cmdkeen

Joined 17 years ago

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735
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Mar 8
An Englishman in Scotland
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Comment · 3 years ago
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!” ― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

Comment · 4 years ago
I stand corrected - that's useful to know as I only recently discovered buyer's premium when thinking about dipping my toe into the auction waters
Comment · 4 years ago
It's probably even more than that with the "Buyer's Premium" tacked on - the Christie's cost calculator linked reckons that would be another EUR540,000 on top...
Comment · 5 years ago
AIS is an aide to navigational safety, but cannot and is not relied upon as a sole source of data. Not every vessel is required to have it, or have redundant systems for it. As this article suggests it's not verifiable information and can be spoofed in various ways, or just switched off if you're up to no good. Various international bodies are keen to come up with standards to reduce the opportunity for spoofing AIS, but it will likely not go anywhere.

The Project Sandstone series from RUSI digs into various techniques smugglers and sanctions busters use to hide or mask illicit activity at sea.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
This article explicitly goes down the "micro" in microservices route, which does have the problems you identify. There's an alternative school of thought that regrets, or at least downplays the obsession with "micro". Much of the drive to microservices was a reaction against things like the Enterprise Service Bus in the SOA world becoming the big ball of mud no-one can easily change - SOA and microservices don't have to look a world apart.

I'm a big fan of Mark Richards and Neal Ford's emphasis of architecture being about trade-offs. No one thing is a silver bullet.

Comment · 5 years ago
Rural poverty is a real thing, and often overlooked by politics / media / society. Rural villages no longer tend to have a shop or post office, the bus services can be erratic and infrequent, it's a real problem.

The student rental market 12 or so years ago was definitely full of horror stories about getting deposits returned, knowing which letting agents to go with useful insider knowledge. The Scottish deposit security scheme is only a few years old and has definitely helped improve the situation. The rental market is one in which there can be significant power/information imbalances and where some protections make absolute sense.

Comment · 6 years ago
The supermarket ones are free - though only 7kW, as they're for customer use. I park up and go for a walk round the local park then do my shopping.

For the rest I use Charge Place Scotland - it's a scheme where you pay £20 a year and get free unlimited charging at various locations around Scotland, they do have some separate locations you have to pay, usually for faster charging. Certainly amongst my friends with electric vehicles it's a point of pride to never pay for charging beyond that £20.

Comment · 6 years ago
I live in Edinburgh, one of the more car-unfriendly cities in the UK and recently bought a Model 3. I park on the street, the city has gone nowhere with its plans to provide on street chargers. Yet it isn't a problem, despite a relative lack of public chargers compared to elsewhere in the country it is still perfectly feasible. I've tweaked my habits to go to the supermarket that has a charger in the car park, when planning what to do at the weekend I check nearby charging locations.

Business locations can acquire visitors by offering them, and there's all sorts of upsell benefits. A garden centre that has one might get me to stay and visit their cafe if I know I'm going to be there for an hour for instance.

Comment · 6 years ago
Looks very interesting and would be a huge win if we were able to use it - any chance Oracle support is on your roadmap?
Comment · 7 years ago
It's more complicated than that - as the article says PE can be used to diversify an investments. If you have a few extra billion you might not want to tie it all to the performance of the US equity market. So PE doesn't have to beat the S&P to be attractive if the ups and downs happen at different times to the S&P.

Then there is also the question of fees, if the fund is beating the S&P by 1-2% after fees, and their fees are 2 and 20 then the strategy is significantly beating the market. The problem is that there is so much money chasing PE, and that leverage means they don't need that much in client funds, that there isn't a push to lower fees that you see in the equity market.

Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
That may include tax credits, don't assume it is just "administration" costs.
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
The documentation may do but many of the official images run as root and provide little to no documentation on how to change that, the Bitnami images in comparison are light years ahead.

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