Travel today. So by request, here is a Weekend Open Thread on Thatcher, who did much to kick off the CO2 global warming saga but later on became a sceptic and regretted her actions. My favorite quote (supposedly attributed to her) from Thatcher is about consensus:
“consensus is an absence of leadership”
So true.
Along the same lines, it is such a shame that the left treats her service so poorly by making an artificial push in song popularity, a false consensus if you will, to make “Ding Dong The Witch is Dead” #1 in Britain so that the BBC will have to play it on BBC Radio1. Such cheap shots speak to the integrity of their political convictions. Fortunately, the BBC decided that they had a shred of integrity left and chose not to play the clip in full. Still, it is a cheap shot.
Plus, discuss anything else within the limits of blog policy.
She came to power in the long cold winter of discontent of1979. There were no jobs going in Perthshire in Scotland where I lived at the time. That is until one of her tax saving schemes for the wealthy kicked off and they started planting trees. I got a job planting trees in a plantation owned by Lloyds Bank – part of their pension scheme. The way it worked, as I remember, was that Lloyds would put in say 1 million pounds against tax. The tax payer would then put in 3 million pounds. At the end of the day, the whole lot would belong to Lloyds. In the last 5 years they have started cutting the trees down to build wind turbines…
Thatcher was not very popular in Scotland, nor indeed anywhere north of her home county of Lincolnshire. The burden of her reign was not shared equally by all of her subjects…
We can only guess at what state the UK would be in today if she had been beaten in the elections by the Labour party. Everything that Gordon Brown managed to cock-up in the time that he was in power would have started thirty years earlier.
They are now claiming that quantum physics also proves that we’re warming the globe
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/13/potsdam-and-the-scientific-method.html
OT Security Heads Up
Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet
“Ongoing attack from >90,000 computers is creating a strain on Web hosts, too.”
ARealChange.com advises
REPLY: This mainly affects self-hosted sites Anthony
I tried to post a comment on what the UK would have been like if Labour had won the election in’77, but apparently your new comments set-up would not allow me to say c**k-up. It obviously doesn’t know that it’s an old naval term.
I just watched Alison Redford thread the needle on the Keystone pipeline at the Brookings Institution. It’s sad to see someone who surely knows better have to defend the carbon footprint of such a beneficial enterprise. Hopefully the days of co2 being considered in every economic decision will soon be coming to an end.
I should have added more… If I remember correctly Lloyds Bank sold the entire forest off to the Rolls Royce Pension Fund some years after I finished planting there in around 1984. After that I have no idea who ended up owning it. I heard that some UK sporting and media celebrities were also part owners.
It says a lot for her integrity that she was taken in by the global warming scam, looked at it (thats where having a leader who is not a trained liar, sorry lawyer is beneficial) and saw through it and had the honesty to say so! had Labour won the election? well us brits are really stupid, stupid enough to spent 6 years fighting for our lives against socialism only to vote out the man who held us together for those dark years and elect a socialist government, but as we were visibly bankrupt, have Mr Calaghan get baled out by the IMF it would need american size stupidity to give them another try, it shows what 25 years of socialist union teachers can achieve!
I have said things about Margaret Thatcher on other posts in other topics on WUWT so I am not going to bore you all by repeating them.
The only thing I will repeat though is that the reason she is so reviled by the political left is because she pointed the way to a better system than they had in place from 1964 to 1979 (apart from a brief tenure in number 10 by Ted Heath, who wasn’t much better than Wilson.The country got richer and the poor got richer and happier umder her leadership.
The Left have the innate ability to control people, they are not interested in, as they pretend to be about the sick and the welfare of the poorest in our society. It is about control, Thatcher took control away from the Left both here in the UK and with the the help of Ronald Reagan, in Eastern Europe and the USSR and they hate her for it to this day .Margaret Thatcher was the best peacetime Prime Minister this country ever had! If Gordon Brown or Tony Benn died tomorrow I would not “celebrate”, in fact I would feel sorrow for their families.
The Left have revealed themselves in their true colours spiteful, ignorant and thoroughly nasty pieces of work who are not fit to be in politics and certainly not fit to govern a country or lecture us on CAGW.
Will they all please go to live in North Korea? Oh sorry I forgot, that is not in keeping with their desire to be in the governing elite.
I wouldn’t call an act of censorship that the BBC is not tasked with (or should be) the showing of a shred of integrity. The BBC is there to report, even if the news is ugly and says that a lack of common decency got a song into the charts (not a big deal these days with the sales figures/number of radio chart callers being what they are compared to two decades ago). Play the thing and add context, that’s the only job the BBC is chartered with.
Otter says:
April 13, 2013 at 7:22 am
They are now claiming that quantum physics also proves that we’re warming the globe
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/13/potsdam-and-the-scientific-method.html
============
All things being kept equal is the key underlying assumption that is never spelled out. However, if vertical circulation is increased by global warming, then there is a very strong negative feedback in the climate system.
Real greenhouse warm not as a result of IR or back radiation, but as a result of reduced vertical circulation. Open a small window at the top of the greenhouse and it will cool rapidly, with only a miniscule difference in blocking by the glass.
The models predict the GHG theory on the basis of the atmosphere warming first, reducing vertical circulation, resulting in surface warming. The so called “hot spot”. However, in many years of observation the hot spot has never been found, showing the vertical circulation is not reduced.
Rather, what we see is that the surface has warmed first, not the atmosphere. The atmosphere has only warmed in response to surface warming. Which strong suggests that the warming cannot be due to reduced vertical circulation, and that the climate system has a strong negative feedback in the form of increased vertical circulation in response to increased surface temperatures.
In other words, GHG cannot be the cause of the increased surface temperatures, because the order in which the warming occurred (surface first followed by atmosphere) is opposite to the signature of GHG warming.
I left the UK in 1973 after the most miserable few years imaginable, courtesy of the NUM and TWU: No trains, no heat and no jobs. The only thing we had plenty of was inflation. It stayed that way until the early 80s when suddenly people started investing in their businesses, pubs and homes. It was really noticeable when I went home to see my parents. My peers suddenly decided that they could start their own businesses and that it was OK to work hard and get rich. It is true we lived around London – as does 40% of the British population. But my Dad grew up in Liverpool. The culture up there – Beatles or not – was dreadful. It was Andy Capp land. As long as the dole enabled you to buy a pint and your fags, you managed. It was Greece without the sunshine. Bloody awful. It was amazing to see how fast things turned around, but I have no doubt that many of those in the mining communities suffered.
I am not sure how much of the turnaround was due to Thatcher but she did not get in the way. Alas the high-mindedness of the poll tax was a political poison pill after the MSM decided that they really preferred the antiquated local rates program.
As for the Thatcher haters – the operative word is “hate”. She called the Left on their corruption (see Scargill), their hypocrisy, their socialistic utopianism, their dependency, their ignorance and their naivete. They never, ever forgave her.
In other energy news today, more evidence is emerging that the legal case brought against Chevron by Ecuador, seeking billions of dollars of reparations and supported by a host of American environmental activists, is collapsing as overwhelming evidence of fraud arises at every level of this case. The original judge who allowed the case to go forward against Chevron has admitted that he was bribed heavily to do so; and now one of the providers of “expert testimony” used in the case has been forced under threat of suit to denounce their own previous testimony.
“Stratus Consulting has provided sworn declarations outlining the firm’s knowledge of the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ misconduct in the ongoing environmental litigation in Lago Agrio, Ecuador as well as testifying that there is no scientific merit to the plaintiffs’ damages claims against Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) and Texaco Petroleum (TexPet).”
http://www.theamazonpost.com/news/ecuadorean-environmental-claims-disavowed-under-oath-by-plaintiffs-own-experts
to quote; “The truly interesting part about this isn’t the apparent collapse of the case in Ecuador, but what seems to be an acknowledgment of the active involvement of American based activists.”
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/13/ecuadors-case-against-chevron-even-more-of-a-farce/
Well said Andrew. Vile and nasty is an accurate description from my perspective as I sit in the middle of California. The left here in the US view themselves as educated, enlightened and superior in every aspect to the unwashed masses of ordinary people. If you dare to question any of the dogmatic pillars of their world view, you are attacked en mass by the faithful believers.
Long may we remember the outstanding individuals who governed with a light hand and left ordinary people free to pursue their own happiness, in their own way.
Rest well Margaret Thatcher.
Lady Thatcher was a tragic figure in the literary sense. Nobody did more than she to break the monopoly of power that the ruling elite in general, and the Conservative party in particular, held over the British population. Yet, for her troubles, she was destined to be reviled as caring only for the rich and powerful.
As an outsider to politics, she entered a government that was the embodiment of privilege, old Etonians and Bullington boys. She was called “Hilda” by those who thought her middle name sounded more lower class than Margaret – an indication of what she was up against.
She brought with her the moral codes of her methodist and grocery shop upbringing which gave her the belief that hard work, personal responsibility and honesty was the route to prosperity – both physical and spiritual. AS an admirer of Hayek and the Austrian economists, she believed that Government should empower the people to fulfil their own destinies through the functioning of the free market – and Government should retreat to the background.
I cannot over emphasise how radical she really was. Whether or not you blame her for every economic ill that has befallen the world (I do not), there is no doubt in my mind, that she acted out only of her desire to empower the British working people, and create an asset owning democracy. And she had to overcome enormous odds to see it through.
Thwarted initially by the old Tories – the wets – she found a few allies among the working class Tories, such as Norman (now Lord) Tebbit. She de-regulated th financial centres (in the Big Bang), privatised a number of state owned industries by selling discounted shares to the British people (held to be controversial today) and sold council houses to their tennants. But as well as this, she was the first PM to actively try and reverse what all previous post war leaders had done before – preside over the managed decline of the UK. She would not allow the country she loved to slide ever more down the hole of irrelevance and poverty. She succeeded in reversing 30 years of post war relative decline.
If we slide once again (we are) it will be because we have squandered the inheritance she has bequeathed.
Otter says:
April 13, 2013 at 7:22 am
“They are now claiming that quantum physics also proves that we’re warming the globe
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/13/potsdam-and-the-scientific-method.html
”
Schellnhuber is by education a quantum physicist; he’s constantly pointing this out on his never ending public TV talkshow crusade. And we quantum physicists are way smarter than you stupid proles is the message of course.
Only that some of the stupid proles actually know about negative feedbacks, chaos mathematics etc.
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Just curious why we haven’t had a sea ice thread. Normally by this time we are voting on the next minimum.
Personally, this year is looking like the minimum will be higher due to more circumpolar winds. Clearly, that could change at any time, but so far, so good.
Anthony says: “[Lady Thatcher] regretted her actions.”
Can you kindly provide a reference for this.
After Lady Thatcher left office, she toured the United States extensively, giving talks sponsored by conservative think tanks. The normal thing. She dismissed alarmism and did not like Al Gore very much, but I’ve never known her to regret her actions regarding Climate Change.
Thatcher was extremely clairvoyant in seeing what the EU was about to become. Ironically, the left whose slogan in the 70ies was “Question Authority” are now screaming for more police state measures against offshore bank account holders, i.e. against people who try to move their money out of a regime that does not care too much about the rule of law (the EU).
Schäuble (one of the four horsemen of the Eurocalypse, German minister of finances) just demanded an EU tax evasion “FBI”; Der Spiegel had an article about it and – as the leftist readers of Der Spiegel cannot possibly simply agree with control freak Schäuble (he’s on the upper right quadrant of the political compass, an authoritarian nonsocialist) they KINDA agreed with him, commenting “Well these are only words, his coalition partner (FDP, classic liberals) will never allow that”.
So, leftist authoritarians agree with right wing authoritarians. Quel surpris. The word “statist” doesn’t exist in this meaning in German, probably because German writers cannot imagine a non-statist attitude.
I think you folks will like this one – Smart Storms Hockey Stick!
http://www.brianlloydfrench.com/1/post/2013/04/smart-storms-threaten-very-survival-says-un-and-scientists.html
“Smart Storms Hockey Stick”
http://www.brianlloydfrench.com/1/post/2013/04/smart-storms-threaten-very-survival-says-un-and-scientists.html
Three things about Margaret Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister stand out for me;
1). Her actions in breaking the traditional power of the trade unions which undoubtedly caused a generation of hardship for some families as business gained more freedom to restructure. It is likely that some of her economic principles were nonetheless a necessary long term evil.
2). However, her subsequent attempts at (over) stimulating the economy with the inevitable boom and bust cycles that that produced certainly define one aspect of her stewardship.
3). But perhaps the thing that ultimately she may come to be remembered most for will be for her leadership during the Falklands crisis. And in that regard she was truly a remarkable woman.
Disclaimer. Despite the final line of praise, I never voted for her, though I did vote for her predecessor Edward Heath, thus to date I have voted for all three major parties, but over the last twenty years have given up voting as all 3 major parties are so much alike and of late have become just branches of the Green Party.
There are two other parties left to vote for, UKIP who have some sensible ideas in some areas but are impractically extreme and thus virtually unelectable in other areas, and the remaining party is the protest vote, The Monster Raving Loony Party !
As our political system in the UK has stagnated I think perhaps I should set up my own political party, The Beneficial Dictator Party. I of course would be the Beneficial Dictator.
Anybody following the Arctic Sea ice care to explain how the Hudson Bay suddenly lost half of its ice in one day? Cryosphere Today tacks sea ice in each sea and they show Hudson Bay just lost half of its ice. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.13.html
Was it an algorithm malfunction, satellite malfunction, or snow melt appearing as open water?
BTW Bering Sea ice continues above average. Ice in the Barents Sea is recovering rapidly. Most of the open water is caused by warm waters pumped into the Arctic by the North Atlantic Oscillation and then further affects atmopsheric circulation. If natural oscillations have caused most of the Arctic ice melt, then the recovering Barents sea ice suggests Arctic Ice will soon follow.
J Martin says:
April 13, 2013 at 8:31 am
“There are two other parties left to vote for, UKIP who have some sensible ideas in some areas but are impractically extreme and thus virtually unelectable in other areas, and the remaining party is the protest vote, The Monster Raving Loony Party !”
What makes UKIP unelectable specifically? Asking not to mock you; but all I know of UKIP is a lot of the talks of Nigel Farrage and he seems sensible to me.
The things I remember about the Falklands are these: 1) It could have been stopped by diplomacy – (as it had the last time the Argentinians started making noises in 1977), and: 2) The Tories were way behind in the polls so would probably have lost the 1983 election had the Falklands not happened.
New Topic: We educated people have a lousy grasp of evolution. Including this marine biologist quoted below.
For the set-up: all of us educated intellectuals believe evolution, and look askance at the dumb religious people. That is a “given.” No need to question that assumption.
Next, we know evolution is true. This is accepted on faith, and the details are to be worked out. Mostly through tautology: the blacktip shark has a black tip because evolution is true, and evolution produces what we see, and we see a blacktip shark, therefore the black tip is evolutionarily advantageous, therefore the presense of a black tip on a shark demonstrates, yet again, evolution.
