Redundancy
There is a big fuss in the papers this morning about the amount of redundancy paid by the NHS in recent months. It’s here in the Telegraph. Here’s an extract.
Nearly 1,000 health workers have received six-figure exit deals in the past year, with 157 managers and other senior staff receiving more than £200,000 — a 50 per cent rise on the previous year.
Some officials have received golden goodbyes of £600,000 as part of the Government’s ongoing restructuring of the NHS.
i’ve always believed, as someone who has generally been self-employed or has worked in a company I’ve part-owned, that if you earn over a certain amount, then you are not entitled to redundancy and perhaps only get the same legal minimum that say a secretary would get. Surely, if you’re making a six-figure sum a year, you should be able to make provision for if the worst happens.
It may be hard, but it will encourage people to perform.
The Death Of The Voice Of Reason
Few in the UK have heard of Narendra Dabholkar, but according to this report, he was murdered in India a few days ago. Here’s an extract.
Blaming opponents of the anti-superstition bill for the murdering rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan said organisations behind such acts should be isolated and their activities stopped.
Amid spontaneous public outrage and grief over 69-year-old Dabholkar’s killing in Pune on Tuesday, the state government on Wednesday had cleared a proposal to promulgate an ordinance to check black magic and inhuman religious rituals.
“The forces which did not want this Bill to be presented and passed into a law were the people responsible for silencing his voice,” Mr. Chavan said.
Before we say that things like this don’t go on in the UK, we ought to look at ourselves carefully. David Aaronovitch in the Times yesterday wrote a powerful piece about this case and detailed cases all over the world and in our past.
I am happy with my life as a scientifically-correct atheist, but doubt I’ll ever see superstition and most religion consigned to the dustbin of history. Let’s face it we can’t even get to grips with things like the appalling treatment of women, children, and those with a different colour or sexual orientation, by quite a few people in this country.
Will Anybody Notice?
There is suppose to be another strike in Post Offices this weekend, according to this report on the BBC.
Will anybody actually notice?
The last time, I went into a Post Office was to collect a packet that the postman couldn’t deliver. I queued for far too long, with most people seemingly buying the odd first class stamp.
I do post the odd parcel, but surely this could be handled by clever automated machines in the wall or by using the good on-line system and then putting the parcel in an oversize post box.
In a year or so, there will hardly be any Post Offices anyway. I have four handy to me and I pass at least one regularly every day. Isn’t that too many?
I Just Don’t Get It
There are reports tonight like this one, that President Assad’s forces have nerve-gassed and killed large numbers of their own people in Damascus.
If we go back to Hitler, who let’s face it was a monster, you could even see some form of evil twisted logic in what he did, especially, as he targeted particular groups.
But there seems to be no logic of any sort to President Assad’s actions.
In the BBC report, I think even Frank Gardner is baffled too.
The only possible reason, is that Assad and his cronies are psychopaths, who get pleasure in killing others.
Spanish Practices
Is Santander getting rattled, as it has just launched a loan sale?
i don’t need a loan and if I did, I wouldn’t go any any Spanish bank! Especially, with all the Spanish practices at Gibraltar.
Will The Banks Actually Allow This?
It is being reported in the Telegraph, that the government is thinking about allowing peer-to-peer lenders to be funded by ISAs.
I suppose it will be very good news for those who invest in ISAs, but it will be bad news for banks, as they will be losing one of their ways of selling low-interest rubbish products to their customers. The only way, they could get a piece of the action, would be for a bank to get into bed with a peer-to-peer lender. But the likes of Zopa and their peers, probably have enough financial friends to set up a way to sell ISAs and give the banks even more of a kicking.
After all, how many of those on the Dalston omnibus would trust a banker with anything but small change.
I suspect George Osborn is going to get an enormous amount of lobbying to stop this well-thought out scheme.
Hold tight George! Our savings are dependent on you not giving in to the wunch,
An Explorer And His Cat
They had a news item on BBC London today about a statue to Matthew Flinders being erected at Euston, which is where he is buried.
I did know a bit about Flinders, but I was puzzled to see that he is being shown with a cat. This story on Wikipedia tells the tale of the cat, Trim.
There aren’t many cats, who have their own page on Wikipedia and even fewer who appear with their master (?) in statues.
The Fracking Story Is Now Dead
We won’t get much on fracking for a few days, weeks and even months, as the papers have decided to dig up that old chesnut of a story designed to sell newspapers; who actually killed princess Diana. Even that royalist rag, the Independent has the story.
Still as her death didn’t happen in Sussex, the police of that county must be very relieved.
The Enormous Amount Of Energy Used By Computer Servers
In all the hot air talked about fracking, wind power and nuclear power, very rarely does the argument stray into energy usage. The only thing people seem to worry about is the cost of their household energy bills and filling up their car.
But accpording to this academic report from Stanford University in 2010, over ten percent of all US electricity was used to power computer and IT equipment. Here’s the relevant part.
In 2010, over 10% of electricity in the U.S. was due to computer and IT equipment usage. At the current rate we’re going, analysts and experts figure that 10% of the world’s power bill will be spent on running computers. To give a more concrete example of how much energy this is, Dixon shows that one 50,000 square feet data center uses about 5 megawatts, but continuously. This energy output would satisfy the needs of 5000 homes. In another staggering example, assorted US data centers use a collective 7000 megawatt data centers from seven different plants; this is more power than is used by the State of Mississippi. Even more surprising is that this astronomical power consumption is just by the plants themselves – cooling systems use as much energy as the plants.
Also in this article in the FT. it says that in 2010, Goggle used about 258 Megawatts continuously.
Since this refers to 2010, I wonder how much of the UK’s energy usage goes in that area now.
According to this article, in 2012 average demand for electricity was 35.8 Gigawatt. Just imagine having to pay that bill!
So let’s assume that only five percent of that energy is used for computer servers, so that is 1790 megawatt. Bear in mind that the UK’s largest power station, Drax, has a capability of generating 3960 megawatts or seven percent of the UK’s electricity. So nearly half of its output and the enormous amount of CO2, Drax emits could be used to power computer equipment.
I need better figures here, but it would seem that a substantial part of UK electricity is used in computing.
But help is at hand in this area. To make computers use less power, you can do many things; like write better software and install more efficient cooling systems.
The biggest fight though is in the area of making chips that consume less electricity and there’s a war going on there, between the dominant Intel and the upstart from Cambridge called ARM. Whether Intel can hold off ARM is a subject for debate, but in a year or so, the average server will consume a lot less power than it does now. Unfortunately, the search, social networking, data storing and other IT companies will be a lot bigger, so all we will be doing with better technology is eating into the growth in energy usage.
I think though, this will mean that many large server farms will relocate to countries, where energy costs are lowest.
Can We Delay Fracking?
Or any other new means of energy creation for that matter?
There has just been a very heated debate about fracking on BBC Radio 5 Live and the amount of hot air produced could power the whole of Sussex without doubt.
Most of the arguments on both sides were fact-free and full of emotion, with accusations of lying and wrong facts from both sides.
The most significant energy news of the day is this story from the Guardian. It says that domestic energy use has dropped by a quarter since 2005.
More work in this field could actually delay the crunch, when we need to build lots of new power stations, be they powered by whatever.
That delay is the time to use to research every method of obtaining energy fully.
The trouble is this would probably give engineers and scientists enough time, to find a solution that ended all the arguments, so a lot of protesters and believers in uneconomic technologies would be kicked soundly into the long grass.
If I’d had a pound for every scientifically incorrect argument about energy I’d heard, I’d be a very rich man.
The Anonymous Widower 