pmyteh

This short clip of people running from one of Dibnah's chimney demolitions going wrong is quite instructive. None of the bystanders should have been allowed anywhere near!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DMCSSMoPELU

More problematic than the work at heights, where the one at risk was mostly Fred himself.

"longer" is comparatively easy: More staff scientists (moving from grant to grant within an institution but on open-ended contracts) and fewer postdocs. "Paying more" is harder, though one or more of reducing marginal grants and lowering the ceiling on institutional overhead on grants would seem a reasonable start.

I've recently finished four years as a postdoc (and now have a permanent academic job and am applying for grants). It's the precarity of it which is a bigger killer than just the crappy salary. Fighting huge numbers of applicants for the chance to uproot your life (again) and move around the country for a contract that may be as short as 9 months, with every move having a good chance of being the end of your career (which you've invested years in training for). It's a grim position to put people into.

Clearly greater than zero, if only for the novelty value. What are Zimbabwean $100trn bills going for on eBay these days?

Very little stock market wealth is held by pension funds on behalf of workers, as opposed to the already wealthy. See https://www.pensionsage.com/pa/Pension-scheme-holding-less-t..., for example. And the value on these schemes are disproportionately held by those who own and/or run companies rather than those who work in them: the Small Self-Administered Scheme is a popular means of UK tax avoidance for business owners who would like their capital gains tax free, and assets held in these schemes (on trust for the owner) will also be included in these figures.

Returns on capital flow, unsurprisingly, to those with capital. And the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands is precisely the issue that people are objecting to.

The particular Sci-Hub trade-off is one that shouldn't worry you. If Pornhub are made responsible for user uploaded content it won't make any difference to Sci-Hub because they're already flagrantly infringing. It's not a grey-zone user-upload operation, its express purpose is to "remov[e] barriers in the way of science" in defiance of copyright law. It's "black" Open Access (in the sense of the pirate flag) and not something within the reach of US regulators (otherwise it would already be toast).

There is a lot that government could be doing which would make family breakdown less likely and less traumatic: building enough social housing that local authorities are capable of discharging their homelessness duties, for example, or reopening the children's centres. So I certainly wouldn't want to sign on to the idea that our present state of child protection is fine. But corporate parenting is hard, and we're depressingly bad at it :-(

The practice in England and Wales is summed up by the following (now rather famous) passage from Mr Justice Hedley in a 2007 case[0]:

> Basically it is the tradition of the United Kingdom, recognised in law, that children are best brought up within natural families. Lord Templeman, in Re: KD (a minor ward) (termination of access) [1988] 1 AC 806, at page 812 said this:

> > "The best person to bring up a child is the natural parent. It matters not whether the parent is wise or foolish, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, provided the child's moral and physical health are not in danger. Public authorities cannot improve on nature."

> There are those who may regard that last sentence as controversial but undoubtedly it represents the present state of the law in determining the starting point. It follows inexorably from that, that society must be willing to tolerate very diverse standards of parenting, including the eccentric, the barely adequate and the inconsistent. It follows too that children will inevitably have both very different experiences of parenting and very unequal consequences flowing from it. It means that some children will experience disadvantage and harm, whilst others flourish in atmospheres of loving security and emotional stability. These are the consequences of our fallible humanity and it is not the provenance of the State to spare children all the consequences of defective parenting. In any event, it simply could not be done.

(Emphasis mine). I'm not sure I like it, but I understand why this is where we are.

Of course, we haven't outlawed beating children in England yet, unlike Wales and Scotland, so there are still obvious improvements to be made...

[0]: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCC/Fam/2006/2.html

The problem is mostly working conditions. They're set up to keep migrant workers living on site, while most locals would want to live at home. Doing the work well and quickly is skilled, but the pay is low. It's backbreaking labour, and also seasonal. Finally, most goods are globally traded, so if you pay enough to overcome the above, you might lose your markets to imports anyway.

It's mostly because the ability of the economy to produce positive economic (but not direct financial) returns on very cheap credit is basically infinite, and borrowing money to invest in all of these things would need a huge amount of extra tax revenue to pay off the loans, which is hard. (Even in principle it's not straightforward for government to capture the consumer surplus of infrastructure investment. And in practice tax increases are politically problematic). So it's rationed, instead.

Yes, probably. This can bring its own problems, though. In Britain, for example, the Treasury is extremely reluctant to approve new public capital projects, even at negative real interest rates. Investment is effectively rationed by requiring a benefit/cost ratio of above 2 (at net present value, after making heavy optimism bias adjustments) before it will approve funding. New nuclear won't get close to that on any conventional appraisal, which is one reason why our current nuclear new build is happening on an eye-wateringly expensive private finance arrangement.

There is (for most crimes) an entitlement to release on licence after 1/2 or 2/3 of the sentence, with the rest being served in the community but subject to recall to prison. So the most important takeaway is that the 'headline' numbers are higher than those actually served. Given the crime and the date of sentence it's very likely that he served three years and eight months inside. Some of that might have happened before his trial if he was remanded in custody: time spent in prison pre-trial is counted towards the sentence.