Next: evolution happens as variations in a species contribute to differential reproductive success: those sharks who happen to have black tips somehow survived and reproduced better than the less-back-tipped members of the species. Eventually, the black tip became its own species, with its own DNA, and definitely not just a variant, as a Chihuaha is to a Mastiff.
Then, how does this quote make sense?–
[“In a sense, it is catching evolution in action,” he told me. ]
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/futureoftech/australias-hybrid-shark-reveals-evolution-action-904726
They discovered inetrbreeding between supposedly differnt species of sharks (of course, attributed to AGW). Thy declare that species evolve by inter-mingling with other species. I have not heard this before as a tenet of evolution – the part of evolution that accounts for where the species came from.
What type of evolutionary process is this called?
In other news: why is this story not getting wide coverage? Arkansas oil line spill…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/11/us-exxon-spill-mayflower-insight-idUSBRE93A0PI20130411
I think oil and coal are OK sources of energy, but this has to be managed i a decent way. Companies cannot simply conduct business and make money without having the govt look over their shoulder to make sure things are done in a relatively safe way, and when bad things happen, the companies – not the taxpayer – should foot the bill.
In simple terms, this is one of the principles I believe the demoratic party used to have, and could one day have, if we coud only get the marxists to just go form their own party and get out of ours.
To avoid cronyism as happens in regulation, I believe govt should be open – astoundingly open – including a system where citizen brigades get trained to understand industry surveillance, and carry it out themselves in a manner approved by citizens, govt officials and industry – at the onset before the first shovel.
Just like I can get access to court documents, I should be able, wthin reaon, to observe and audit the buildig and functionig of a chemicla plant, nukelar reactor, etc – a watchdog looking over the shoulder of the govt regulators, so they cannot be bought off as we now know hppened in many cases including the big BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
I’m not a Brit, but from what I’ve read I think what makes UKIP so “extreme” is that they have the gall to think that England should actually be run for the English people and not so much asians, Romanians, Bulgarians, and whoever else happens to show up on the odd doorstep. Radical thoughts indeed.
@ DirkH. In order to answer your question I realised I hadn’t looked at their manifesto in a few years, so have just done so. I think they will find that there is only so much money to go round and that good intentions in many areas may prove harder to attain in practise.
They do seem to be the only party with firm attitudes towards overcrowding (immigration) and exploitation of the UK’s benefit system by those who would not have benefited from such largesse in their own countries.
I am strongly opposed to their anti EU standpoint and believe it should be made to work, in practise we cannot run away from it as we do half our trade with the EU.
I don’t see enough in their manifesto about energy, I would like to see something about fracking and nuclear power. Like it or not, a successful economy is founded on energy.
On balance, I withdraw my outdated notion that they are unelectable.
For now I will continue to not vote, but stronger statements about energy from UKIP could then leave me in a small quandary as to whether I should consider voting for them, I think I would have to seek more detailed information about their stance on the EU though before I could actually consider voting for them. In my opinion leaving the EU is not an economically sensible action, indeed I think the UK should join the Euro, but I also think we should require that some absurdly managed countries leave the Euro.
Sadly, Tom Fuller is not going to be posting with us much longer. However, he has graced us with what is perhaps one of the best blog posts yet made regarding AGW hype:
http://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/506/
J Martin: “It is likely that some of her economic principles were nonetheless a necessary long term evil.”
“Evil” is a strong word so can you please be specific?
Chris Edwards says:
“It says a lot for her integrity that she was taken in by the global warming scam, looked at it (thats where having a leader who is not a trained liar, sorry lawyer is beneficial) and saw through it and had the honesty to say so!”
—————————————-
She only became interested in CAGW because it was a useful stick with which to beat the miners, she urged other world leaders to take drastic action on flimsy to no evidence and if she ever had the “honesty to say” that she changed her mind she said it pretty damn (and uncharacteristically) quietly. I doubt that a single person who doesn’t haunt sites like this has the first clue that she changed her mind or was even involved in the first place!
Hey, but maybe she wouldn’t have been paid enough to make a speech debunking CAGW after she left office.
Anyway it displays the same kind of “integrity” which loudly proclaimed her anti-EEC (EU) stance but still signed the Single European Act, I suppose.
J.Martin 8:31
“……set up the Beneficial Dictator party…..”
Hey, that’s my idea! I’m starting the Davist party. Our slogan will be “One for all and all for Dave!”
regarding the Arkansas spill, thelastdemocrat wrote:
“I think oil and coal are OK sources of energy, but this has to be managed i a decent way.”
It is managed in a very decent way. That doesn’t mean accidents never happen, just like managing traffic in a decent way doesn’t guarantees that there will never by any traffic accident anywhere. It means that when an accident *does* happen it is quickly and efficiently cleaned up and all who have suffered harm are compensated and made whole again, insofar as that is possible.
“Companies cannot simply conduct business and make money without having the govt look over their shoulder to make sure things are done in a relatively safe way,”
Govm’t DOES look over their shoulder in every possible way, at both the State and Federal level. And the pipeline business is run in as safe a way as the engineers doing know how. Do you have any idea who much money is lost by having to shut down this line for even just a few does? To think that pipeline companies sacrifice safety for profit is a very tired old canard that betrays a complete lack of knowledge about the industry. When you are building a pipeline, the most profitable path is ALWAYS the most safety conscious path, because accidents are so damned expensive!
But that doesn’t mean accidents don’t happen, especially on a 60 year old pipeline like this one, where corrosion can occur underneath existing buildings in areas you can’t get to.
“and when bad things happen, the companies – not the taxpayer – should foot the bill.”
Did you even read the article you referred to? That’s exactly what’s happening – Exxon is paying the full cost and compensating everyone involved.
This is why I kept voting for Maggie and why I would still vote for her even if it was only a bronze bust of her standing for election in my constituency.
“The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom.” (May 1983)
WWS-
Good posting on Chevron and Stratus Consulting. Stratus has been a go to provider of “expert” testimony in many important environmental cases. The Chevron case shows that they are simply well paid advocates with Phd’s posing as scientists.
As to the “mixed result” and “pain caused” crappola being held against Thatcher please show me a government policy that is all upside. I think we put paid to that argument with the home ownership society policy leading straight to a massive financial collapse here in the USA. GB was already in pain when she came to power. Her policies provided a chance for renewal. Of course if you suffer the delusion that there is an iron rice bowl somewhere you’ll never agree.
From here UKIP looks like the rightwing of the Conservative Party. The GOP greybeards should take note.
Seeing how this is a “Weekend Open Thread”, might a bit of advice be solicited for a serious, but low-priced, number-crunching ‘computing’ platform?
Needed is a computer containing on the order of 64 GB of RAM installed and budgeting is only allowing about US $650 to be spent … willing to compromise on ‘speed’ and number of ‘cores’ so something (slow?) in the area of a 2 GHz clock are acceptable … don’t need a whole lot of disk space at present and graphics is not a concern either. Just gobs and gobs of RAM.
The goal is to get away from continual memory ‘swapping’ that takes place on the present PC (a 3 GHz “Core2 Duo” Dell Optiplex 755 with 8 GB of RAM running Win 7 x64 Pro SP1) … the last run took over 3 days on account of the amount of time used in disk (virtual memory) I/O where the CPU utilization shows really _low_ during those periods when disk swapping takes place. The ‘peak’ memory used on the last run was something over 40 GB (on a Dell 755 with only 8 GB memory installed).
Some of the platforms meeting the criteria above (on eBay) look to be Dell PowerEdge 2950 (and C1100) series servers, but I have no idea (or experience) how these perform executing a single user program (vs acting as a “server” with appropriate server software) under a copy of, say, Win 7 Pro x64.
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Recently it’s been pointed out in comments that climate sensitivity is a function of forcing and temperature and nothing else, and it’s been argued that the source of the forcing doesn’t matter with respect to feedbacks. If this is indeed so, it seems to me to be a matter of straightforward arithmetic to establish a low climate sensitivity. I’m perfectly aware that this can’t possibly be a new argument btw, but being a relative newbie I haven’t heard it before. What’s the counter argument to this? Why is this argument not persuasive, or what have I done wrong?
Premise: Every year we observe changes in global temperature as the Earth moves between perihelion and aphelion in its orbit of the Sun. Given the known distances between the Earth and the Sun at perihelion and aphelion and the global temperature changes, we may therefore compute climate sensitivity and apply our result to a doubling of CO2, assuming as given that a doubling of CO2 increases forcing by 3.7 W/m2.
Data:
Earth distance from Sun at aphelion – approx 152,000,000 km (numerous sources)
Earth distance from Sun at perihelion – approx 147,000,000 km (numerous sources)
Radius of Sun – approx 695,000 km (numerous sources)
Radiation intensity on surface of sun – approx 63,300,000 W/m^2 (numerous sources)
From (http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Final-BW-Print-Version-TIS_html_5f0398df.png) :
Global temperature at aphelion – approx 15.8C
Global temperature at perihelion – approx 12.0C
Methods and arithmetic:
Formulas:
Solar radiation intensity = [(R^2)Sun / (D^2)] * HSun
Sensitivity = delta T / delta F.
Area of a sphere = 4 pi R^2
Area of a circle = pi R^2
Calculations:
At aphelion we compute a forcing of :
At perihelion we compute a forcing of:
Note that:
We adjust for surface of a sphere instead of a disk, dividing deltaF by 4:
and end up with a sensitivity of
This gives us, for a forcing increase of 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of CO2,
Results:
climate sensitivity = .165 (C * m^2 / W)
increase in C per doubling of CO2 = 0.6C
So what’s wrong with this argument?
Here’s a question that I’ve been wondering about. Does the earth’s interior conduct heat to the surface at a uniform rate through time? It seems likely that it would, but I haven’t heard anyone discuss this. Does anyone know of anyone studying this, links to it or other sources?
I am an American but I lived in the north of England 1985-87 in a small town, Knaresborough, and enjoyed the experience greatly. However, it was hard times for many of the locals as the coal pits, factories, and shipyards were closing and unemployment was very high. Every Friday night the 10 O’Colck news totted up the week’s joblosses with a big odometer type display marking each closure. What surprised me was the complete unwillingness of people to relocate even a few miles to where jobs were more plentiful. Didn’t want leave their friends and their local they said.
Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, was a big hero to the locals. I suggested that based on the wackiness of their economic policies the Mineworkers could merge with the National Union of Teachers and become the NUM-NUTs.
I wonder if many Americans know that until recently the Labour Party used to open and close their annual conferences by waving red flags and singing the Internationale. There were less communist trappings and rhetoric from the peasants when I previously lived in China. Eye opening for me.
UKIP is the only significant UK party that hasn’t been taken over by the Green Treen movement, and the European Empire. And is therefore capable of free thought. Consequently it is the only party with a sensible energy policy. And the only party that believes that charity begins at home.
andrewmharding says:
April 13, 2013 at 7:44 am
‘and the poor got richer and happier umder her leadership’ so much so that they spent most of the 80s rioting, because of her policies! And when she brought in the ‘poll tax’ that doomed her leadership to the bin!
William Marshall says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:16 am
The poll tax was a good idea and fair, especially compared to the Council Tax that replaced it. A morass of meaningless ever-changing bands that can be used to “punish” people for being too wealthy? No thanks.
Of course I’d rather have neither tax.
And contrary to your claims the UK did not spend the majority of the 80s rioting. Those riots that did occur were a people whipped into a frenzy by labourites who wanted to destroy Thatcher and the right by any means possible. She was bringing real prosperity to this country, highlighting the failure of Labour policies for years beforehand and they couldn’t stand it. Nor could they stand that she was a working class woman who got to the top of the “party of the rich”. They hated her because she revealed everything about them to be a complete scam.
So they doubled down the scam.
And you fell for it. And now I’m stuck with the results of that. Thanks a lot.
In her book “Statecraft” PM Thatcher clearly is critical of the global warming crowd. Did she “regret” her former stance? We don’t know, but we do know that she no longer shared the views of Hansen, et. al. who she knew to be wrong about the climate. Shame she was instrumental in setting up the IPCC and that den of incompetents in East Anglia.
Speaking of the poor from personal experience: I was born in 1930’s built public housing in Germany. It was a cesspool of father-less families (including mine), laziness, drunkeness, and criminality. Being in Germany the stoops were clean. We immigrated to the USA to escape.
The notion that “the poor” should be consulted on economic policy is lunacy. They will take what they can and exploit every opportunity presented by those who don’t know them. Let them riot. The fact that they do is a sign you are doing the right thing.
Climate consensus is 97% of an unidentified uni-think population behaving as if it had a single brain. The speed at which this population syncs up on a notion is proportional to the speed of email. You are more likely to trisect an angle with a hockey stick and a bungie cord than modify these monothoughts (a variant humanoid tribe not yet taxonomically ranked).
Mark Bofill, you write “So what’s wrong with this argument?”
Simple. The number for climate sensitivity has not been measured. What physics, and the scientific method is based on, is forming a hypothesis from observed data, then postulating some number that can be measure which follows from the hypothesis. The warmists have hypothesised that CO2 causes global warming. They claim there is such a thing as the climate sensitivity of CO2, and they ascribe various estimates to this idea; one of which is yours.
However, no-one will ever know what the actual number is until it has been measured, and at the same time an accuracy of measurement is established. At this moment it is impossible to measure climate sensitivity, so your number, like all others, is nothing more that a SWAG (Scientific Wild Arsed Guess). All we know is that climate sensitivity is probably positive, and has some maximum value. Other than that, your guess is as good as anyone else’s. My guess is that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero.
The answer is to stop exhaling. This may be a bit extreme, so I propose eliminating ever third exhale. Compromise is a good thing, no?
_Jim;
Some of the platforms meeting the criteria above (on eBay) look to be Dell PowerEdge 2950 (and C1100) series servers, but I have no idea (or experience) how these perform executing a single user program
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are asking a very complicated question. If your app is single threaded you will be better off with a higher GHz processor as additional core count won’t help your performance. If your hard drive requirements are small, consider an SSD or a Hybrid (SATA with a SSD cache). This will make a massive difference to performance if the app is disk intensive, which it sounds like it is. More ram is almost always better, but not all apps are written to take advantage of large ram space in the first place, so you don’t always get the performance boost you expect.
_Jim says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:01 am
Jim, I would recommend buying the parts from a source such as Newegg.com. You could build a great system for 400-450$.
Is your number crunching your own code, or existing programs?
If the former, get yourself one of the high-end Nvidia cards and learn how to write CUDA-C. The Tesla Kepler series cards yield several TFlops of single precision performance (K10, K20, K20X) and just over 1 TFlop of double precision performance (K20, K20X). The primary programming language is C with differences added in for massive parallelization. Learning the threading model, and particularly how to make sure things work synchronously, is the hardest part of using these processing beasts.
