andrewducker | Interesting Links for 02-06-2021

andrewducker

'My landlord wants six months' rent upfront': (tags:rent uk )
China allows couples to have three children: (tags:china children )
The first complete sequence of a human genome: (tags:genetics )
Eighteen million trees to be planted around Glasgow: (tags:trees glasgow scotland )
A swimming pool. In the air. Between two skyscrapers.: (tags:swimming architecture UK )
Ever wondered what it looks like to crash into an erupting volcano?: (tags:volcano video drone )
Europe to US: Pass new laws if you want a data-transfer deal (also impacts the deal with the UK): (tags:europe dataprotection usa uk )
Swiss abandon years of EU talks and reject treaty: (tags:Switzerland europe trade )
Covid in Scotland: Army brought in to help Lothian vaccine rollout: (tags:pandemic vaccination edinburgh scotland army )
Belarus has temporarily banned most of its citizens from leaving: (tags:Belarus dictators immigration )
One-Fifth of U.S. Beef Capacity Wiped Out by JBS Cyberattack: (tags:security cows meat )
Graph of average age versus vaccination percentage for UK council areas: (tags:graph vaccination UK age cities pandemic )
Clown-face privilege: (tags:privilege video gender abuse viaSwampers )
Woman tries to look after her mental health by not doing non-core part of her job, employer is a dick about it: (tags:mentalhealth anxiety depression sports tennis OhForFucksSake )
The Edinburgh city dwellers who want a more tribal way of living: (tags:Scotland Edinburgh housing viaJane )
David O Russell is not a good person to work with: (tags:work bullying movies )
NordLink joins Norway and Germany's electrical grids: (tags:norway germany electricity viaDanielDWilliam )
Nautilus - the best sounding, most visually striking speaker of all time: (tags:speakers sound Technology )

Crossposts: https://andrewducker.livejournal.com/4044942.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

danieldwilliam

I think the better solution for the risk of rent default is probably some sort of insurance product. That would be better for cash flow and should actually cost what the risk of default actually is.

From:

andrewducker

That makes sense. The insurance company acts as the guarantor for a hopefully not ridiculous price.

From:

danieldwilliam

The ridiculousness or other wise of the price would hopefuly reflect the actual default risk.

I don't know what the default risk actually is or how lumpy it can be. A rare risk has a small average cost but that's not very helpful if it bankrupts you if it happens to you.

And it would make the costs and risks and benefits less asymmetric. Six moonths rent certainly solves the risk of default problem but it doesn't address the probabalistic or fractional nature of the problem and dumps grossly disproportionate costs on the renter I mean finding six months rent is a massive cashflow ask. Whilst from a profit and loss point of view prepaying rent is neutral actually find the cash is an entirely different strain on resources and relationships. And if everyone is doing that a lot of the time it shifts a big pile of cash around and over-solves the risk of default problem.

From:

danieldwilliam

I like the focus on addressing the fragmentation issue when planting the woodlands around Glasgow.

From:

danieldwilliam

I am beginging to wonder if part of the problem with the film and television industry is that employment is project based not organisation based.

From:

andrewducker

I believe there were also problems when it was organisation based.

But yes, definitely issues of reputation and trust there.

From:

movingfinger

The problem is that studios keep hiring shitty people (99.99% of them white men) and not penalizing them for behaving like this. They would still hire them if they were employees, not independent contractors or free agents or whatever. Abuse happened under the old studio system where directors and actors were locked into contracts with one studio, too. The problem is the old boy network protecting its own in a culture of disrespect and abuse.

From:

danieldwilliam

So why do they keep hiring them? And why do the other people on the project put up with it? I'm curious about what is structurally different about the film and television industry that makes it prone to bad behaviour.

From:

andrewducker

Because it's the film industry. Nobody knows what makes a hit, and they make hundreds of millions of dollars. So if you've ever made a hit (and not fucked up the next several things you got to play with) then you get to get away with a lot, because you might make some people an awful lot of money.

From:

danieldwilliam

That makes sense from a structural point of view.