The 'additional' time for not paying £963k is designed to be coercive. The court has, in theory, decided that not only does he owe the money but he can be expected to find it. And the prison in default is supposed to encourage him to do so. Importantly, it's not an either/or: he still owes the money even if he serves the default sentence.

Yeah. The rollout of domestic wiring standards was pre-EU, and dealing with the entrenched incompatible standardisation gets in the way of the EU goal of a single market in goods and services. They really don't want more arbitrary standards that vary nationally.

Of course, that's not quite the same as the laptop charger question where the fragmentation is between companies and less entrenched. But still.

Most bitcoin regulation scenarios would just be an ordinary investment risk, in some senses. If you invest in commercial property and then changes in the tax treatment of real estate mean that the value of your investment falls then that just sucks for you. I can't see that it's any different if, for example, the US Government started demanding annual declarations of crypto wallets on tax returns and started taxing capital swings as income.

If cryptocurrency is actually confiscated I'm sure that the US government at least will be obliged to pay out. Given the volatility of bitcoin (and the extent to which it will likely drop if governments come out full square against it) I'm sure there will be legal arguments about what the compensation for the taking should be. But if the use-case is largely either (1) speculation or (2) hiding things from governments and governments limit the upside of (1) with tax or structural changes and crack down on (2) I don't think anyone's going to make the bag-holders whole in case of regulation rather than confiscation. Bigger companies than ~$4bn have gone bankrupt by misreading their market risks before.

Yeah. The UK tried too, with a prototype reactor at Dounreay. We had all kinds of operational problems and gave up when it became apparent that the falling level of new nuclear installations meant that we weren't going to be short of uranium as a primary fuel. The economics, without a fuel shortage, were awful.

I don't know about medical research, but that's exactly what the rest of us in universities do.

We do; just not everywhere. I've moved to Liverpool, and the rail system here is great (as far as it goes - it could always use more lines). Fifteen minute interval suburban service from the south suburbs under the city all the way to Southport, fast and frequent service to places in the Wirral etc. It's great - Merseyrail is an unusual example of a forward-looking rail system done in the 70s. The trains are old now (new ones on the way) but it just works.

Leeds? Not so much. Daventry? Nothing. Whitby? One slow train every two hours.

It is a big qualifier, but not entirely that big. Yes, it would mean that the decision to start the dictatorship was democratic, but you could definitely arrange it so there is no Disabling Act. Don't forget that to pass such an Act would need the Royal Assent, which the government is now in a position to refuse. Yes, that's a breach of constitutional convention, but we'd be well past that point.

So the plan goes something like this: pass the Statute of Proclamations[0], optionally repeal by proclamation section 4 of the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022[1] to keep your complaisant Parliament in place indefinitely, optionally make a proclamation preventing them from meeting, definitely refuse Royal Assent to a Disabling Act, and then govern by decree as you please.

Obviously this isn't failsafe in any way. Dictatorships aren't stable just because they've got legal cover, and the politics would need to be carefully managed. But there's nothing in our constitution that would prevent it.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_by_the_Crown_Ac...

[1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/11/enacted

Yeah, maybe that stretches the analogy too far. I think it is distinct from ministers governing in their own right (or in the right of the semi-fictional unitary 'Secretary of State') though. Most statutory instruments, for example, are issued by and in the name of a minister. Obviously the appointment of the minister is an act of the Crown, and so is the passing of the original Act which authorises the order-making power. But the power is used directly from their own ministerial user account, IYSWIM.

It's complex. There's nothing really to stop a British prime minister going full dictator if they want, as long as they can get Parliament to pass an Enabling Act. And that's not an entirely fanciful proposition: they have the support of a majority of the House of Commons pretty much by definition and the Lords have very little power in practice.

Our constitution is built on the so-called 'good chap theory of governance', which is that power is in the hands of people 'like us', and therefore reasonable. If the PM loses a vote of no confidence he's obliged to resign. What makes him? Nothing. But that's the convention and it's been followed until now.

It's also a constitutional convention to resign from ministerial office if caught lying to Parliament. (Yes, really!) That one, though, looks defunct: Boris Johnson is a serial liar, and has managed to get himself referred to the Privileges Committee of the Commons for lying over his lockdown breaches despite his majority in the Commons. Will he resign? Will he hell. He doesn't want to, and all the Commons can do is bring the whole government down (and even then only if he is prepared to resign then). He's made it clear he doesn't care, and the Conservative Party in the Commons has made clear they're not willing to face an election over it, so that's that.

A similar thing happened over the Prorogation of the House just before Brexit. That was fairly straightforwardly a contempt of Parliament, and the advice to prorogue was found to be unlawful by the Supreme Court. But nothing of consequence happened to those in charge as a result.

I'm grateful our political culture isn't quite as buggered as that of the US at this point, but I'd be grateful for slightly stronger guardrails against misconduct than simply hoping it doesn't happen.

Something like that. And with the Governor General as the VM root.