Mark
Mark Bofill;
So what’s wrong with this argument?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What’s wrong is that the calculation you used is based on a change to the amount of energy being input to the system as a whole. Doubling CO2 changes the amount of energy being put into the system as a whole by precisely zero. What a doubling of CO2 does is rearrange where the energy is at any given time with some altitudes increasing (close to surface for example) and other altitudes decreasing, but the “average” remains the same. So you can’t compare the two. The 3.7 w/m2 from CO2 doubling doesn’t occur at any given altitude, it is actually “smeared” across the atmospheric column and so doesn’t behave anything like an increase in insolation at TOA.
mods ~ hidey hole snared one. Can’t for the life of me figure out why. But TIA.
Margaret Thatcher is reviled on the left for her action against the miners, which is blamed for closing down many deep coal mines.
If the ‘Greens’ have their way in reducing the amount of coal burnt to generate electricity, what will be the effect on coal mining?
William, the poor had the opportunity for the first time in their lives, to better themselves, to buy their council house, to move where the jobs were “social mobility” was the key. The poll tax was a good idea, badly sold, that made everyone pay for local amenities, such as roads, the police, libraries, parks etc instead of just home owners. The left wing agitators kept orchestrating riots with the usual suspects (the ne’er do wells, who spend their lives scrounging off everyone else and who resent anyone else trying to better themselves) who did not see why they should pay for the facilities that they use, because they had never paid for anything with their own moneuy before.
What doomed her leadership to the bin was the handful of “wets” who wanted us to join the Euro and stuck the literal knife in her back!
Margaret Thatcher was initially enthusiastic about the EU and turned against that.
I’ve frequently noticed that people who are sceptical about AGW are often sceptical about the EU as well. (Not just because the EU impose all the crazy green directives.)
There are striking similarities between the climate saga and the Euro. Before it was introduced I thought that a single currency and exchange rate would never work with such a wide range of countries. I still cannot comprehend why the good and the great of seventeen countries couldn’t wait to join. The consensus was clear, but it was wrong.
I still cannot understand why any country would wish to give up control of their borders, banking, working hours, food safety, agriculture and fisheries, environment , etc., to join the EU.
However, like climate change decisions by politicians and others, all the consequences are beginning to emerge. It will take many years, perhaps decades for the mistakes to be admitted.
J Martin says:
April 13, 2013 at 9:22 am
“In my opinion leaving the EU is not an economically sensible action, indeed I think the UK should join the Euro, but I also think we should require that some absurdly managed countries leave the Euro.”
Thanks for your answer. And an interesting stance on the Euro – what you’re saying seems to be basically if the Euro were a sensible currency the UK should join it.
To which I would say: But it isn’t, so you better not.
Germany BTW is in hock for 1 tn EUR (via TARGET2 and some of the bailout funds); so expect us to sooner or later throw some good money after bad to avoid facing bankruptcy just now. The Euro is a prisoner’s dilemma.
We are always eager to invite other nations into it. Have some fun and some drama in your life. It’s boring without the Euro.
davidmhoffer says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:48 am
“If your app is single threaded you will be better off with a higher GHz processor as additional core count won’t help your performance. ”
If he wants to crunch numbers and his app is single-threaded, there is often a cheap workaround: Divide the problem space in as many parts as you have cores and let each core work with that part. Or, for genetic algorithms:
My personal number crunching is based on genetic algorithms so can profit from simply running on all cores available in parallel; which increases the likelihood of a positive mutation. The app itself is single threaded and is started n times. The apps communicate via files, basically stealing individuals from each other so a positive mutation can jump from the gene pool in one app to the next.
Jim Cripwell says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:44 am
——–
Thanks Jim. Actually, I could rephrase the lead in and conclusion of my argument if you like as follows: The IPCC claims a most likely value of 2C temperature increase per doubling of CO2, based on the assumptions I used. Using those assumptions, I provide an argument that doubling CO2 will cause no more than a 0.6C temperature increase. For those who choose not to accept one or more of the assumptions; that’s perfectly OK with me – not accepting the assumptions also invalidates the IPCC position on 2C per doubling.
What I was really after is, from the perspective of a warmist – Is my fly down or is there spinach in my teeth arguing this?
_Jim says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:01 am
“The goal is to get away from continual memory ‘swapping’ that takes place on the present PC”
What kind of data is it that is so huge?
Did you try an SSD? I have one running nonstop for a year now, it hasn’t slowed down noticeably and it’s maybe 10 times faster than a harddisk; when you copy loads of small files even more as no head movements are necessary.
thelastdemocrat says:
April 13, 2013 at 9:20 am
……” – including a system where citizen brigades get trained to understand industry surveillance, and carry it out themselves in a manner approved by citizens, govt officials and industry –…
If you think government bureaucracy is a barrier to economic development, just give “citizen brigades” like WWF, Greenpeace, Sierra Club etc a voice in watching over a private company’s operations.
Now, if you’d proposed something really radical, like corporate representatives surveilling government officials, I’d be on-board with that. If the likes of the EPA were being watched by reps from Exxon and BP, I think they’d need to work a whole lot harder to get things like CO2 regulated. At least we’d have a window into the dealings of government regulators rather than the way it is now, where citizens and corporations are completely disregarded in the process of making regulations.
What pi$$e$ me off about the idiots celebrating the death of Thatcher is they are kids, or at least the visible ones, who have no idea whatsoever what life was like in the ’70’s.
The UK was dreadful. Rubbish piled high with rats circling the bins. 29,000,000 man days lost through strike action in a single year. Unions abusing their power, bringing a once great nation to it’s knees etc etc etc.
I used to be a labour supporter having been brought up on a huge council estate where the rule was you took what you could, mostly from the state, but also from your neighbours. The ’70’s turned me into a Tory.
Thatcher was the first Tory I voted for, but she wasn’t the last. From being a card carrying labour voter, the unions turned me into a Tory,although I was on the front-line of the poll tax protests. Crushing Scargill was the best thing that Thatcher did for the county.
Thatcher, may she rest in peace, was the last of the conviction politicians, who rightly or wrongly stood for what they believed in not what they can get out of the system
Mark, it’s an existing commercial app; it solves Maxwell’s equations using a multitude of tetrahedron’s in 3-space.
DirkH
Did you try an SSD? I have one running nonstop for a year now, it hasn’t slowed down noticeably
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It is unlikely to ever slow down but it will eventually start to shrink. As SSD’s age, cells lose their ability to have data written to them. This is not noticeable at first because a 100 GB SSD actually has anywhere from 120 GB to 150 GB on it. As cells “lock up” they are swapped out and spare cells are swapped in. Once you run out of spares though, your drive capacity starts to shrink. Rule of thumb is that the cheapo SSD’s are capable of about 1/2 PB of write through while more expensive “enterprise class” SSD’s are capable of 4 – 5 PB of write through.
Solution to Maxwell’s equations in 3-space as excited by structures defined within that space making use of a number of ‘tetrahedrons’ in the space. Larger, more complicated structures, more and smaller ‘tets’ as they say.
I thought about that, but, there is still the overhead of the OS to make “virtual memory” available to the application during execution. As it is, I bumped up the amount of virtual storage to 64 GB on a separate HD partition so as not to receive the application-stopping message saying “insufficient memory”.
Direct-access RAM would seem to be the answer, although a large, *fast* swap file would solve the issue of lots of ‘idle’ time created now using a spinning hard drive for the ‘swap’ (actually, “virtual memory”) file.
I might do both, buy a SSD now and then see how that goes to reducing task run-times first …
.
Mods – my posts seem to be getting snagged in the spam filter … TIA _Jim
Mark Bofill;
What I was really after is, from the perspective of a warmist – Is my fly down or is there spinach in my teeth arguing this?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The spam filter ate my last response to this, don’t know what the “trigger” word was, but I will take another crack at it.
The sensitivity calculation that you have done is predicated upon a change in the amount of energy being put into the system as a whole. CO2 doubling doesn’t change the amount of energy being put into the system, it changes where in the system the energy is concentrated at any given time. Thus “radiative forciing” or RF and “surface forcing” are not comparable, and the IPCC says so.:
Surface forcing has quite different properties than RF and should not be used to compare forcing agents (see Section 2.8.1). Nevertheless, it is a useful diagnostic, particularly for aerosols (see Sections 2.4 and 2.9).
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-2.html
There are essentially two types of SSDs: SLC (single-layer cell) and MLC (multi-layer cell). You could spend a long time comparing the two, but to keep it really simple, SLC lasts longer and is far more expensive. You could expect an SLC drive to last a lifetime. The enthusiast market is pretty much entirely MLC drives. An optimistic estimate for the lifespan of an MLC drive would be ten years. Intel is known to make the most reliable SSDs, but the performance per dollar of Intel SSDs won’t compare to some other manufacturers.
David, thanks, I should have known it couldn’t possibly be that easy. :). But your answer is what I was looking for. Much obliged.
Thursday’s CME due to hit some time after midnight GMT
_Jim;
One other thing you may want to consider is just upgrading what you have. You said yourself cpu utilization is very low. In other words, you’ve got the horsepower, but your transmission only has one gear and your tires are bald. You can more than likely upgrade the ram in your existing box, and ram is cheap. Given that it sounds like you are I/O bound at the disk level, you may want to just buy an SSD or Hybrid drive and see if it makes a big difference or not. If not you can always pull them out and install them in whatever you do buy.
Mark Bofill says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:02 am
. . . So what’s wrong with this argument?
Perihelion is in January at 147.5 million km. Aphelion is in July at 152.6 million km.
Otter says:
April 13, 2013 at 7:22 am
=====
That is one very confused ‘scientist’. He/she apparently doesn’t realize that the argument is over feedback.
Funny how those who fought their way free of the Nanny State seem to be it’s harshest critics. That alone should tell you something. Who in their right mind wants to join an organizational model dependent on your continued poverty. The state never “withers away” it simply grows larger whenever possible. Imagine yourself a citizen of the UK where a bankrupt energy policy based on a fairy tale is hobbling any chance of an economic recovery. My hat is off to those who refuse to yield.
All the polls indicate that the British people are split almost exactly fifty-fifty on Thatcher. Anyone who thinks the antagonism to her is just coming from the ‘loony left’ has completely lost the plot.
My own reaction to the news of her death surprised even me: I felt sorry for her. She must have realised that she had been duped – and I don’t just mean in connection with global warming. I’m sure she thought she was restoring a lost golden age of liberty, self-reliance, and free enterprise. In reality, she held the door open for the forces of global turbo-capitalism to destroy everything that made us British. The semi-fascist Britain we now inhabit would have been much harder to achieve if she had not cleared the ground for it.
While she was in power, I really hated her, and with a perfectly clear conscience. Now, I just feel rather sad. We are a very different country from what we were, and by no means a better one.
Mark Bofill writes “Is my fly down or is there spinach in my teeth arguing this?”
Sorry, Mark, my beef is with any “scientist” who pretends that their guess at what the climate sensitivity is, has some actual scientific meaning. No numeric value of climate sensitivity has ANY meaning at all, until it has been measured. So my beef is not with your method, but with your apparent claim that your number has a scientific meaning. IMHO. it does not; any more that my guess has a meaning.
The only numeric value of climate sensitivity which will EVER have a meaning is one that has been measured, and has a +/- accuracy with it. All other numbers, including mine, have no meaning whatsoever.
This is the problem with the IPCC claims in the SPMs that there is a >95% probability that something or other about CAGW is correct. There is no measurement of climate sensitivity, so all such claims are at best wrong, and at worst fraudulent.
The facts show that the socialist Harold Wilson when prime minister closed about 200 pits. Margaret Thatcher had about 90 closed. Yet the invective is directed at her. What is certain is that in future, all of the industry will close. As a consequence of Labour’s Climate Change Act of 2008, coal fired power stations will effectively be outlawed, leaving no future market for coalmining in the UK. Therefore, it is a moot point whether Wilson or Thatcher closed more pits, as the person responsible for completely shutting the mines will be the committed socialist Ed Miliband, the minister responsible for the CC Act.
Will we be seeing angry shouts of “Eddie! Eddie! Eddie! Out! Out! Out!”, in the near future?
David, there a couple replies of mine still stuck in moderation relevant to this, but I’ll add a little more here while I’m at it.
The CPU utilization is _low_ on account of the OS waiting for ‘stuff’ to get swapped back in off the HD and back into main memory for further processing. There are times that CPU utilization ‘maxes out’, such as during the early parts of the task, until the point where the 8 GB of RAM shows to be ‘used’ (full) up … then the heavy disk swapping starts, adding “virtual memory” to the mix of physical memory (a little more complicated than that) and CPU utilization drops off dramatically.
The Dells I’m using (Optiplex models 755 and 780) max out (max addressable) on memory at 8 and 16 GB respectively … hence I’m looking for something capable of accessing (natively) lots of RAM just to get all the tetrahedrons (in 3-space) in memory for processing … comments to DirkH further up-thread (but spam snagged) shed further light on the app.
An interesting thread. Firstly many commenters from the US and elsewhere lionising Thatcher. I’m not saying their viewpoint is invalid. But it is no more valid (and perhaps less) than my thoughts about Clinton, Nixon, Bush, Reagan etc.
And then there are the UK Hagiographers who think there was no-one like Maggie (and perhaps lived in the leafy shires which did rather well from her policies).
Nice to see I’m not entirely alone (see artwest 9:32 am and Schrodinger’s Cat 10:59 am) in suggesting that you don’t have to be a fan of dinosaur Union leaders in general or Arthur Scargill in particular, or have to be some pimpled “Socialist” yobo, to have (ahem) a somewhat nuanced view of Maggie Thatcher.
I have to declare an interest, I worked in technical management in the coal industry at the time and still do consultancy work from time to time. And I saw ‘up close and personal’ the way the miner’s strike played out and the devastating effect on mining communities (and the Coal Industry) which has lasted in some cases for a generation. This isn’t the time or the place for a full discussion on the strike, but I will say that Maggie was very lucky in her most notable opponents (Kinnock, Galtieri, Scargill), their crass stupidity played straight into her hands. And that it certainly wasn’t only the inept communist Scargill who brought politics to play – it had been 100% political since the strike was planned by Thatcher and the Tory Party before she was even elected.
All that sticks in my craw.
All that could be forgiven, perhaps, if she really was part (with Ronald Reagan) of the defeat of Communism in 1989. But how much credit does she deserve for that? Certainly she was in the right place at the right time and had made the right noises. But would the USSR have imploded anyway? Hard to say. I could make a reasoned argument both ways.
But, as others have noted, she was a major supporter of the EU before soon seeing the error of her ways.
She was also without doubt the single most important senior ‘Statesman’ promoter of the GlowBull Warming scam.
http://www.thegwpf.org/margaret-thatcher-climate-sceptic/
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
Yes, she eventually saw the mistake she had made (although, to my knowledge, never ‘fessing up.) And her criticism of the ‘alarmists’ was way too little, way too late. She was arguably the Frankenstein who breathed air into the whole corrupt monster.
But everyone forgets that, now.
