, designs and concepts for defence. Get those bright young people inventing cheap new drones, engines and missiles for the benefit of the Realm?
And we need to build some tactical nuclear warheads, which Blair got rid of in a fit of virtue signalling. Our current deterrent of only 16 missiles lacks credibility in most real world situations. Unlike Trident, we don’t need the Yanks for this. We know how to build warheads, and we know how to build everything from dumb gravity bombs to long range cruise missiles. Just slap them on an iron bomb, add a cheap a JDAM kit (which is just a pair of wings, a computer chip, and a GPS and/or laser sensor. Put them on F-35’s. Then you’ve got yourself a new military capability – stealthy tactical nukes! – which will make the Kremlin a lot more nervous about fucking with us, for the price of cheap, cheap, cheap.
But candidly, noone knows.
PS – this is how you get Skynet, btw.
AI is mostly bullshit, but one of the niche cases where it’s fried gold is (Brass Eye intro) war.
So many applications, from radar to signals intelligence to smart mines to revolutionising battlespace tactical awareness at the lowly lieutenant level.
And, obvs, computer vision is already able to pick targets with great discrimination, be they humans or vehicles.
Ok, so at some point soon the irresistible logical conclusion of the AI arms race is going to be fully automated warfare. Actual killbots, going house to house to root out human resistance. The advantages are too great to resist – what if the enemy does it first? It’s the One Ring of Sauron, mateys.
No, I don’t know a Sarah Connor.
For F?)(‘s sake Steve you aren’t supposed to give Burnham ideas! Albeit my guess is he is already thinking along those lines
Or, Anduril lookalikes. But clearly we don’t like growing defence startups here. We’re too “ethical” for that.
The whole point of Trident and its predecessor Polaris is that once in the air it can’t be distinguished from one launched from a US sub. So the enemy (whoever that might be, wink wink) can’t tell it only needs to retaliate against the UK rather than all of NATO.
The thing about air-launched (or dropped) tactical nukes was that the enemy would take out your Air Force on the ground possibly by special forces. And don’t expect the F-35B force to deploy to the field, Crabair don’t do that in any serious way.
Nuclear deterrence isn’t about delivery platforms. It’s about making the enemy afraid to mess with you.
There are a vanishingly small number of situations where any British prime minister (or submarine captain for that matter) would launch a Trident missile in anger.
And Putin knows this. Everybody knows.
Are we going to glass Buenos Aires if they somehow took the Falklands? Of course not.
Are we going to launch our Big Ones if Russia takes Talinn? C’mon buddy.
But a tactical nuke, in the order of 10kt yield, is not a weapon of MAD. It’s an Ace card, permanently (we should hope) up John Bull’s sleeve when dealing with Johnny Foreigner.
Gives us a very credible capability to simply evaporate a Russian or Chinese armour column – or seaborne invasion fleet – as soon as they crossed our red lines. Is Putin going to commit national suicide over that? No. Stop them cold, so it would.
The thing about air-launched (or dropped) tactical nukes was that the enemy would take out your Air Force on the ground possibly by special forces. And don’t expect the F-35B force to deploy to the field, Crabair don’t do that in any serious way.
That’s what will happen in WW3 anyway, all our air bases will be nuked. I’m talking about all the situations that are not WW3 – including escalate to deescalate.
The F-35 is a brilliant piece of kit, able to glide past the latest Russian and Chinese radar. Stealthy tactical nukes would be a massive force multiplier to our constrained defence budget. Gives the enemy lots more reason to think twice.
(BTW the RAF already has nuclear capable F-35’s. But they’d carry NATO bombs (American), so it’s not as effective as a deterrent compared with having our own sovereign nukes)
What actual difference would it make if Russia or China decided to invade us using actual soldiers in actual uniforms?
What more harm could they do than is already being done to us?
Perhaps I am just depressed, and the answers to questions such as these are more obvious to others.
It would be a moment of clarity, at least.
Such is my respect for the malevolent genius of Blair’s pursuit of international socialism that I wonder whether he did not envisage, as a natural consequence of his hollowing out of the nation, driving us to the point where we would ask questions such as: what’s the point of having a navy? who cares if China invades?
Well, I ask those questions. I might be in a minority.
Nah. Conspiracy theory, which falls to the simpler explanation that progressive transnationalists can’t comprehend second-order (or subsequent) effects.
For people who cannot comprehend second-order effects, they seem to get an awful lot right in terms of the pursuit of their own ambitions.
Which is why actually doing that is unlikely. Far better to destroy your enemy in a manner where they never have that moment of clarity.
Wise words, mate.
((c) DJ Smashy)
For England, James.
If you genuinely believe that life in the UK would be no worse under a Sino-Russian dictatorship, I think you are seriously out-of-touch with reality. Sea Kelp!