From:

andrewducker

Also, I don't think many of the people at the top really care if people get shouted at. It's frequently seen as a sign of genius that you are "sensitive" and lose it at the drop of a hat over tiny things.

From:

danieldwilliam

Thnking a bit about it I think in the film industry quite a lot of the important stuff isn't the actual film making. Things like distribution rights, IP management, merchandising will be very important too. Important decision makers in those areas won't be anywhere near the junior members of the production team.

From:

danieldwilliam

People are going to have to get pretty serious about cyber security pretty quickly I think.

From:

andrewducker

The ones that aren't already worry me.

From:

danieldwilliam

It's pretty clear that open season has been declared on a whole bunch of fairly mundane operations. Who'd have thought that the beef burger industry would be targeted by malware.

From:

andrewducker

Anyone that noticed they had money ;-)

From:

danieldwilliam

LOL and that, but lots of industries have got money.

I mean its entirely obvious (in retrospect) that the target for financailly motivated malware attacks will be the organisations a) with some cash b) weak security and c) not likely to cause the President of the United States to drop a SEAL team on your head because you've closed half of his gas stations.

From:

andrewducker

Lots do - but lots are being hit. Hospitals, schools, etc. have all been attacked by ransomware. I don't think there's anywhere that's safe.

And yeah, I agree with your list!

From:

danieldwilliam

On reflection I'm not sure I'm joking at all about the SEAL team - or local equivalent. I think being punched in the goolies by a beefy shouty sweaty angry man with a sub-machine gun might change the risk-reward profile a bit.

Unless we can get the ransomware people to target the bitcoin miners.

From:

andrewducker

I'm sure they try. If the miners are sensible then their rigs are *very* locked down.

From:

danieldwilliam

I am not convinced that talking to the media is not a core part of a professional sportsperson's job. Professional sports is an entertainment business and I think part of what the punters are paying for is some sort of connection to the players.

From:

anef

I like watching tennis but I find the post-match interviews dull when not excruciating. The people who can cope with them basically spout bland rubbish, and I'm not interested in people crying or stalking off.

If Roland Garros were actually Osaka's employer she would probably have a lot more protection. As it is I expect she's on a short term contract.

I would have thought a reasonable position for the tournament organisers would be to say "OK, you provide us with a doctor's certificate to prove you have mental health problems, and we won't make you do the interviews."

From:

danieldwilliam

I definitely agree that sick notes are the way to manage exemptions from the public facing obligations.

I wonder what folk would think if the tournament organisers explicitly said - mental health is a health issue, no different than a sprained ankle,however we consider the public facing activities to be equally part of a player's participation in the tournament and just as you can't take part with a sprained ankle you can't take part with mental health issues that stop you attending post-match interviews. Because that seems to be the position they are moving towards.

Almost all sports players give very anodyne interviews and I suspect most of them consider their actual personality to be bad for business. And who can blame them.

From:

anef

Your second para is probably a clearer statement of the tournaments' postion than the sickening guff they have actually put out (as cited by 90 Degrees, below). A third iteration might be "the post match interviews are a significant contributor to our profits and we consider our profits to be more important than players' mental health".

From:

danieldwilliam

Iterations 2 and 3 are pretty similar I think. The record of professional sports bodies taking effective action on health and safety issues is pretty mixed. Comparing, for example rugby union, soccer and Americal football's response to concussion or motorsport's adoption of firesuits.

From:

danieldwilliam

I wonder how much we fancy a war with Belarus? Not much I reckon. Do we have any sanctions left to impose?

From:

andrewducker

I am seeing suggestions that it might merge with Russia soon.

From:

dewline

"...be reabsorbed by..."

From:

danieldwilliam

Do the people of Belarus generally want this?

From:

andrewducker

Good question!

I've just been reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_State which I had no idea about!

And this is fascinating: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/soft-annexation-inside-the-russian-takeover-of-belarus/

From:

danieldwilliam

So we can expect a much longer NATO/EU border with Russia (de jure or de facto) in the 2020's and a bunch of refugee / economic migrants.