The fact remains that she was, without any doubt, the most divisive leader in my lifetime. And it is simply not good enough to suggest that people who resent the money and brouhaha lavished on her funeral must be members of the Socialist Workers Party or Respect or the Green Party. There are millions in the UK who find it very hard to forgive or to forget. And if playing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” blows a raspberry to the incompetents who rule us now (or their pathetic ‘loyal opposition’ – all pygmies compared to Maggie, in all fairness), then I may catch myself humming along.
@Edward Bancroft says: April 13, 2013 at 12:23 pm
I’m just about as likely to put a picture of Wilson (or Scargill, or Eddie Milipede) on my bedroom wall, as I am to put one up of Maggie.
But, with respect, the comment about Wilson closing 200 pits is tripe. Yes, he closed a lot of exhausted, completely uneconomic little pits, ones that had been thrashed to death during the War and which even the Unions accepted were unsaveable. And Labour, after the six days war, introduced The Plan for Coal in 1974, setting out an expanded and modernised industry.
Maggie, and her glove puppet Major, closed a lot more than 90 pits, a number of which were brand new, highly productive and hadn’t even been paid for.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3500979.stm
There are now three operating deep coal mines in the UK, although (mainly imported) Coal produced 41.5% of electricity last year.
The fact that Milipede is an incompetent imbecile isn’t much of a defence of Maggie’s spite.
Alls fair. It’s true that I am not from the UK and that Thatcher was controversial and all that. Of course many of the coal mines were totally un-economical weren’t they. That was the point then and it’s still the point. The coal mining communities formed at the pitheads to exploit the resource. That boom was long past by 1980. Other than developing something new for the miners to do or paying them out of the national pocket to do make-work what would you have suggested. Ding-dong is a little phrase that can be used in lots of ways.
Jimmy Haigh. says:
April 13, 2013 at 8:49 am
————————————————-
I suggest that your declaration is false that the Falklands invasion could have been prevented by diplomacy. The military tyrants of Buenos Aires in 1979 were no different than the tyrant there now, in their complete disregard for the will of the inhabitants of the islands. What do you suggest Britain should have surrendered in the negotiation with the Generalissimos? It is much more likely that some sort of concession would have strengthened and prolonged the dictatorship, with an invasion to follow whenever politically useful.
My comments seem to be disappearing without trace.
Thanks Jim. It’s not tremendously important, but I’d like to note that my argument was intended to be a rebuttal against a claim of high sensitivity rather than an original argument for a specific sensitivity. One of the ways to do that is to accept the premises of the argument you’re trying to refute and show they don’t lead where they’re supposed to. It’s become a moot point since David pointed out I’m mixing apples And oranges. 🙂
Spoke too soon – comment now posted.
Watched John Ford’s masterpiece “How Green Was My Valley’ about a week ago. As with his American westerns he “shot the myth” and it is beautiful. Saw ” Master and Commander” last night. Suggest those British traits sorely in need there and here right now.
_jim
This site may be of some help.
http://www.tomshardware.com/
Mark Bofill, you write “Thanks Jim.”
Let me note that climate sensitivity MUST have a maximum value; reductio ad absurdum, no-one is suggesting adding CO2 to the atmosphere will increase temperatures by 1,000,000 C. If you had phrased you analysis as an estimate of what the maximum value of climate sensitivity might be, then I cannot see how anyone can have an objection.
“I suggest that your declaration is false that the Falklands invasion could have been prevented by diplomacy.” know what you mean there. Shocked a little group of elders from my own family once by declaring that the French should have invaded the Fatherland to squash Adolf in 1935. The current US administration came into office stating that we were not talking to the North Koreans or Iranians enough. Hows that working for them.
Two groups destroyed British industry: the trade unions and Thatcher. Indeed, just as the BBC led the charge for the absurd notion of global warming and the Tories today went along. So in the 1980s the BBC led the charge to destroy UK industry and the Tories went along.
Her only redeeming grace … well I worked in a factory and nearly caused a mass walk out because I got fed up waiting for someone to come and move our stuff and carried a box with our work to a new office so I could get on with work.
But YES she got rid of this kind nonsense in the UK workforce … but like so many other places the way it was done was to get rid of the industry rather than tackling the actual problem of the unions.
And I will never forgive her for that destruction.
Some fact correction on Thatcher:
A recent poll by the Guardian (Marxist-socialist broadsheet) found opinion divided 50% pro-Thatcher, 34% against. In other words the equivalent of an electoral landslide such as those she enjoyed when in office. Another poll by the Sun (working man’s tabloid, pro-Thatcher, pro-Blair) found Thatcher to be the favourite prime minister of all time (well ahead of Churchill).
More pits were closed under Harold Wilson (former Labour prime minister who resigned at the height of his powers, simply because the heat in the kitchen from his own party was too much) than under Thatcher. Coal mining in the UK had simply become uneconomic compared to foreign competitors. The pits would have been closed had Thatcher been there or not.
Arther Scargill of the National Union of Miners called the 1984-5 miner’s strike without holding a ballot of members. This eventually brought about the end of the strike (the Nottinghamshire miners tried to get a ballot called, and when it wasn’t, they went back to work over the issue). Not a single other union came out on strike in support of the miners.
When asked about the subsidising of loss-making pits, Arthur Scargill replied that such subsidies should be “unlimited”. That is the nub of the issue.
All the best.
I left Britain in the early 1970s as part of the ‘brain drain’. I used to return regularly and I shall always remember the change in attitudes of the average Brit between 1975 and 1985, from bloody minded bolshies to reasonable and rational human beings.
Thatcher was brilliant, the present crowd in power in the UK are clowns in comparison.
Lewandowsky would be proud of me for this conspiracy theory: you are more likely to believe in CAGW if you hate/despise Thatcher and Reagen In other words, fantasists hate realists.
Is everyone ready for the coming stock market crash and the next recession?
martinbrumby says:
April 13, 2013 at 12:29 pm
“And it is simply not good enough to suggest that people who resent the money and brouhaha lavished on her funeral must be members of the Socialist Workers Party or Respect or the Green Party.”
Your labor party is controlled by the Fabians, yet you need another socialist party?
DR says:
April 13, 2013 at 1:12 pm
“Is everyone ready for the coming stock market crash and the next recession?”
Yup.
J Martin says:
April 13, 2013 at 9:22 am
“I am strongly opposed to their anti EU standpoint and believe it should be made to work, in practise we cannot run away from it as we do half our trade with the EU.”
Doing half your trade with them is not enough of a reason! Maybe join Germany, but France, Spain, Italy, Greece…? If the UK had longer sighted glasses on, they have a giant productive English-speaking world that they created but haven’t taken sufficient advantage of. Hell, you have more in common with India and they will themselves eclipse the economic power of all of Europe in the near future. Perhaps its a bit old fashioned now but once the British used to say that Americans are just Britishers misbehaving away from home. Instead of half your trade with EU, the amount of your trade with them would stay the same but it would account for 1/10th of the total if you invested your efforts more in the English-speaking world where we understand each other (except when government goes off on a periodic excursion into that dark political world invented in continental Europe that no one has been able to make work). Too bad Margaret Thatcher didn’t have this vision it would have become a reality. I regard MT as a giant who accomplished the impossible. Okay, no one is perfect, they all make mistakes big and small, but she was far more perfect than the picture one gets from much of the partisan criticisms I’ve been hearing and reading about.
A number of (not-very-well-read) people here have queries just what UKIP means here in the UK. UKIP means a break from the well-ensconced political ‘elite’, those who have attended Oxbridge, got a useless degree and immediately entered politics. Almost all of Britain’s serving MPs have never held a meaningful, productive job. UKIP intends bringing back to local bodies powers presently retained by Westminster. See here :- http://www.ukip.org/
However, UKIP must keep looking over their shoulder. There is a small, but growing accretion of support for a new, a very new idea emerging on the British political scene, one which will prove very disturbing to the presently-ensconced ‘elite’. It is the Harrogate Agenda and it makes eminent sense.
http://harrogateagenda.com/
Just read about it and then think about it. It means returning ‘power’ to the people and making government responsible to us, the people.
What is not to like?
Recollections of times under Maggie
My mother was an NHS doctor in some of the most deprived – and about to become more deprived – parts of south-east London and my dad worked for the National Theatre. University and drama college respectively had been possible for them only because of grants. My sister and I were at the local state primary then secondary schools, and we went to university only because my parents started saving, hard, as soon as they saw the way the wind was blowing.
At school, things started disappearing. Milk, obviously. Playing fields. Sports and science equipment, overhead projectors, art materials broke, wore out, got used up and weren’t replaced. When I started school, there was a textbook per pupil. By the time I left, we were down to one for every two or three.
Teachers started striking and the school fell into disarray. This was partly because children tend to be unfamiliar with the reasons behind collective political actions and feel, however wrongly, abandoned; and partly because, if they see their teachers being treated with contempt for long enough, children will follow the example.
Meanwhile, in the NHS, my mother and her colleagues looked on, baffled, furious and ultimately beaten, as rafts of managers and other bureaucrats – knowing nothing, improving little and earning much – rushed in to fill the spaces where medical staff and beds once stood. Later, her clinics and surgeries and caseload would be filled disproportionately by the mentally ill and otherwise vulnerable. These people had been turfed out of long-term hospital facilities on prime real estate to roam the streets instead, under the “care in the community” programme – a programme which might have worked but for the ongoing destruction of its eponymous components. Her home-visit patients suffered as benefits, council housing and social services shrank. It became harder for them to escape mistakes, the effects of illness or abusive partners, and she picked her way through charred detritus to get to many of them, after the rage smouldering among the unemployed and disenfranchised ignited as the Brixton riots.
Cuts slashed at subsidised theatre, along with the rest of the arts, too, as you would expect under the aegis of an arts minister, Richard Luce, as philistine as his leader, who believed “the only test of our ability to succeed is whether we can attract enough customers”. But because our family had, as a result of Dad’s job, a lot of gay friends, it is less the impact of the cuts that I remember than the absurdity and cruelty of Section 28, which tried to tell the world that our friends, the people who came for lunch and made us laugh, who told me and my sister bedtime stories, who helped my mum look after dad when he got ill, who loved us and each other, weren’t fit to be mentioned by anyone in charge of our moral or intellectual welfare.
I’m dancing on no graves. I’m just remembering.
( HT to Lucy Mangan.)
artwest:
In your post at April 13, 2013 at 9:32 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/13/weekend-open-thread-6/#comment-1274294
you say of Margaret Thatcher
I have often come across that assertion, but it is not true.
Margaret Thatcher created the AGW-scare for a much more personal reason than that. However, her political party was willing to support – at least, to not oppose – her AGW campaign because it was anti- coal.
People wanting the truth of these matters can read the item at
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/richard-courtney-the-history-of-the-global-warming-scare/
Richard
Here in the UK we have a right wing pressure group who complain and lobby against anything they see as a waste of taxes. This group, the Taxpayers Alliance ( I know it an odd name considering only the very wealthy do not pay taxes in the UK) complain bitterly against welfare payments or arts funding, but seem strangely silent on the costs of a full military funeral for Maggie Thatcher, just as they did for the Royal wedding, or the Jubilee and other establishment beanos. One thing Maggie did ensure, is that even in her grave the UK remains a divided and stratified society where establishment ceremonies are untouchable, while welfare health and education are seen as frivolities. By the way, if she were in power today she would toe the Conservative line and be a skeptic, it’s just when she was Prime minister climate science had not evolved into the politicised debate that now graces these pages.
Did anybody read the article that Bill Mc Kibben did for Rolling Stone Magazine? I feel bad for the young people who read this sort of thing and “believe” it. No data required, just scary hyperbole. I did learn something: The Sierra Club is dropping it’s civil disobedience ban. Since they have lost on the science it looks like the mainstream environmentalist have to resort to crime. Of course they will call it climate justice. If you can spare a moment for a quick read:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411#add-a-comment
Leave a comment and help the little tikes out.
I think someone in an earlier post said they might support UKIP if they were not so anti-EU. The whole purpose of UKIP is to take Britain out of the EU. If UKIP were elected to government that is the first thing they would do – which is why I support them and vote for them.
Margaret Thatcher was the finest peacetime Prime Minister we in the UK have ever had and are ever likely to have. Comparison with any present British politician is not possible as she was a colossus and they are pygmies. A lot is being written today about her being ‘divisive’. This is actually a result of mishearing as the correct description is ‘decisive’. All this dancing around by the left-wing detritus shows just how wonderful and successful she was.
“Consensus: “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?”
― Margaret Thatcher
It should be noted that the mechanism by which the EU commission arrives at decision is…
…consensus.
…it shows…
_Jim;
Mark, it’s an existing commercial app; it solves Maxwell’s equations using a multitude of tetrahedron’s in 3-space.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
If you have a link to the app’s web site, that would help (though I may not have time to look at it right away). Bottom line from your other comments is that an SSD will most likely help. It will still be a ram drive, but it will be a really, Really, REALLY fast ram drive. Since the amount of actual data sounds small, a Hybrid drive may give you most of the improvement with a lot more capacity for the bucks you spend. If the app supports the use of an nVidia card you probably want to consider that as an upgrade option as well. The nVidia card will run circles around anything you can do with processors and ram when it comes to floating point math. But the app has GOT to support it or not worth bothering with.
Bottom line is that the app vendor ought to be publishing guidelines re performance and those should guide your decision making more than anything else. The problem with going by your current experience is that there are multiple bottlenecks in any performance profile, and making a change may fix one only to reveal another one just below it. If this is a commercial app, there should be some info on their site to help make big picture config decisions.
mods ~ another down the hidey hole again. What’s the new protocol for giving you guys the heads up when that happens? TIA.
You might like to read my take on Mrs Thatcher — http://donaitkin.com/the-complex-margaret-thatcher/
Mark Bofill – I have no reason to doubt your calculations, but the sensitivity you calculate is over a short period. The “IPC” sensitivity is ECS (Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity) which takes many years to be reached. The IPCC don’t say how many. I get the impression from the IPCC report that they think it’s around 80 years, but I’m happy to be corrected.
Apologies if someone has already said this, I haven’t read all comments.
About the EU and the Euro : As originally envisaged, the EU was a free-trade zone. Then the bureaucrats got stuck in and the rule-book just grew and grew and the bureaucrats got more and more power, and the Euro was a part of that process. The idea that GB should join the Euro is absurd – the Euro is unsustainable, it’s tearing the EU apart, and surely has to be abandoned. at the very least, if Greece and Cyprus, eg, don’t leave it, then Germany may have to.
Paul Deacon says: “When asked about the subsidising of loss-making pits, Arthur Scargill replied that such subsidies should be “unlimited”. That is the nub of the issue.”
The nub of the issue is that Thatcher, the Tories, the BBC and academia created a total myth about “old industry” being dead. The reality is that industry wasn’t dead, but the idiots who ran the banks and government told everyone to stop investing in “dead” industry.
Not only did that loose investment, it meant industry stopped attracting the bright people who were needed to make it work and we entered a vicious cycle of decline whereby the failure of industry caused by Thatcherism was taken of proof that it was going to fail so re-enforcing the myth that it was bound to fail.