If you actually know Russians or Chinese, you’d find out – in practical terms – the difference isn’t that great. Their States are never as intrusive as we are led to believe. It’s blunted by incompetence & of course, widespread corruption. The problem is, Brits believe – against all the evidence – that they still live in a “free society”. So they get surprised when reality hits them.
Yes. Free country my fucking arse.
It’s a totalitarian socialist hellhole, with added authoritarianism and third-world enshittification.
These facts are to some extent masked by the awesome societal inheritance which we have squandered – the roads, drainage systems, houses and so on – plus the modern trinkets like touch-screen phones.
But facts they remain.
So Putin throws his opponents out of windows. Starmer has his banged up so they suicide themselves.
So the Chinese have social credit. We have a nudge unit.
A while back Timmy had a thing about how much easier it was to just do business in China.
But do business here? Unless you’re connected, it’s a mug’s game. The only people who don’t see that are out of the game – retirees, or pubsec/bennies recipients.
People believe what historians tell them which is normally the official version, and they also have this idea of all dictators being evil and hated because of fantasy movies.
Dictators depend on support. If too many people oppose then, they get overturned.
It’s what the west get wrong about the Middle East. Yeah, the regime in Iran tortures some people, but it’s not the bloke selling iPhones. It’s the people that want the Shah’s son back in power.
Hitler was an antisemite and wanted greater Germany but back in 1930 that wasn’t that unusual. The whole “we didn’t know what was going on” from Germans is bullshit. It was all in the 25 Points.
I think you are seriously out-of-touch with reality
It’s true, I went full tonto a while back when that prat Ben Wallace was chuckling about sending what he was pleased to call a ‘carrier group’ to the Black Sea to yank Putin’s nose.
But China is not net zeroing itself out of business. China is not invading itself with cut-throats, thieves and rapists. China’s economy is growing well (I accept it has serious faultlines, however). China is not ruled by perverts and degenerates who actively seek to harm China. China is ruled by serious men with a serious eye on serious geopolitics.
Russian is different from China, granted. But if the Russkies haven’t yet managed to occupy the whole of Ukraine, I wouldn’t be too worried about them.
I already live in China, albeit a special administrative region thereof. It’s fine. We do not have even a pretend democracy or freedom of speech but it’s safe, clean and you have the freedom to keep most of your hard-earned and walk home alone at night. It’s also not afflicted by hordes of paki rapists and sundry other violent primitives.
if China offered SAR status, to string up a few thousand nonce rapists and the same immigration laws as the PRC, I reckon many would be tempted.
The US Navy – or maybe the marines – has been accepting F-35Bs with no radar sets. This is a wunnerful opportunity for the Royal Navy to sell them some fully equipped F-35Bs, since they are no use to us anyway with our lame aircraft carrier capacity and non-existent aircraft carrier escort ships.
Run out of ammunition in three weeks, Steve?
Candidly, we’d run out of ammunition in three days.
Of some natures, in three hours. (Only the expensive and important weapons, though).
Because stockpiling munitions is boring, and unsexy, and costs money. So it gets discreetly slashed.
It’s so easy to just cut 80% of the intended stockpile that you worked out you’d need, pocket the savings to feed the Great God Skoolzanospitals, and declare that Just-In-Time logistics will fill the gaps when needed. (And anyway someone else will be in charge by then)
Until you get into a bit of a scrap, and discover that you can fire off weapons far, far faster than they can be produced… and when several folk are fighting, you’re at the back of the queue for the few manufacturers able to supply.
Back in the day we used to have factories that were (deliberately!) inefficient and underworked. Why were they set up that way? So they could go from working leisurely single shifts to produce a thousand rounds a week, to round-the-clock max-effort 10,000 rounds a week, almost without breaking step, when “peace” started turning into “war”.
But that was when we had some plans and intentions that, if we really couldn’t avoid a war, we’d try to win it.
And salvation is at hand:
But being forced to step away made me ask a different question.
Should this channel change?
Not because the issues have gone away. They haven’t.
Not because exposing failure no longer matters. It does.
But because perhaps the time has come to spend more of our energy asking a different set of questions.
What should replace neoliberalism?
How should we reform tax?
How should we reform money?
How should government work differently?
What would a politics of care actually look like?
How do we build an economy of hope instead of an economy of fear?
Those are the questions I increasingly want to explore.
The question is whether you want to explore them with me.
So this isn’t an announcement that I’ve already decided to change direction.
It’s an invitation for you to help decide whether we should.