Pretty much exactly that. The Government can (and does) request a Privy Council meeting, which issues various kinds of Orders in the name of the Queen. The Queen's Speech is another (less instrumental) way of government using the root account directly.

(Or, I suppose, you could `$ sudo su`and then `# instantiate_republic` to permanently promote the usual administrator account to root. Still not clear it's wise to directly govern from account 0, though).

First Direct is great; I've been an account holder for a bit over ten years, after getting an offset mortgage with them. I've once needed physical contact, for which they have an arrangement to use your local HSBC branch. Otherwise it's just as you say: ring up at 2am, answer within 5 rings, incredibly helpful staff.

Frankly, I'm astonished it's survived. It was always an 'internal startup' in a big bank (Midland, before they were taken over) and I would have thought the bean counters would have successfully lowered service standards by now - or at least stuck a heavy fee on and marketed it as 'premium'. But no, it just keeps rolling on, delivering excellent customer service, decade after decade.

I don't even like HSBC, but it's so good I don't want to leave.

When I was a postdoc at Oxford there was an article in one of the university magazines complaining that full professors could no longer afford one of the lovely giant late-Victorian villas in North Oxford that used to be occupied by academics.

Hilariously, it turns out that was always the case. The profs with the fancy houses were never doing it on their university salaries; they were doing it on family money. Meanwhile, one of my colleagues resigned and left because he couldn't afford to pay rent for him and his partner in Oxford on a postdoc salary. Plus ça change...

Honestly, I don't think this would be such a problem if the job wasn't getting so grim. It's HR 101 that salaries help with recruitment but are less important for retention and that a cash raise can't substitute for a poor working environment. Even with the 20% salary cuts of the last decade I don't think they'd have much trouble obtaining enough staff (outside London) if people felt respected.

Ah, interesting. Yes, our current position is deeply unhelpful. State enough that VCs will jump to follow some arbitrary after-dinner speech by the Minister, but private enough that we're competing in a 'market' with each other and carry a bunch of financial risks directly.

Colleagues in other countries have suggested that "each unhappy university system is unhappy in its own way". Hugely constrained funding in some countries, direct government interference in others, rampant casualisation in a third, a collapse in scholarship in a fourth...

Yeah, those days were ended years ago. The present generation of senior management are doing very nicely though: their historically-acquired final salary entitlements with a generous accrual rate coupled with recent insane inflation in senior management salaries mean they're going to make out like bandits.

My own projected pension is £13,180 a year, based on about 30 years' worth of (mostly future) combined employer/employee contributions of 30% of a salary of a little less than £40k/yr. Big bucks it is not.

Oh yes, absolutely. This particular scheme is very heavily pre-funded (currently to ~30% of salary, which is why many employers want it dead) and is sustainable as long as your investment strategy isn't 'putting the money under the mattress'. Yes, residual investment risk falls on the universities collectively (by deliberate scheme design) but it's certainly not one of the over-promised schemes of the kind you note. In fact, it's status as a nominally private-sector scheme subjects it to heavy regulation specifically to ensure that the government doesn't get left holding the bag.

If you want far more detail than is sane, there was a 'Joint Expert Panel' set up by the employers organisation and the union to provide a way forward after the industrial action caused by the last attempt to abolish the scheme. Their report analyses USS in detail (rather than pension schemes in general) and is at https://web.archive.org/web/20220506092908/https://ussjep.or...

They're backstopped by the government, in that they're written off after ~30 years if they weren't paid off in that time by the 9% marginal income charge. The scheme was designed as a backdoor graduate tax rather than a conventional finance agreement, and the government has been using them like a credit card to fund the universities off-balance-sheet. Which will be difficult to continue.

FWIW on your (5) there's nothing unsustainable about the most recent iteration of the pension scheme. The problems are an interesting (if infuriating) combination of the employers wanting to kill the defined benefit scheme to save money, the government's regulatory framework being designed to protect pensionholders in closed defined benefit schemes and not to run functional private DB schemes (which are nearly all gone), the Trustee company being untrustworthy, and the governance arrangements being poor. The only people really committed to the scheme continuing are its members, for whom it's theoretically run but in practice have very little control over it.

If you want an illustration of the magnitude of the problem the might resonate with HNers: the USS Trustee is aiming to achieve CPI+0% investment returns for the next 40 years. With long-run equity returns being what they are, that's borderline criminal. (It's certainly not the investment strategy that universities will be adopting for their own endowments).

The honest truth is that the USS was highly solvent on a going concern basis before the recent changes (which already involved prospective cuts of 30% to accruals only a few years ago). It only generates a deficit if you model closing the scheme tomorrow and shunting the entire fund into gilts in order to eliminate all investment risk. But even if you do that, the scheme can still pay: it's explicitly backed by the combined assets of every scheme member, which includes all the richest universities and (hilariously) the government.

Oh, and the present cuts will take it down to less than half the pension of our colleagues in the newer post-92 universities who are in the Teachers' Pension Scheme. What price a formal government guarantee?

Where are you based?