Indeed, unless you hadn’t noticed the idiots who believe in global warming (BBC Academia and government) are exactly the twats who put the knife into UK engineering and who so hated the the engineers and pragmatic people who now form the majority of sceptics
In other words Thatcherism was not only the first global warming nutter … she largely stoked up the cultural war between enegineers and scientists which led to
1. The destruction of UK manufacturing
2. The irrational belief in global warming
3, The irrational idea of “endogenous growth theory” (which is really just borrow a lot of money and hope the huge banking industry will make the economy get bigger …until the bubble burst).
Thatcherism, was the same anti-industry ethos which created the anti-industry idea of global warming.
Thatcherism and global warming were just two sides of the same idiotic ANTI INDUSTRY vitreol.
If it’s Darwin or Darwinians you have in mind, different species cannot interbreed. What these folks might be seeing is interbreeding between two “groups,” for lack of a better of word,” of shark that were thought to be a different species but now are known not to be.
troe:
I am responding to your post at April 13, 2013 at 12:47 pm. Thatcher was – and is – very divisive so several posters have been very partisan in this thread. Others have been more balanced. And I will try to be factual.
Your post says in total
Firstly, it was not only the mining communities which were deliberately destroyed by government policy in the Thatcher era because other industries were also destroyed; i.e. steel, shipbuilding, etc. . This was because the Thatcher government decided to switch the UK economy from production industries to “service industries” (i.e. banking and financial services).
It is a matter of opinion as to whether this was good or bad policy. However, it did have significant immediate and long-term effects. Like all changes, it provided ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ with the result of the extreme pro and anti attitudes to Margaret Thatcher.
In the immediate term a result of the change was devastation of the towns and cities which were deprived of the factories, steel mills, shipyards and coal mines upon which they depended. Many have still not recovered a generation later. Everybody suffered in such towns: for example, late on a Friday it was announced that Grimethorpe Colliery would close and, therefore, first thing on the following Monday morning Tesco announced it was to close its Grimethorpe supermarket because unemployed people would be unable to buy anything.
This deliberate closure of industries destroyed 20% of the UK economy and was only possible because the North Sea oil revenues had come on-stream.
And it was only politically possible because the government bought votes. People were given the right to buy a Council house at well below its market value if they lived in it. This was a direct transfer of capital from taxpayers to those who became owners of the houses for less than their worth. But somebody hoping to buy a Council house or who had bought one would vote Tory because Thatcher’s party would not recover the lost capital. With passage of time it became impossible to regain the lost capital so all political parties now accept it. But the Council housing has been lost with the result that ‘affordable housing’ has become a serious problem in the UK.
In the longer term this transition from production to service industries greatly increased the UK’s reliance on banking and so banking and financial services became about 40% of the UK economy. ‘All eggs in one basket’ is risky. It took a generation before the ‘basket’ obtained a ‘hole’ when the US had a banking crisis. The knock-on effects of this on the UK were a disaster so the UK obtained a triple-dip recession and still shows no signs of recovery.
Achievement of this economic transition required closure of the coal industry, and that was only possible if the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) were destroyed because it was the most powerful trade union in the country. Nicholas Ridley (who, coincidentally, was my MP) devised the Ridley Plan for this. It had two basic components which the Thatcher government applied.
Coal was stockpiled at power stations and ports both in the UK and elsewhere. Any strike or threat of a strike from the NUM would be -and was – capitulated until the stockpiles were sufficient to outlast any NUM strike. The government would then deliberately induce a strike at the start of a summer when need for coal was least. This trigger was assisted by the total incompetence of Arthur Scargill who was President of the NUM. Also, the Thatcher government conducted a successful propaganda campaign which induced a split in the NUM so the Nottinghamshire miners did not join the strike because they were fooled into thinking their mines would not be closed. The strike lasted a year before the miners were starved back to work and, thus, the NUM was broken.
This removed the NUM as an impediment to closure of the coal industry. And that closure was justified by the tactic of “The Uneconomic Tail”.
Prior to defeat of the NUM the coal industry was structured in Regions with several mines in each Region. The mines had become highly mechanised. A mine operated retreat or advance mining but in either case this required a development and a production phase. During development the mine created all the tunnels and facilities needed to cut a panel of coal: this had high cost and no profit because no coal was produced. During production the panel was extracted: this had low costs and high profits because coal was being extracted for sale.
A Region made planned and constant profits because at all times some mines were in development while others were in production.
The Ridley Plan declared that each mine was an individual profit centre and would be closed as being uneconomic if it failed to make a profit over a financial year. But no mine made a profit in a year when it had a development phase. Hence, by this tactic, each mine was declared uneconomic when it reached a development phase and, therefore, it was closed.
I hope this explains the issues which you raised.
Richard
PS I held office – which I retained in five elections – of being the Vice President of the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM) and, of course, BACM Members had to apply the Ridley Plan.
Ah, my 20th year, when Ronald Reagan was President, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister of Canada.
The Cold War was NOT ramping down on its own, and even though we tend to forget about the importance of the Cold War on decisions made all through the 60s-70s-80s, it was the Giant Axe hanging over our heads each and every day. Today’s youth do not remember, and ARE NOT TOLD, what it was like in those days. Somehow “my” generation has forgotten to tell them.
It was difficult to be born in the 60s and not, you know, just KNOW that eventually there would be a nuclear war. A series of world leaders bowed to the Soviet Union, letting them bang their shoes on tables, invade a few smaller countries. Occasionally someone performed a heroic act showing backbone, like stopping missile deployment in Cuba in 1962 or defeating their hockey team in 1972.
However, in the 80s a new group of leaders stood up to the Soviet Union in a different way. I’m more than willing to give in on many aspects of those three leaders’ actions because in the big picture it was more important to defeat the Soviet Union.
I’m not saying Reagan or Thatcher or Mulroney single-handedly defeated the Bear, or anything that sounds like hero-worship. I don’t do hero worship, since I believe there are no Heroes, only Heroic Acts. However, these three were the “trifecta” of defeat for a crippled giant. They made life difficult for Soviet leadership, and presided over an era where communication was starting to let the average Soviet citizen understand just how crappy things were for them.
In the end, The Soviet Union never really “collapsed”, it just succumbed to its own irrelevance. A vast area of the world was left rudderless for a while, and even taken over by criminal elements and thugs, and STILL were better off than they were under Soviet rule.
My high personal respect for Reagan and Thatcher is not based on AGW or mines or jobs or any of that, in those things they were reasonably competent leaders. However, we would NOT be living in the world we are right now if the Soviet Union was still a major power. That is the legacy of both Reagan and Thatcher, which sadly may never be properly explained in history books.
R Taylor says:
April 13, 2013 at 12:49 pm
Jimmy Haigh. says:
April 13, 2013 at 8:49 am
————————————————-
“I suggest that your declaration is false that the Falklands invasion could have been prevented by diplomacy. …”
I just wrote of my recollections. I also remember Dr.David Owen, who was foreign Secretary in the 1977 Labour Government, saying the same thing around the time.
I agree with you in that had diplomacy worked in 1982 that the Generalissimos would have tried again at some later date. (Maybe they should have waited until the Tories had lost the 1983 election…)
” But perhaps the thing that ultimately she may come to be remembered most for will be for her leadership during the Falklands crisis. And in that regard she was truly a remarkable woman”
Well her initial leadership consisted of being a festering bag of indecision until CinC Fleet Stormed in in full uniform, reminded her that this was what you had a bloody navy for and told her that the islands can and must be recovered. The Islands were at risk because of the stupidity and ineptitude of her defence and diplomatic policies. Had the Argentines waited one more campaign season we would not have had the capability to mount operation corporate and the islands would have been lost. The only thing she can be praised for is not chickening out after the fleet sailed unlike Michael Foot, but that can be attributed to self preservation not statesmanship. The Falklands War was one more case of the armed forces digging the politicos out of the consequences of their own ineptitude.
As for winning the ’83 election that was no ‘khaki election’ , that was the consequence of Tony Benn and Militant Tendency playing Russian roulette with an automatic pistol.
A rule of thumb in the supercomputing field is “if it’s paging, you need more RAM.” Sure, SSD is faster than rotating memory, but just having the RAM is much faster still.
I built my current system and its predecessor from parts from Newegg. I doubt I saved much, if anything, but I did get a motherboard with a serial port and a parallel port, I use both!
Umm, 64 GB of RAM (8 8GB modules) will cost $400-$600 from Newegg. I don’t think it will be a great system for your application with less RAM.
Sigh, I remember the days when a good price on core memory was a dollar a byte.
Bloke down the pub says:
April 13, 2013 at 7:25 am
“I tried to post a comment on what the UK would have been like if Labour had won the election in’77, but apparently your new comments set-up would not allow me to say c**k-up. It obviously doesn’t know that it’s an old naval term.”
It was posted! WTF are you complaining about?
I’m kinda looking for hardware a generation back; Tom looks like he deals in bleeding edge stuff!
The difference between running bleeding edge stuff and -1 or -2 generation back stuff will be a simulation ‘run’ that is 2 or 3 hrs long vs 5 or 6 hrs long, but at a cost of a couple grand vs 600 US. I can wait the extra 3 to 4 hrs given the cost difference (It will be like in a ‘batch processing’ environment as in the ‘old days’ when time on an IBM 370 cost *real money* if not opting for ‘discount’ processing option on the JCL card…)
bernie1815 says:
April 13, 2013 at 7:54 am
I left the UK in 1973 after the most miserable few years imaginable, courtesy of the NUM and TWU: No trains, no heat and no jobs. The only thing we had plenty of was inflation. It stayed that way until the early 80s when suddenly people started investing in their businesses, pubs and homes. It was really noticeable when I went home to see my parents. My peers suddenly decided that they could start their own businesses and that it was OK to work hard and get rich. It is true we lived around London – as does 40% of the British population. But my Dad grew up in Liverpool. The culture up there – Beatles or not – was dreadful. It was Andy Capp land. As long as the dole enabled you to buy a pint and your fags, you managed. It was Greece without the sunshine. Bloody awful. It was amazing to see how fast things turned around, but I have no doubt that many of those in the mining communities suffered.
I am not sure how much of the turnaround was due to Thatcher but she did not get in the way. Alas the high-mindedness of the poll tax was a political poison pill after the MSM decided that they really preferred the antiquated local rates program.
As for the Thatcher haters – the operative word is “hate”. She called the Left on their corruption (see Scargill), their hypocrisy, their socialistic utopianism, their dependency, their ignorance and their naivete. They never, ever forgave her.”
They haven’t changed. Milliband’s lot are no better than Foot and his crowd.
BTW, this thread is looking like a UK political thead. A bit OT i feel!
martinbrumby says:
April 13, 2013 at 12:29 pm
I can sign up to that, absolutely.
But I would add that the immediate impact of Thatcher was great; whether good or bad, dependant on geography
John Major had a greater long-lasting effect on the UK.
The Olympics with out the Lottery would have been embarrassing.
He clarified our position in Europe. Bruges was waffle: Maastricht a treaty.
John Major made the peace in Northern Ireland.
If Thatcher had victories like that then no-one would comment on her passing. It was the divisiveness of “the enemy within” and the weakness of Argentina that lead to the mockery of Maggie.
richardscourtney says:
April 13, 2013 at 1:56 pm
Thanks for the correction and the link to your very interesting post.
J Martin says:
April 13, 2013 at 8:31 am
“3). But perhaps the thing that ultimately she may come to be remembered most for will be for her leadership during the Falklands crisis. And in that regard she was truly a remarkable woman.
Disclaimer. Despite the final line of praise, I never voted for her, though I did vote for her predecessor Edward Heath, thus to date I have voted for all three major parties, but over the last twenty years have given up voting as all 3 major parties are so much alike and of late have become just branches of the Green Party.
As our political system in the UK has stagnated I think perhaps I should set up my own political party, The Beneficial Dictator Party. I of course would be the Beneficial Dictator.”
I voted for Heath, but he was THE WORST PM we ever had and I quit the party unilt MT became Leader.
NO! I am the LEADER of the BDP! As Original Founder!
INRE: Commodities trading abuses – excessive speculation and distortion of markets and prices of the basic necessities of human life; carbon tax
This group has it right:
“What is the Commodity Markets Oversight Coalition (CMOC)?
The Commodity Markets Oversight Coalition is an independent, non-partisan and non-profit alliance of groups that represents commodity-dependent industries, businesses and end-users, including average American consumers, that rely on functional, transparent and competitive commodity derivatives markets as a hedging and price discovery tool. The coalition advocates in favor of government policies that promote stability and confidence in the commodities markets, that seek to prevent fraud, manipulation and excessive speculation, and that preserve the interests of bona fide hedgers and consumers.”
This shows the limited and genuine need for some speculation in markets relating to the basic needs of human life, and how this is distorted by huge banking players engaging in speculation:
http://www.nefiactioncenter.com/PDF/commoditybasicshandoutrev.pdf
And here is a letter written to warn of the dangers the creation of a carbon tax, because it would lead to exactly the same abuses of the prices of basic staples of life through speculation by big players and governments:
“Our groups are concerned with the potential consequences of creating a PRI [“Pollution, Reduction, and Investment” (PRI), or otherwise known as “Cap-and-Trade”] market-based carbon market without a preexisting, transparent, and comprehensive oversight and regulatory
framework; and importantly, protections against fraud, manipulation and excessive speculation. If
created, a comprehensive carbon trading market would be one of the world’s largest and most lucrative new commodities markets. According to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), by 2017, U.S. carbon markets could exceed $2 trillion in nominal value.”
http://www.nefiactioncenter.com/PDF/cmocltr2009oct30carbontradingfinal.pdf
_Jim says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:01 am
Seeing how this is a “Weekend Open Thread”, might a bit of advice be solicited for a serious, but low-priced, number-crunching ‘computing’ platform?
Needed is a computer containing on the order of 64 GB of RAM installed and budgeting is only allowing about US $650 to be spent … willing to compromise on ‘speed’ and number of ‘cores’ so something (slow?) in the area of a 2 GHz clock are acceptable … don’t need a whole lot of disk space at present and graphics is not a concern either. Just gobs and gobs of RAM.
The goal is to get away from continual memory ‘swapping’ that takes place on the present PC (a 3 GHz “Core2 Duo” Dell Optiplex 755 with 8 GB of RAM running Win 7 x64 Pro SP1) … the last run took over 3 days on account of the amount of time used in disk (virtual memory) I/O where the CPU utilization shows really _low_ during those periods when disk swapping takes place. The ‘peak’ memory used on the last run was something over 40 GB (on a Dell 755 with only 8 GB memory installed).
Some of the platforms meeting the criteria above (on eBay) look to be Dell PowerEdge 2950 (and C1100) series servers, but I have no idea (or experience) how these perform executing a single user program (vs acting as a “server” with appropriate server software) under a copy of, say, Win 7 Pro x64.
