I've always assumed its an issue of incentives, like most things of this type.

The people signing the contracts are incentivised to come in under budget, since they will then get rewarded for saving money in that financial years / term / parliament / etc. They know that the rewards will be fairly immediate (annual bonus, pay rise, promotion, etc.) and they know that they will likely have moved jobs to somewhere else in a few years.

By the time the problems with the contract are discovered it is typcially (for stuff this size) many years later, and is someone elses responsibility. The person/people who agreed to the orignal contracts are no where to be found, and have already been rewarded years ago.

In the corporate world, companies sometimes face the same perverse incentives - e.g. a CEO will be incentivised to maximise short term gain at the expenses of long term sustainability (the "Enron" problem). They often respond by making the short term rewards contintingent on long term success - for example, some portion of the executive's renumeration being in long term stock options that can't be realised for 5 years. What's the equivalent that can be done in public service contracting?

Cool, thanks for explaining. It's always good to get someone else's view on things.

For what it's worth, I'm very aware that the European financial markets as a whole seem to do a poor job at directing capital to startups and fast growing businesses, compared to the US. I've never been able to get any good information on this to form an opinion as to why.

I've just found an interesting site that shows realtime info from the UK national grid. Never really looked at it before:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgrid.iamkate.com%2F

At this moment (8:30am in the UK), we're using about 30GW, and of this about 16% is coming from gas. 43% is coming from wind, and 8-9% each from Nuclear and biomass (I never knew biomass was such a big player).

Solar is doing almost nothing (0.5% percent), but then its filthy weather at 8am. I'll check this again in better weather conditions, as I'm curious.

We're generating about 80% of it domestically, and importing the rest, with around half of that import coming from France.

I've never really looked at it in any detail before. Clearly gas is a player, but a minority player none the less.

Interesting. I can certainly see the argument around volitily, and other people above have referenced how a large company will gear a lot of it's activity around the reporting cycles - slow these down a bit, and you slow down this disruption from getting real business done.

I'm not sure I understand your second comment, about the relationship between managers and shareholders and the difference between European and US markets. Can you expand on this a bit please?

Hmm, not so sure about that. By any measure, us here in the UK have energy costs a bit more than twice that of the USA. Ours is probably cleaner (and improving over time), but it is certainly not cheaper.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.statista.com%2Fstati...

https://worldpopulationreview....

This is a good point. It is one subject that almost never seems to come up when peopele discuss surveys like this - the psychology of the experience.

Some of it falls under the rubric of "sample bias" and is well known - are all people in all types of cicumstances equally likely to response to a survey? No, they aren't.

But even then, for the people answering, the way they answer is at least partly determined by psychology. Lots of people will tend to want to answer anonymous surveys by portraying how they wished things were (or by portrayingg the sort of person they think they are) rather than purely based on reality. They (we all) have an internal image of themselves and often answer for that, and not for the real person who everyone else sees. You see this more in lifestyle surveys, where people will answer in ways that suggest they are more virtuous, responsible, etc. than they really are.

This is true of economic surveys too. These surveys always ask about the respondants outloot for the next 12 months, or how they see their business doing in the next 6 months or whatever. The way a person prefers to answer these questions (i.e. the answer that causes the least disonnence within them) might not always be the most straighforwardly honest. It isn't dishonest, but it isn't necessary a true reflection of reality either.

I get involved in audits for ISO compliance from time to time. The ones that are about general business management (e.g. ISO 9001 and similar) make a very big deal about "satisfaction" surveys after major interactions with customers, suppliers and other "stakeholders".

Its fine as far as it goes, but trying to them to understand basic concepts such as sample bias is nearly impossible. Imagine for example that you are required to issue a survey invite to each customer after delivery of the product or service you provide. You can imagine immeditely that 90%+ of the responses are going to be in the 9 or 10 out of 10 or in the 1 or 2 out of 10 range. The only people who will reply are those who were extremely unhappy or extrememly happy (the extremes) and you'll almost never hear from the people in the middle (who are probably 90% of your customers).

You would pass the audit with flying colours by doing this, but never learn anything useful.

(I suppose you could say that measuring the change over time in the answers you get is useful - are you getting more 1s and 2s this year than last year - but I don't think that's what's really intended)

Why is it one or the other? Just because cars are VERY dangerous, doesn't mean that bikes and scooters can't also be QUITE or a A BIT dangerous.