Fun times.

From:

andrewducker

If they let them out.

From:

andrewducker

And reading about the last election and the protests/brutality afterwards, it looks like things could go in any direction!

From:

danieldwilliam

I'm very excited about Nordlink. There's a lot of hydro potential in Norway which will be very useful for long and short term grid balancing with non-despatchable renewables. And I'm in favour of the EU's amibition to have each national grid 10% interconnected with other neighbouring grids.

From:

andrewducker

Yes, mutual interconnection will definitely help smoothe things out more.

I wonder how well the control centers will have to work together in order to get electricity from one side of Europe to the other.

From:

danieldwilliam

I think not particularly closely - no more so than ususal.

My knowledge of this is a bit limited to the UK and somewhat out of date - but if the systems in other countries operated like the UK system used to do each interconnector termination acts as both an inputter and an offtaker from the Grid. The firm operating it would be a market participant in the local national grids electricity market (and presumably allied markets for fuels) and depending on the relative market prices would trade power volumes over different time horizons.

So the interconnector operator would look at the relative prices in Norway and Germany for winter and see that Norway's price was lower than Germany. They'd buy power in the Norweigan market and sell power in the German market and pocket the difference. In the UK you could do this up to 2 hours ahead of the actual physical delivery but I don't know how quickly you can change the direction of flow in a DC cable. But you could flex for on-the-day weather patterns and demand patterns.

Power in the UK was traded up to 3 years ahead of delivery.

This transaction above would see physical power moved from Norway to Germany, increasing the price in Norway a bit, lowering the price in Germany a bit. If the German price was now a bit lower than the Italian price the operator of the German-Italian interconnect (basically Switzerland) would buy German power and sell it in Italy.

So the market does the gross shifting of power from high-supply/low demand areas to high-demand/low supply areas (bearing in mind that the traders and operators across Europe well understand that wet winters in Norway mean that Norweigan hydro-power will be cheaper than Italian or Spanish CCGT generation and that a windy week in Germany means cheaper German power.)

The national Grid control centres don't need to manage the gross movements of power accross the borders too much and will use their own balancing services in country (batteries, pumped storage, CCGT's etc) to fine tune the actual balance on an hour by hour basis.

But if I'm power station operator in Spain or Italy looking at overcast weather at home and wind and rain in the North Sea I can guess that the interconnector operator will be trying to sell me Norweigan hydro-power and plan to switch off my CCGT for the day.

From:

andrewducker

Aaah, so it doesn't require direct contact, just letting the cheapness at one end filter across Europe to the other end. That makes sense. Cheers!

From:

danieldwilliam

That plan for some living space around a shared facilities is basically an updated, more private version of 1960's vintage commune isn't it?

From:

andrewducker

Yup. I'm not sure many of those have been long lived. Designing organisations for the long term is tricky.

From:

danieldwilliam

I reckon these sorts of things would be relatively easy to set up. Find some like minded pals and the right building / land. The difficult surely comes when people's circumstances change.

From:

andrewducker

Yup. Or when people fall out. Or when their expectations of what it would be like to live with each other don't match up with reality.

From:

cmcmck

At that price, think I'll stick to my Kef's! :o)

From:

andrewducker

I'm beginning to doubt your commitment to high-end audio ;-)

From:

ninetydegrees

"The mental health of players competing in our tournaments and on the tours is of the utmost importance to the grand slams. We, individually and collectively, have significant resources dedicated to player well-being.

“In order to continue to improve, however, we need engagement from the players to understand their perspective and find ways to improve their experiences."

This is such BS. What is there that they don't get exactly? Are they Naomi Osaka's caregivers? Are they Naomi Osaka? Nope. If she says media circus is detrimental to her mental health then it is. Period. I've liked this tournament less and less. This seals the deal.

From:

ckd

#3: Cool, my citation count just went up again! :-D

(I am, in a very minimal technical sense, a co-author on the original HGP paper in Nature. That gives me my one scientific publication and an Erdős number of three.)

From:

andrewducker

That's still very cool!

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