Jim — If you know any linux you can buy ten Raspberry PI’s, a couple of neytwork switches and downlad some PDF files on distrubited computing using Python for about your budget. You will have a home super computer.
richardscourtney says:
April 13, 2013 at 3:11 pm
Excellent post.
ric werme;
A rule of thumb in the supercomputing field is “if it’s paging, you need more RAM.” Sure, SSD is faster than rotating memory, but just having the RAM is much faster still.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Agreed. But in this case Jim said that he could not upgrade the ram in his existing pc. That being the case, a $100 SSD might achieve the performance improvement he is looking for versus a whole new PC. The spinning rust he’s got right now is probably capable of 100 IOPS, even a cheap SSD will hit 20,000 on write and 60,000 on read. No, not as fast as ram, but a big step up from what he has now and if it doesn’t have the desired result, it is still useful in a new pc.
Yeah, I remember when ram was $1/byte. 10 Meg RL02 was what? $5K? and 19 inches? the RA80 was only 14 inches and a whole 120 Meg. Only $50K. Yep folks, them’s megabytes we’re talking, now we get 4,000,000 megabytes on a single drive for a few hundred bucks. To put this in perspective, if Boeing had kept that pace, a flight from LA to London would take less than a second and cost less than a penny.
richardscourtney;
Thanks for that excellent post. Perspective on any issue always changes when one has the background in detail from a credible source. Much appreciated.
They do, and they recommend gazoos of RAM* … What I would like to know is: can a Dell C1100 class pizza-box “perform” like a normal PC. That’s really the gist of my question. If so, a platform like one of the first two below will suffice for my purposes (excepting the 2nd item below which is only at 36 GB of RAM):
Without getting too crass and commercial here on this forum, the choices come down to something like this: (1) Dell C1100 64 GB or this: (2) Dell C1100 36 GB ea. under 700 US.
As opposed to this: Dell Precision Workstation 64GB et al at over 2 1/2 grand US.
PS. I have no affiliation with any of the above vendors; items referenced above for discussion purposes only.
.
* I have moved beyond the analysis of simple structures, for which 8GB was sufficient, hence the need for *more* RAM now (and a platform that will accommodate gazoos of RAM like a server platform) to accommodate the additional computations required to arrive at ‘solutions’. Additionally the vendor warrants his product to operate under various OS’s, not specific platforms e.g. desktops, server ‘pizza-boxes’ etc … pizza-boxes are not something I have spent time with (to date!)
.
Charles Tossy says:
April 13, 2013 at 4:26 pm
“Jim — If you know any linux you can buy ten Raspberry PI’s, a couple of neytwork switches and downlad some PDF files on distrubited computing using Python for about your budget. You will have a home super computer.”
Python is useful for controlling the number crunching processes but entirely unsuitable for doing the number crunching itself; as it is two orders of magnitude slower than C++ (its semantic forces it to do dictionary lookups all the time).
A system of a bunch of Raspberry’s is a loosely coupled system; Jim runs computations on huge matrices I think – so there’s a huge amount of connectivity between a huge number of data elements – you can’t shoehorn that onto a loosely coupled network of nodes without losing orders of magnitude of speed.
David Jones says:
April 13, 2013 at 3:59 pm
“BTW, this thread is looking like a UK political thead. A bit OT i feel!”
By definition nothing can be off topic in an Open Thread – and our host mentioned Maggie Thatcher himself…
Presently, no support for aux number-crunching cards. But then there is the requirement to have direct access to a HUGE amount of data (representing various E and H field values, parameters, conditions, etc. associated with each tetrahedron in the simulated 3-space environment.)
.
Snow flurries this a.m. in Chicago (high temp of 44 F).
The prediction for Sunday is 68 F, then back into the 40’s mid-week.
No warnings issued, despite the temperature swings ?
Get ready!
richardscourtney:
Thank You for the education. Please allow me to defer to your superior knowledge of the coal industry in Britian and probably in other areas as well. I do know the general history of the strike which broke the NUM’s power and the details of how this was achieved. By disposition and living I am a cynic, skeptic, individualist, and knee-jerk opponent of all things coming down from the top. If the coal industry of that time was producing a surplus for it’s owners and the country it should have been kept. If it was a breeding ground for a self-interested subculture known as “miners” who were suckling the national tet it should have been crushed.
If English coal is a going proposition it should be mined rather than importing coal as you are. If the import is cheaper buy it and use the savings for something else. I have personally been crushed a time or two, suffered the blow, and rebounded nicely. Thatcher was never my Prime Minister but as others have noted she was and is greatly lionized on this side of the pond. I own a signed copy of her two volume autbiography which I consider a valuable guide in leadership.
I am very glad that someone of your intimate knowledge of all this is posting on this site. Don’t know if you drink but would buy you a pint anytime.
davidmhoffer says:
…
What a doubling of CO2 does is rearrange where the energy is at any given time with some altitudes increasing (close to surface for example) and other altitudes decreasing, but the “average” remains the same. So you can’t compare the two. The 3.7 w/m2 from CO2 doubling doesn’t occur at any given altitude, it is actually “smeared” across the atmospheric column and so doesn’t behave anything like an increase in insolation at TOA. (emphasis added to point in question)
——
Are you sure about this? From Roy Spencer’s book ‘The Great Global Warming Blunder, How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists’, page 48, paragraphs two and three:
and
It seems to me from this that the 3.7 watts can be compared to TOA insolation changes.
I did however forget albedo (factor of 1 – 0.3 or 0.7), which changes my numbers a bit:
Or am I still smoking the crack rock on this? It wouldn’t surprise me.
Mark
There is rank speculation and price manipulation in commodities, or the basic necessities of human life, by Goldman Sachs and others, and it was and is responsible for food prices rising to 2008 levels, according to experts. This is pushing people all over the world from poverty to extreme poverty. It is fundamentally wrong on principle to allow speculative maneuvers by huge players in the simple necessities of life such as wheat, oil, cattle, and rice.
Michael Greenberger: Commodities traders should be brought down to 30% of the market, but are now at 80%.
richardscourtney-
Thank you for the detailed response and I defer to your superior knowledge of the situation. I would however like to point out that the statement “This was because the Thatcher government decided to switch the UK economy from production industries to “service industries” (i.e. banking and financial services).” begs the question of why did they decided to do this? Because many of those industries were unprofitable and uncompetitive is the answer. I still recall that at around this time the British standard of living was considered as on par with that of East Germany.
Something had to be done and she did it. For all that the Lady has passed away and the proper immediate response is RIP. History will judge the rest.
Ya think? Where does all that QE money go from the primary dealers?
The One-Chart Summary Of All That Is Wrong With The US Financial System: JPM Deposits Over Loans (ZH article)
“Primary dealers serve as trading counterparties of the New York Fed in its implementation of monetary policy.”
Primary Dealers List – http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/pridealers_current.html
Note: JPM 13th down in the list.
.
M Courtney says:
April 13, 2013 at 4:03 pm
“It was the divisiveness of “the enemy within” and the weakness of Argentina that lead to the mockery of Maggie.”
Divisiveness. You know, I have heard this word used dozens of times in the last few days in association with MT- it must be the buzz-word in the media- and it perplexes me. Divisiveness in politics is not necessarily a derogation. Politics doesn’t deliver many Kumbayah moments. Divisiveness can win leaderships and elections and Margaret had to deal with some of the toughest eggs there ever were, not just in the opposition either. How she overpowered the Tory home guard and became leader is enough to make her a legend although I suspect that most of her party members didn’t want the job that had to be done. I worked as a lab technician at Bedford College in London in the mid 1960s (for 7 or 8 quid a week and had a wife and baby to look after) and I can assure you peace, harmony and prosperity over the land was not what Margaret Thatcher interrupted.
The labour unions were the “governing entity” at the time and most of the news was on labour unrest and governments pandering to this ruinous sector. I recall an extended strike at Ford over a dispute between the pipe-fitters and machinists over who should be making or installing the newly developed “torque converter” – was it a pipe or a machined part? Labour strife became a cultural identifier. Even the BBC has reported on the decline toward a failed state and I suspect they were putting the best face on it they could:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/thatcherism_01.shtml
“During the 1960s and 1970s, the main parties competed to reverse Britain’s relative economic decline. There was a growing awareness that the economic league tables showed that Britain was at the wrong end for figures regarding strikes, productivity, inflation, economic growth and rising living standards.
Virtually all European countries, except for Britain, had so-called ‘economic miracles’. Britain was often described as the ‘sick man of Europe’.”
Will you tell me that this situation was going to right itself without a powerful intervention and a whole new approach? The edifice had to be torn down to the basement and rebuilt. Britain owes her a massive debt. It was like saving imperiled crocodiles – no thanks expected but it had to be done – it is a shame that after this much time there is no new perspective from such a large part of British society. That Britain has declined again since in the hands of gutless governments may explain it. Man, we loved her from afar. The Argentines owe her a massive debt, too. It was the end of the sadistic military government and may have also been the beginning of the end for the ‘divisive’ social class system in UK.
In the 1970s when INCO (nickel mining) in Canada was hiring foreign workers, they had a large number of tradesmen and miners applying from Britain, Italy, Brazil and elsewhere. Because of blood ties, they were leaning toward hiring British. I privately advised hiring Italians and Brazilians – It was my belief that workers from UK would engender labour strife and sabotage.
richardscourtney-
Thank You for sharing your superior knowledge of the situation in the UK coal industry. There is a very good telling of the Ridley Plan and the Scargill Insurrection in Thatchers autobiography which I had signed by her. Your points do seem to beg the question of why Thatcher’s government made the decisions it did. Knowing the economic history of that time it is hard to argue that the effected industries were profitable ones. If they were they would still exist. I suppose the difference in our views is one of perspective. In my view businesses are not organized into “regions” and successful ones generate enough capital to finance expansion. Council Houses sold to their occupants do not represent lost capital but rather a decrease in the costs of maintaining them.
At the end of it all a Lady has passed away and the appropriate response for me is RIP. History will continue to judge the rest.
Zeke, spare us the usual suspects arguing for more jobs for themselves in ‘overseeing’ markets because for all these speculators there are equal numbers of hedgers at a global level. In any case if they could manage to drive up prices by capturing large quantitities of a commodity in the short term, those prices will naturally call forth greater supply.
Still you can always try being the Bunker Hunt of wheat, corn, pork bellies, etc but I have a feeling it’s like trying to corner the global market for catastrophic climate change and don’t get to the stage where you’re full of it or….
observa says:
April 13, 2013 at 6:09 pm
..”I have a feeling it’s like trying to corner the global market for catastrophic climate change and don’t get to the stage where you’re full of it or….”
========
You can’t grab my attention, then just….
“A picture is worth a thousand words”
http://au.businessinsider.com/thatcher-and-the-winter-of-discontent-2013-4
Yeah, I was smoking crack. 15.8C occurs in July at aphelion. Signs are backwards. This has to be due to seasons and land / water divide over northern & southern hemisphere.
Sorry about that. 🙂
Consensus is totalitarianism.
“There is a consensus, QED”.
And if you disagree with The Consensus, you are evil or demented or paid by enemies; anyway, you should be incarcerated.
The terrible and disrespectful manner in which the Lefist UK press has treated Margaret Thatcher’s death leads me to believe there is little hope for UK’s economic and societal solvency.
I’m reminded of Shakespeare’s line from Julius Cesar, “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones.”
When Thatcher took office, the UK was on the brink of economic collapse with: massive unemployment, rolling blackouts (if you can even believe that!), a free falling currency, social unrest, debilitating and violent union strikes, massive budget deficits, high inflation, growing welfare rolls, a tanking stock market, a collapsing healthcare system, oppressive and debilitating corporate and individual taxes,etc., etc., etc.,….
Under her leadership and the implementation of free-market capitalism, unemployment fell, GDP grew at 4%/yr, people got off welfare and started working for a living, taxes were cut, government spending was cut, deregulation was implemented, budget deficits were brought under control, union strikes were reduced, the stock market soared, the Pound Sterling appreciated, the grid hummed along 24/7, wages grew, inflation fell, etc., etc., etc., She saved a nation from the devastating consequences of Socialism.
Rather than learning the bloody obvious fact that Socialism doesn’t work and that free-market capitalism is a far superior economic and social system, the Leftist press went out of their way to denigrate her obvious accomplishments, lest Socialism be thrown in the trash heap of history, as it should have been.
And so it goes…….until it doesn’t…..
Gary Pearse says:
“The labour unions were the “governing entity” at the time…….”
And that’s why a lot of people are turned off by the ‘unions’.
They are, in many (all?) cases, part of the Labour Party.
When the Labour Party and their allies lose the election they fall back on their proxies to stifle and disrupt changes being implemented by the democratically elected government. In many cases this results in the country, in effect, being ruled by unelected minorities using ‘grass roots’ movements and protests, often accompanied by the use economic sabotage, violence and intimidation.
One of the most ‘despised’ unions in New Zealand is the Maritime Union of New Zealand which was formed when the New Zealand Waterfront Workers’ Union and the New Zealand Seafarers’ Union (two of the most militant unions in New Zealand) combined.
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/cook-strait-rail-ferries/strikes-and-strandings
Gareth Phillips
How did hospitals fare under the three day working work imposed by the Labour government in response to the hardship imposed on the people by the militant unions?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/gallery/2009/apr/16/past-conservatives#/?picture=346055042&index=1
Observa, I appreciate your point; limited speculation is fine in the grain market and is a stabilizing force.
But the distortions we are seeing in food prices and the staples of human life is an abuse that needs to be looked into. Unless people understand the importance of a genuine market based on real supply and signals in commodities, they may not be able to understand the problem of governments and banks getting involved in a huge co2 market. I am conjecturing that Co2 is the ultimate commodities market.
If you are a free market capitalist, you must develop a message about why creating a huge market for co2 and water would be wrong and open to abuse. Why not just use carbon dioxide instead of gold, if that is what banks want? Part of the reason it is wrong on its face is that it is creating the ultimate commodities trading market, open to abuse and fraud; its mini-me can be observed in huge manipulations and distortions in the prices of such essentials as wheat and rice, and oil.A free market can protect food and energy commodities from super speculators like Goldman Sachs and not lose its integrity as a free market.
ref: http://commoditymarketsoversight.org/
ref: Goldman Sachs created 2008 food crisis: ” In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.”
ref: Goldman Sachs investing 40 bn in green energy
A bit of a brawl is starting to happen between the “whooping crane environmentalists” and the “wind turbine environmentalists.” I wrote something called, “For The Birds” about issues it raised.
(Warning to “oldfossil.” You may find it too “preachy.” In passing I mention the spirituality of bird-watchers, and Saint Francis.)
http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/for-the-birds/
re: Zeke says April 13, 2013 at 7:14 pm
Do you think we ought to end the Fed’s “QE4EVA” policy Zeke?
Why isn’t JPM making any loans to the business community? Are they possibly addicted to the free money handed out by the fed? (*Better* returns are to be had in commodities rather than making perceived ‘risky’ loans to businesses?)
Might cutting off this Quantitative Easing-Forever policy of the Fed reduce the amount of money sloshing around in the JPM’s, Goldman Sachs and Citi et al’s hands looking for a place to make *assured* (‘sure thing’) returns?