Also Tim I don’t think you are doing the idea the full justice. It’s absolutely batshit crazy on every level. There’s various ‘types’ of bond that apparently Burnham’s chancellor should issue:
Defence bonds
NHS bonds
Care bonds
Housing bonds
Climate bonds
Children’s future bonds
Community bonds
Infrastructure bonds
Science and innovation bonds
Resilience bonds
Nature bonds
Cultural bonds
Skills bonds
Regional development bonds
Intergenerational bonds
He sadly missed out on my preferred:
The name’s Bonds, James Bonds
Or for the Westham fans on here:
Billy Bonds
But as usual the sting is in the tail:
That is not just an economically correct statement; it is, given the gross misuse of most savings at present, either as dormant funds in bank account, or for the purposes of financial speculation of no benefit (and potential harm) to society, a redirection of funds towards social purpose that any government should be promoting is, it would seem to me, to be a matter of political and social priority. The issue of government-backed bonds for this purpose does, in that case, make economic and social sense.
Basically he wants to steal people’s savings and cream off a portion for himself – something almost his entire corpus of activity is devoted to. As Gamecock points out he is a Communist…
The amusing thing is he must think anyone would be stupid enough to buy the bonds.
The ostensible point of issuing the named bonds would be using the money for the named purpose.
But it will all go into the general revenue. And be used on “migrant” invaders.
If he wants to borrow cheaply he should reintroduce Granny Bonds: currently they pay just CPI + an iota. And retail investors would probably mop them up.
Would they really? Investors aren’t stupid. The sort of volumes of debt he’s talking about are unsustainable. Ignore all that arithmetic bollox john77 comes out with. It’s backwards looking & markets are forward looking. Value’s imaginary, there is only price. And price requires a buyer. Who would?
Why would retail investors buy a Government bond thats offering say 3.5% (CPI currently 2.8% so round it up a bit), when you can buy a 10 year Gilt thats offering c. 4.75%? Or you could get 4.5% 1 year fixed rate bonds with any number of banks, with £120k guaranteed by the deposit guarantee scheme?
Granny may be a bit slow on the uptake, but she’s not completely doolally.
That depends on the tax treatment. If there’s a bond that pays 3.5% exempt from income tax, then that’s equivalent to 5.8% to someone paying 40% tax. Gilts are exempt from Capital Gains Tax but not Income tax to the headline interest rates are insuffcient to compare the potential alternatives.
Why on earth would you want to support quantum computing? There are vanishingly few problems where a quantum computer will outperform a much cheaper conventional one. The only broadly accepted use case is factoring large numbers to crack obsolete encryption.
As I implied earlier re ecommerce, getting your investment back could be a tad problematic if Quantum Computing works well enough. It could then easily crack the factoring of large numbers, rendering RSA redundant overnight. This would be a very big and costly deal for virtually all installed existing ecommerce.
Of course other systems and techniques uncrackable by conventional and Quantum computers could be developed, but that would take at minimum a lot of time and money to develop and rollout.
That work started 10 years ago, with the first replacements for the vulnerable RSA and elliptic curve crypto announced in August 2024. The lattice math they are based on is resistant to both conventional and crypto attack.
NIST’s 2024 guidance said RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography should be deprecated by 2030 and disallowed by 2035. The whole point is to make the vulnerable crypto obsolete before quantum computing is available to break it. That said old encrypted data will always be at risk.
Seen the new maths and PKI stuff, but just think people are underestimating the existing technical debt. 9 years is a long time in tech and all it takes is one massive quantum computing leap (LOL) and ecommerce is vulnerable. As someone who has done this before do organisations even know the scope of their vulnerabilities?
Not quite true, they’re also useful to theoretical physicists trying to simulate quantum interactions. But that’s still a pretty limited use case.
Let’s start with actually building an actual quantum computer, shall we?
Because, just like nuclear fusion….. they will be Commercially Available within 10 years…
On the current defence mania for drones, isn’t that rather fighting the last war (again)? Shouldn’t we be trying to develop anti-drone technology instead?
It seems to me that the first country to develop a universal ‘drone dome’ that can be fitted to armoured vehicles or ships will rather steal a leap on all those countries that have nothing but drones.
Yep. The Defence Plan seems tailored to fight the last war we know about, which we are losing. It’s not asking what would be the perfect weapons you’d like to have – for me Steve’s killbots doing house to house clearance, or something like the Mars Rover which you launch into enemy territory, is pre-programmed to unfurl and upright itself and then rover over and destroy drone command bunkers somehow.
There is a huge amount of anti drone technology being developed and tested plus the technology to counter it too. Don’t expect universal anti drone technology to ever be developed. It’s not something with a fixed endpoint.
The whole point of the current drone warfare strategy is its not technological. Its huge numbers of very low tech devices. From little more than a Mavic carrying a small charge of explosive, to a more accurate version of the V1 flying bomb. A country that can counter your anti-drone technology is probably not the country that is going into low tech drone warfare in the first place. A device that can clear (say) a square mile of mavics at the push of a button is going to largely neuter the drone created stalemate we see in Ukraine.
It seems to me that we are forgetting the lessons of the past – the machine gun created stalemate, but tanks created movement again. Instead of attempting to build more machine guns than the opposition we should be looking for the next tank, or its anti-drone equivalent.