I'm a cyclist, in Britain. I've never driven a car in my life, and my bike is my main mode of transport around the city and county I live in (Sussex, for what it's worth). I see a huge amount of cyclists and scooter-drivers behaving in ridiculous and dangerous ways, that often only avoid a crash or injury because other people jump out the way.

The constant cycling on pavements, cycling through red lights, pedestrian crossings, etc. under-taking moving traffic and other such ridiculous behaviour might not be a dangerous as carpedestrian impacts (and I agree, cars are much more dangerous), but it doesn't mean it isn't an issue for pedestrians.

I agree with you. If you post a message directly to a third party (through email or Twitter or whatever) that is libelous, then you personally are liable for that - you chose to send the message, so it's your responsibility, both legally and morally. No problem with that at all.

For email, this isn't complicated, but with something like Twitter or Facebook or whatever it gets more complicated. Through the use of their algorithms (which they created and are fully in contol of both the operation and the output of) they choose what information their users are presented with. It is no longer a case of you posting a message to someone else, but rather you just generically posting a message to their platform, and them choosing if that message gets shown and to whom. That's editorial control, in just the same way that a newspaper editor choose whether to publish an article from one of their journalists or a letter from a reader. They're choosing to publish your message, and as such should inheret the same legal responsibilities as any other publisher (in my opninion at least).

In practice of course, there is no exclusivity. Both you the author of the post and Twitter (or whoever) the publisher of the post can both be lliable at the same time, although I imagine that it legally complicated in terms of figuring out how much relative liabitiy each party holds.

Very true. A sense of tribal loyalty is likely a contributing factor.

Famously Japan has long been a very homogonous society, with strong social enforcement of norms and behaviours. I don't know enough about Japanese culture to know how true this still is in the modern world, but my guess is that its still more true than in most western countries.

Not sure how much national unity can be expected in modern western societies when they're so ireconcilably split (largely between the urban/educated/young vs the rural/less-educated/older).

Interesting. In my opinion, what you're describing in Japan is the combination of demographics and economics that were all in their favour throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Throughout that time they were one of the fastest growing countries in the world (pop culture at the time was concerned with Japan overtaking the USA). It was helped by the favourable demographics - lots of young people willing to work hard to make a new coutry for themselves.

During the 90s they had both a banking collapse and their demographics flipped, and so this positive outlook all flipped too.

We in the west went through the same thing in the late 2000s. Our economies and financial systems proved to be built on thin air, and our baby-boomer demographics (which we've known about for my entire life, but have utterly failed to properly plan for) have left us with very skewed population pyramids, same as Japan. As a result, our popular sentiment is now relentlessly negative.

I suppose I'm arguing the other side of the chicken/egg split than you. You're saying (I think) that the right popular mood can effect ecomonic progress. I'm saying the economic progress (or lack thereof) shapes the popular mood.

In reality of course we're both right - its just a question of how much contribution each side makes to the cause and effect at any given time.

It's a good question, and one that comes up in many forms in all sorts of discussions. My opinion:

Yes, Google are free to process data going through their servers in any way they wish. However, if that data is then published to the wider world and they are exercising arbitrary editorial control over the content (to be fair, it isn't clear that's what's happening here), then they are (or at least, should be) open to the same liability issues as any other publisher.

The controversy comes in because they (or Twitter or whoever) get to exercise editorial control over the context (choosing what people see) but avoid the liability issues that any publisher would face for the content they publish. It's a bit two-faced.

Couldn't that just demonstrate that the WinRed website (whatever that is, I've no idea) is as spammy as the emails? (email filters check the reputation of the link destinations too)

If the theory is that Republicans send spammy messages, then it doesn't really prove anything.

It raises the question (to me at least) of: are the messages being marked as spam due to:

a) the normal process of filtering rules (including LLMs), user interaction and feedback, keywords, blacklists, etc.

b) some additional editorial decision (e.g. they have chosen to block, or add extra weight, to certain messages).

If its A then it's hard to see the problem. The rules apply to all senders and messages equally, and the solution is to write better messages.

If its B then there is a problem. Google are acting as content curators and not just messangers, and so they should subject to the same liability as any other publishers.

You're really trying to claim that modern engineering doesn't concern itself with things where the difference in magnitude is on the order of 10,000 or more?