Is it possible there’s a bigger root problem at issue here?
.
Oops – mods, one stuck in the spam filt again! TIA _Jim
Microsoft has some Geo-Spatial tools for Excel that might be useful to the WUWT community :
GeoFlow – 4D geo-spatial-temporal data visualization from Excel!
h/t http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/GeoFlow-4D-geo-spatial-temporal-data-visualization-from-Excel
Mark Bofill;
Are you sure about this? From Roy Spencer’s book
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No I am not sure. I’ve gone into detail on this issue with at least 12 physicists who between them have provided 15 answers. The problem is that the IPCC definition is vague and subject to a lot of interpretation:
The definition of RF from the TAR and earlier IPCC assessment reports is retained. Ramaswamy et al. (2001) define it as ‘the change in net (down minus up) irradiance (solar plus longwave; in W m–2) at the tropopause after allowing for stratospheric temperatures to readjust to radiative equilibrium, but with surface and tropospheric temperatures and state held fixed at the unperturbed values’.
So, for starters, they are talking about the tropopause, not the TOA. Second, actually measuring what they are talking about is pretty much impossible, Willis Eschenbach wrote a whole post on it some time back. Then you have the issue of the change in net (down minus up) which yields different values at different altitudes, but if you go back to the TAR and to Ramaswamy, you’ll see that those descriptions (sorry, I don’t have the links handy) are not quite the same either, but it is clear that there is no additional energy added to the system except during the change between equilibrium states. Oh, and the TAR for certain (Ramaswamy too if I recall correctly) calculates the sensitivity against the effective black body temperature of earth which is about -18C. (That’s why they get 1 degree for 3.7 w/m2 while your calcs are done at surface temps of about +15 and so yield only 0.6).
All that said, the physics doesn’t support a change in net energy flux across the system as a whole except when there is a change in CO2 concentration that yields a transition to a new equilibrium state, but this is temporary. So before CO2 doubles, insolation is 240 w/m2 and equilibrium temp is -18C. After CO2 doubles, insolation is still 240 w/m2 and equilibrium temp is still -18C. At what altitude -18C occurs at however does change to a higher altitude, and then assuming some sort of lapse rate roughly the same as before, you get higher temps below that altitude and lower ones above that altitude, but the effective black body temp stays exactly the same at equilibrium. The average across the atmospheric column remains the same, and the RF doesn’t directly correlate to surface forcing (per the IPCC) which is why I call it an effect that is smeared across the atmospheric column rather than a net new energy input at any given altitude.
mods ~ another down the hidey hole. I think it has taken a special interest in me today 😉
TIA
_Jim;
They do, and they recommend gazoos of RAM* … What I would like to know is: can a Dell C1100 class pizza-box “perform” like a normal PC.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The short answer is yes. The long answer is really complicated, the summary of which is that unless you have the expertise to be self sufficient technically, I’d recommend staying away from used gear entirely, but doubly so for servers. PC’s are designed and configured to run reasonably well with little expertise. Servers (pizza boxes) are 99% the same technology, but they are designed and configured on the assumption that someone with the requisite expertise is going to load specific firmware patches, specific operating systems with specific settings and so on. If you don’t have a sys admin background, you’ll be looking for someone who does to help you in short order.
Mark Bofill;
Let’s summarize: If we assumed that the Earth was initially in energy balance, and then instantly doubled the atmospheric concentration of CO2, there would then be an energy imbalance of 3.7 watts per square meter less than the amount of sunlight being absorbed by the Earth.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Hopefully the mods will rescue my more detailed response from the spam bin. On this particular comment by Roy Spencer, I believe he is referring to the condition that would exist between equilibrium states. You start at equilibrium which is 240 w/m2 and an effective black body temperature of -18C. CO2 doubles. That establishes a substantive change in energy balance until equilibrium is once again established. At that point…. 240 w/m2 and an effective black body temp of -18C. In between stuff is messed up.
I lived in Suffolk, UK, from 1970 to 1975. Under Wilson, the UK would have achieved third-world status except for its savior, North Sea natural gas. When i returned for a long visit in 1988, I could not believe the transformation. England was prosperous and entrepreneurial, not as it was in 1975. I remember a British friend demonstrating poor British products from their nationalized industries, in this case motorcycles. He did a pantomime; “Japanese motorcycle,” he said, and then simulated turning a key and it starting smoothly. “British motorcycle,” he then said, and began jumping up and down on a simulated foot pedal starter. I had a 1974 Jaguar XJ6 then, a fine motorcar if you overlooked the gaps around the doors and the electrical components provided by Lucas Electrics, known to British as “The Prince of Darkness.” http://www.mez.co.uk/lucas.html
Margaret Thatcher changed all that for the better, which is why the unions still can;t stand her. She changed England so much that when Labour came back to power, the were led by Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher “Lite.”
I don’t know why the Arkansas oil spill isn’t getting wide coverage. Or why Canada would send the oil to our refineries. Looks like they’d just build their own refineries. That’s where the most value is added. They’re just sending money and jobs for Canada down the tubes.
Noelene says:
April 13, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Gareth Phillips
How did hospitals fare under the three day working work imposed by the Labour government in response to the hardship imposed on the people by the militant unions?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/gallery/2009/apr/16/past-conservatives#/?picture=346055042&index=1
Hi Neoline, as far as I recall, very badly. Things had got out of control and I do not seek to justify that. But remember, just as Thatcher was elected North sea oil flowed in at such a rate that the UK became a member of OPEC. Most countries in similar situations invested this bounty in modernising industry and setting up a solid economic basis. Thatcher wasted huge amounts on maintaining high unemployment due to allowing business and manufacturing to die off instead of investing, on maintaining the resultant massive unemployment and at the same time cutting taxes. Most countries did not do this, which is why Norway who had exactly the same opportunities benefitted in the long run, while we did not. The British motorcycle industry is a classic example. We now have a re-born Triumph, one of the largest selling motorcycles in the world. At the time it was allowed to die along with much of our manufacturing base. We could have invested, Thatcher blew it all on political goals. She did some things that had to be done, but she was no Churchill and did not benefit the majority of UK citizens.
Actually the Canadians have refineries they were going to expand before the great recession 2008. Plans got scrapped and I guess forgotten.
Federal Study Reveals Global Warming Not To Blame For Crippling Drought…
http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2013/04/12/study-reveals-global-warming-not-to-blame-for-last-years-crippling-drought/
ST. LOUIS (CBS St. Louis/AP) – A new federal study reveals that global warming is not to blame for last year’s extreme drought that crippled the central Great Plains.
The study conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Drought Task Force places the blame on natural variations in weather patterns that caused the “flash drought.”
The Plains saw very little rain last summer due to two key meteorological processes which NOAA states was a “sequence of unfortunate events.” First, the Plains states saw very little rain in May and June because low pressure systems that brought storms were shunted northward into Canada. Second, thunderstorms were infrequent in July and August and produced little precipitation.
The report states that there were “no strong indicators” a drought of this magnitude would have struck the Midwest last year.
It seems the CSIRO have taken pocket lining, bribery, corruption and even swindling to a new level. (from several sources including Greenie Watch) Time to lock the doors, throw them out and start again: http://pindanpost.com/2013/04/14/shocking-corruption-in-csiro-doesnt-surprise/
“_Jim says:
April 13, 2013 at 11:40 am”
I don’t think more RAM will sure your swapping problem as Windows is architected to do exactly that, swap to virtual memory. What you might be able to do is tune you disk cluster size on the virtual swap disk to the size of a page of RAM. I raised disk/server performance issues with my former employer. Their “standard” server build image configured a 2K cluster size on the swap disk, when they were running a 32bit O/S and applications I was able to demonstrate the performance gain using virtual machines and a disk utility to change the cluster size. They weren’t interested.
On Thatcher. I recall the UK from the ’70’s, living on large council estate. I recall the winter of discontent, the miners strike, the car worker strikes, the power worker strikes, the poll tax riots and the Falklands war (Two of my mates fought in it too). It wasn’t pretty. Like all leaders, sometimes they do things that are popular, and sometimes not so. Either way she was the Churchill of her time which Britain desperately needed.
“Mike Haseler says:
April 13, 2013 at 2:54 pm”
Except that Britain was the called the “Dirty man Europe” causing forests in the rest of Europe to die due to acid rain as a result of industry, coal mining and coal use. The UEA CRU was setup, in part, to demonstrate “coal” was bad for the environment. It was quickly seen to be a rather powerful tool in the rapidly growing “green movement”. I do agree with comments along the lines of “destroying” industry (When at the same time MT was also “choosing winners”, Nissan for instance would not have made cars in the UK if it were not for subsidies) and moving to “services”, as others have pointed out, she put most of our eggs “in one basket”.
“R Taylor says:
April 13, 2013 at 12:49 pm”
And now there is the strong possibility of large oil reserves in the Falklands. Expect some trouble there in the not too distant future.
When historians look back on the last century, there will be two UK prime ministers who stand out from the rest. Churchill for his wartime leadership, and Margaret Thatcher for her resolute stand against those who would subvert democracy. Rampant unions who despised their membership, military juntas bent on subjugation, Soviet war mongerers, and European bureaucratisation, were all targets who she had been told were untameable, and it was better that we simply lay down and do what they want. She faced up to them and won.
There were detractors, in a very small and vociferous minority. It is not surprising that this minority protested loudly, for they were those whose unwarranted power, special privileges, and belief in perpetual state funded lucrative sinecures, were under threat. For the majority, the prospect of the end of industrial strife, the unswerving opposition to Soviet hegemony, the chance to own our homes, and the freedom from state monopolies, was the reason for electing our first female prime minister, three times.
It is ironic that the Labour party only made itself electable when they adopted her policies. They have neither repealed nor amended any of her key policies in their thirteen year tenure. It is further ironic that the issue which most vexed the Labour party in the nineteen eighties, tbe closure of some of the coal mines under a Conservative government, is going to be overshadowed this century by the closure of all of the coal mines by the Labour government’s Climate Change Act, and by the minister responsible, Ed Miliband.
Steven
Totally agree! Formidable person – Thatcherism lives on forever!
The decline in industry started long before the nineteen eighties. I briefly worked in the motorcycle industry in 1972-73. At the beginning of the sixties the UK motorcycle industry was the largest in the world. However, by the time I got involved there it was obvious that it could not compete with its old products and chronic labour problems. I left for other opportunities. This was the right decision as by the end of the decade, UK motorcycle production and its industry had gone.
It is striking how much traction the myth that Thatcher caused industrial decline has had. Yet a simple look at British industry from the postwar period to 1979 does not make good reading. From a position of a wealth of higher tech leads and opportunities, radar, computers, electronics, aviation, medicine, machine tools, and chemicals, the postwar governments favoured the manual labour union dominated industries. If you wanted a job, it was most likely to be found in shipbuilding, steelworks, coalmining, dockyards, steam railways, and the utilities. The automotive industry, which could have offered both mass employment and higher quality engineering, was hobbled by government restrictions on raw materials and a preference for meeting the simpler needs of the export market.
It is no surprise that when Margaret Thatcher came to power she faced a formidable task in halting the decline and putting Britain back on the road to recovery.
As for the trivial matter of school milk, it was the Labour government who first abolished it for secondary schools, in about 1967.
“Edward Bancroft says:
April 14, 2013 at 4:26 am
As for the trivial matter of school milk, it was the Labour government who first abolished it for secondary schools, in about 1967.”
How true. And yet all you heard after her, landslide, election was the chant “Thatcher Thatcher, the milk snatcher!”
With regards to “the unions” etc, you should watch the film by Peter Sellers called “I’m alright Jack!”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_All_Right_Jack
_Jim
What is the app??
DirkH says:
April 13, 2013 at 5:01 pm
That’s what I thought too until a Python newbie showed up on the New Hampshire Linux Python group wanting to write Python code for automotive radar collision detection or something like that.
Using the numpy and scipy packages he got an interface into gobs of standard supercomputing number crunching C++ code from Python. We (and he) were all suitably amazed with what he managed to do with it.
However, the situation at hand is using an existing commercial application, so Python and distributed computing on Raspberry Pi may be fun but not a solution.
On the lighter side
http://www.stupidvideos.com/video/all/I_Ship_My_Pants/#430771
Ansoft HFSS
I’ve had good luck with Dell’s business class products (several Latitude laptops, a slew of OptiPlex desktops); this would be my first foray into their PowerEdge ‘server’ territory however. Where I’ve come from and my background ‘applying patches and sysadmin duties’ will be a cinch compared to experiences in the development lab (“Where everything goes wrong, first, and may require a board change.”) at Cisco.
I see one vendor on eBay has Dell C1100s meeting my specs for 100 US under the figure I listed earlier, and that includes free ship and 30 day return or exchange – and they’re local to me to boot. Nothing I’ve seen offers the horsepower/dollars ratio as these used Dell severs.
.
Oops, mods, one more stuck in the spam bin! TIA _Jim
To understand why Thatcher did what she is alleged to have done (close down industry), you have to understand her relationship with the economic theories of Hyak.
Hyak was a former socialist who had been brought up to believe what he was taught – that socialism will increase the wealth and wellbeing of working people. Yet his experience told him otherwise – that socialism had the opposite effect to the one intended, and that it was free market capitalism which, he believed, was the provider of this missing prosperity.
Thatcher saw the industrial landscape of 1979 and saw that it was not only inefficient, but that in order to sell products globally, it needed injections of taxpayer capital on a continual basis. It was clear to Thatcher, that most of Briitish industry was not creating wealth – it consumed it.
Some people have blamed unions for this sorry state of British industry, but we cannot criticise unions and at the same time let the management off. British management of the time was terrible – I mean absolutely and completely incompetent. We had one of the greatest motorcycle industries in the world, but when faced with the challenges from Japan, management smuggly believed that their customers would never buy “that sort of bike.”
So, Thatcher realised that the situation was unsustainable (much as I have come to hate that phrase). If people had jobs from it, the inevitable conclusion from her economic theories, was that these workers would see their standards of living decline relative to the rest of the world. Indeed, as competitors grew more productive, it would take ever larger slices of taxpayer funds to keep up – something that was also illegal under the proposed EU mastricht treaty.
She also saw a similar situation with the financial sector – a system so archaic, so stitched up by a closed shop of old boys, that it had to change, just as industry had to change. This created the biggest expansion economic activity I think this country had ever seen. But it is important to understand that Thatcher was not favouring one sector over another – she threw both open to free markets, and the one thrived where the other did not.
Many have blamed the present economic crisis on Thatchers reforms. But this is to misunderstand the difference between free markets in the Hyakian sense, and what actually took place under later goverments. Hyak and Thatcher would not have countenanced the removal of moral hazard by government guarantees, nor the distorting of investment decisions by artificially lowering interest rates. Both of these government interferences lead to excessive speculation and risk taking, and result in asset bubbles, such as the dot com boom, then the banking boom (and bust).
Most of these market distortions began under Clinton/Greenspan, then Bush/Greenspan and Blair and Brown.
