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.
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.