.. sure, once one runs out of “physical”.
The last run I made ran 3 plus contiguous days and peak RAM/VM usage under Win 7 indicated 40 GB … this isn’t “Lotus Notes” Patrick. Previously “Out of Memory” messages from the app terminated with the swap file set to 16 GB … no such similar ‘early termination’ with ‘swap’ (virtual memory) file size set to 64 GB on a *separate* partition (otherwise Windows 7 also complains about inadequate resources on the HD partition used to hold the ‘swap’ file) …
.
_Jim
Fasinating Application!!
Technical support can be obtained by:-
Email: support@ansofttech.com
Please include a description of the problem, a contact person, and a phone number and time that you can be contacted.
This thread may help
http://www.edaboard.com/thread161044.html
Oops, mods, got one stuck. TIA-Mark
_jim
http://www.edaboard.com/thread161044.html
Technical support can be obtained by:-
Email: support@ansofttech.com
Please include a description of the problem, a contact person, and a phone number and time that you can be contacted.
_Jim
http://www.edaboard.com/thread161044.html
Yes, been there done that; simply need more RAM! And something reasonably-priced to “put” it in (Dell 755 limited to 8GB, Dell 780 limited to 16GB, Dell P-owerEdge C1100 memory capacity up to 192GB.)
My question: Can this be beat for horsepower/dollar?
.
_Jim says:
April 13, 2013 at 9:00 pm “Might cutting off this Quantitative Easing-Forever policy of the Fed reduce the amount of money sloshing around in the JPM’s, Goldman Sachs and Citi et al’s hands looking for a place to make *assured* (‘sure thing’) returns?”
I responded but wordpress did not like the words I used to describe QE. lol
It is objectionable to have so many megabanks speculating and distorting food markets so that the “futures” by speculators far outnumber everything else in the market. It is a false signal. Food commodities are not the place for that, and these banks ought to be ashamed of themselves.
The socialist state of Maryland is preparing to tax “rain”. Not kidding. The tax will be based on satellite images of “impervious surfaces” leading to water-runoff.
Look out Californy, we can out-communize even you.
_Jim says:
April 14, 2013 at 8:44 am
Wow, that looks exactly like what you need. Even within your budget. You might want to replace the disk on general principles, but I’m sure you know that already. Me, if it spins up and doesn’t make ugly noises, I’d probably wait until it’s too late. 🙂
davidmhoffer says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:10 pm
….
Thanks for taking the time out to respond David, it helps a lot. 🙂
Mark
beng says:
April 14, 2013 at 9:07 am
The socialist state of Maryland is preparing to tax “rain”.
I, along with about 100 others, was just forced to replace my clay tile sewage line (8′ underground) because rainwater infiltration in the springtime has to be treated by the water treatment plant. Seems like pretty much everyone with the clay tiles, and some with cast iron, had to replace their lines, because over a few decades the tiles shift or roots get into them, etc. So I basically got taxed bigtime for rain. Several thousand dollars, not cheap. Gonna happen to everyone around here whose home is 1970s or so and earlier.
In answer to _Jim, I agree that QE is “welfare for the rich.”
I just mean to say that so much futures trading by megabank speculators in food and the basic necessities of life is a shame, and is not a real market signal.
Sorry if this trips the spam. I am getting used to the new system.
For all you folks in the UK that worried about the “Union Busting” that occurred in Thatcher’s time, not need to worry. All those big union bosses just moved to Canada and other common wealth countries along with certain left leaning professors. Just listen to any commentator on our national radio, the CBC (Constantly Bitc#ing and whining Corporation). Almost every union leader or lefty has an Island accent. Odd that. So your Union friends just adapted and moved on. Same goes for many of the eco – groups. Always that UK accent of one sort or another. I feel like out country has been invaded by Bolsheviks.
“_Jim says:
April 14, 2013 at 8:07 am”
I guess you have never dealt with a real operating system such as MVS, MVS/ESA and OS/390. I’ll leave you to your “windows”…
“Vince Causey says:
April 14, 2013 at 8:02 am
She also saw a similar situation with the financial sector – a system so archaic, so stitched up by a closed shop of old boys, that it had to change, just as industry had to change.”
That is the ~300 year old system of interest bearing debt, created by the Bank of England. Even she had no chance with that battle! And where are we today? At the brink of another 1929 style crash. You bet!
Some thoughts on the new system of getting comments through.
Although the application of the system is new to WUWT, from what I understand the system itself is not, being a feature of WordPress, so I don’t know if this is the final version or it is subject to further tweaking.
I am not alone, judging from comments, in finding stuff not auto listed.
The first point, is that it is not possible to know if that means a comment is subject to moderation or has been dumped entirely – at least for me, since I have not seen anything flagged as such.
This means that unlike prior, when there may have been a considerable time between posting and listing and that was understood, the poster is in a limbo, not knowing whether to alert – or try to – a moderator or not.
Which brings me to my second point, which is that in notifying a moderator, if that does not appear the status of that is in itself unknown, and, if it does appear, because the moderator has no need to be aware of what goes through automatically, it is impossible to know if it will be read. In effect, either way, there is no knowledge that the moderator – and therefore site – can be communicated with.
A third point is that when – if – retrieved, this will inevitably be some time, perhaps considerable, after it was posted, and to a much greater degree than in the in the previous set-up, because of the listing by individual auto comment rather than in a block when moderated, and the presumably reduced requirement for moderators to deal with things on such a frequent basis, will appear some way back in the thread. And so will likely to be “lost” even if found to a greater degree than previously.
Fourthly, the temperament and caprices of The Algorithmic are not easily discerned, and so to placate and supplicate it is beyond my capability.
From my experience, everything disdained by The Algorithmic, except one, has been subsequently listed, with, I suspect – because I cannot imagine the nature of the offense to a human – the missing one devoured by the Algorithmic and any remains buried at the back of its cave.
So, to the practical implications and some suggestions.
It seems to me that the moderators, to pick up comments that have been unreasonably savaged and disposed of by the Algorithmic, can only know of this through a notification which on the balance of probabilities will appear automatically (or could be similarly savaged). So to know of this, they would have to read all the comments, placing them in the same situation as previously, albeit with a less stringent time frame.
It is possible that The Algorithmic, being newly introduced to this eco-system, might be trying to impress by being over zealous, or it might just be lashing out because it can. So perhaps it can be tamed and trained to an acceptable behavior. But no matter how docile and attentive, the above must remain to some degree.
IF commentators cannot be given notice that something has gone to the bin and for what reason, is it a possible solution – from a posters point of view – that ALL comments are auto posted, and then mods remove those deemed offensive when they check. If moderators have to read every comment anyway to see if there is notification of a problem, there is no practical difference for them. It may be less onerous in that what might be a transgression to The Algorithmic is clearly not for a human, and it can be passed by without notice or action. In other words the number that need deleting may be less than those that need to be found and checked.
Whilst this might seem like open season on decency and relevance, if The Algorithmic can be persuaded to auto list, say, all those deemed inoffensive to its current mores and in addition all those submitted by posters who have established a “reputation” with it through previous posts including those it has rejected but have subsequently been listed by a human controller, whilst delivering a smack to the Algorithmic, the risk seems very low.
Hopefully something can be worked out. It is amazing how quickly an adjustment in expectations occurs, quite apart from the reality of getting things posted. When most go through immediately, not doing so is very disconcerting.
I hope this in itself can escape the attention of The Algorithmic which cannot be expected to view such comments benignly.
Excuse me, may I compliment the magnificent new wordpress Algorithmic moderation device? I would like it to know that I just performed a little Quantitative Easement for WUWT with the “fling funds” button and wish you QE4ever in your account.
And my advice to everyone else is don’t say “han*y pan*y” if you value your post. I simply do not know what got into me. 🙂
Au contrair, mon ami. The Fortune 500 I worked for had *two* IBM-centric CIC (Corporate Information Center) centers just in the North Texas area alone, then there was Houston, Miho Japan, and a dozen other locations around the globe and they were used in-house for all manner of purposes including raw ‘data’ (test vector) transfer between semiconductor design-centers and Silicon (at the time) ‘fab’ facilities worldwide.
In fact, the Fortune 500 I worked for had gone so far as to engineer VAX (11/780 and later the VAX 8800 series) minicomputers as the “front end” interface to these behemoths (in lieu of the usual IBM 3270 “terminals”) giving RJE (Remote Job Entry) and IMS capability (complete with an “MSG” (Message app AKA “e-mail” today) utility throughout the company) throughout the company; we had the *intranet* decades before such even saw the light of inspiration at DARPA …
At the time entering on an IMS logged-in screen the following command “T DA:UG” would bring up the CIC-written “User Guide” for all the applications available on the big iron
.
Contracts entered into by two parties wherein one pays back the other for use of (essentially) ‘resources’ borrowed by the one with an additional percentage was ‘created by the Bank of England.‘?
A Brief History of Interest
“Loans in the pre-urban societies were made in seed grains, animals and tools to farmers. Since one grain of seed could generate a plant with over 100 new grain seeds, after the harvest farmers could easily repay the grain with “interest” in grain. …
When animals were loaned interest was paid by sharing in any new animals born. ”
and
The History Of Interest Throughout Time
“The ‘phenomenon on interest’ as it was once called first became the object of question only in the form of loan interest for a full two thousand years.”
As a result of foolish lending practices (i.e. subprime lending and more) which, when the economy was ‘tested’ (‘stressed’ would be a better word for it) by rapid increase in oil then resulting in the forced capitulation by a wide range of folk (including those doing home flips) who instantly became over-extended by the loans they had taken out resulting in (‘down the road’) worthless ‘packaged’ mortgages held by banks and to those whom they ‘sold’ what were billed as stable, reliable, Triple-A rated investment-grade securities?
And the sight of an ‘over-extended’ stock market should come as no surprise today, when algorithmic trading yields slight volume (number of shares being traded is down) but sometimes volatile price fluctuations (flash-crash anybody?) then it is no wonder stock prices have ‘drifted’ as high as they have. Computer trading only does what it is programmed to do …
Where or what is the real value? After the crash will remain the real value … but if the real volume of securities (the number of shares of stock being traded) was low while stock prices climbed, where is the REAL loss?
.
_Jim
That looks…AWESOME
If you can overtax that system you are a god among men:)
mark ro says:
April 14, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Just give it a protein folding task and you may never hear from it again….
Neutron count logged in the last night geomagnetic storm
http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/~pyle/TheThplot.gif
caused by the Thursday’s CME, see my post above
Again, another crash…? What crash? Did the Repubs get back in office? Sounds like some are looking forwards to it. You will get your wish if Libertariatards get power. Let the banksters run wild! Creating more and more inequality of wealth and more child poverty. But you who salivate over the deal already know that.
Ric Werme says:
April 14, 2013 at 3:07 pm
With the ansoft hfss, Sorry I wasn’t clear
The ‘preppers’, always the preppers … remember the Great Depression? Extended by at least a decade owing to that good ‘republican’ FDR … /sarc
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It was cleaned up quickly. And it was built in the late 1940s. Presumably modern pipelines are sturdier.
Re Lady Thatcher, I was interested to listen in to Any answers on Radio 4 in which the listeners’ phone-in response to Any Questions was, on Saturday, entirely about Thatcher’s legacy. Not only that but it was heavily weighted on the negative side. Is this Radio 4’s left-wing policy at work again? If so it’s a bit obvious isn’t it?
“_Jim says:
April 14, 2013 at 1:05 pm”
The primary objective for setting up the BoE was to pay for the British war machine. It morphed over time.
“_Jim says:
April 14, 2013 at 12:21 pm”
So you do understand system tuning. And yet you leave your “disk/memory performance issues” to MS Windows?
thursa:
Your post at April 15, 2013 at 9:24 am asks
I am a severe critic of BBC bias – especially its bias on AGW – but I think it unlikely that this phone -in was biased. It probably reflected the proportions of pro and anti views being phoned in.
As I explained in my above post at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/13/weekend-open-thread-6/#comment-1274534
the policies of the Thatcher government created ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.
Those who benefited are not likely to phone in to boast about it.
Those who suffered – or who grew up in a family that suffered – are likely to be emotionally motivated to phone in to vent their feelings.
Hence, the phone-in was likely to obtain many more negative calls than positive calls whether or not most people feel positively towards the Thatcher legacy.
Please note that – whether or not they are a small minority – there are very many people who feel severe resentment about the effects of Thatcher’s policies upon them, the families they grew-up in, and/or their towns. The idea that these people are a small number of extreme left activists is refuted by the facts. Such extremists do not inhabit entire streets, and in some towns street parties are being organised to celebrate the funeral of Baroness Thatcher.
Hence, it seems likely that the phone-in represented the proportions of pro and anti views which were phoned in. But that indicates nothing about the proportions of pro and anti views in the country as a whole.
Richard
Richard, I lived in England most of my life and I disagree! the BBc is by the left for the left and most of what they do is very skewed to the left and they preach to the choir (how Top Gear came to be there is a mystery, I realise big money keeps it there) in reality most people had their lives improved by her, she would only change her mind, and at least twice she very publicly did, when the real facts spoke for themselves, name any other world leader thus principled? I would expect socialist rhetoric from the BBC and the clowns in radio4 are not a typical cross section in any sense (outside the AGW world)
Chris
Chris Edwards:
re your post at April 15, 2013 at 7:13 pm.
Much of what you say is pure opinion some of which I share (e.g. BBC bias).
However, I don’t think it is reasonable to state dubious opinions as facts. For example, you say of Thatcher
In the immediate term that was certainly NOT true. Unemployment and inflation soared. Most people suffered a lowering of their living standards.
She won re-election by buying votes and because the opposition Labour Party was in hopeless disarray and unelectable.
Considering the longer term, it can be debated as to whether peoples lives would have been mostly better or mostly worse if Thatcher’s changes had not been imposed. That cannot be known. Opinions and values will define opinion of it.
However, it is certain that many people had their lives severely damaged by Thatcher’s policies. Indeed, she targeted sections of society as being what she called “the enemy within” and she tried – with some success – to destroy them, their communities and their way of life. It should surprise nobody that they resent her and her policies.
Richard
Richard, when you consider the fact the union terrorists and their political wing the Labour party had destroyed a large part of the modern industry (consumer electronics, car manufacture, railways, British Road Services,semi-conductors and more) and her policies got a huge number back to work, dot mention the death of some steelworks and mines, had they been allowed to wither naturally the pain would have been less and how many mines were deliberately flooded by the unions blocking the maintenance? as for targeting communities what tosh, sure some mining communities were gutted but Ive covered that, what about the corner shops that closed wholesale due the the labour tax on jobs (go on question it!) the country was being run by IMF auditors after they bailed us out socialist policies can only lead to poverty and ruin for the working man and Wilson was no exception but oh boy was he wealthy when he was done with us! So I am correct most people (although would not admit it) were better of because of her, even if it was only because of the disaster of the labour miss management (and I doubt that was accidental, look at the USA Obama could be Wilsons son!)