How much wood do you have to burn to heat up 200 litres of water?

Now repeat that calculation, but include the contribution the individuals make to their healthcare cost. Suddenly, the obese and the smokers don't look so cost efficient.

Because the only thing harder than staying on Notes, for us, is transitioning off it. Damn thing is like the Borg, except slightly better at adapting.

It was in fact quite common at one time. Kaiser Wilhelm (Victoria's grandson) was an Admiral of the British Navy and Colenel-In-Chief of the 1st Royal Dragoons and exchanges and friendships were common enough that meetings between opposing officers after engagements in the early days of the war were often friendly reunions.

I find it a bit odd, because this is stuff that's been around for ages. You can buy commercial packages off the shelf for many instruments, particularly piano, and they sound fantastic.

Essentially, yes. This is seriously embarrassing but from an operational point of view, barely note-worthy. They'll spend more money hedging liabilities. The real impact of this is reputational (and for the person responsible, who is now Executive Director in Charge of Applying for New Careers).

Actually, Israel has a serious problem, and they need to come to an accommodation sooner rather than later. The problem is, they can't manage their internal disputes to achieve significant action.

The problem is that the Palestinians have a significantly higher birth rate and Jews will effectively be a minority in the not-too-distant future. At that point, they lose democratic legitimacy, so they need to come up with a satisfactory settlement before that happens.

You make a good point. For most people, the real value of insurance is covering catastrophes - not in a Katrina sense, but house burning down and destroying everything kind of way. If you've ever added up the total replacement cost of every item you own, you'll know it is a terrifying number.

You're assuming all people who take out warranties use them to their full coverage. It's well known that in home/contents insurance a massive portion of covered events are never claimed. It's not unknown for people to have their house burnt down and they don't claim on their insurance. No, I don't understand it either.

I'm not talking about race as such, just the simple fact that in a company of hundreds of people, finding one who was born or brought up within a couple of miles is like finding hens teeth. That seems odd to me. I don't blame anyone in particular for this state of affairs, but once you recognise it I think there's an argument to be made for addressing it.

Yeah, actually I don't care that much. I work in central London and it's painfully obvious that none of our workforce come from local communities. I'd be quite happy to see us lower our hiring standards just a little to bring some of these people in. I don't believe for a second they're actually worse - I think they just don't know how to play the corporate game.

I agree it is user error, but I feel very strongly that this is the fault of Excel, not the user. My job is effectively being a professional spreadsheet driver and you eventually learn to become rigid about range checking, row counting, balancing totals, etc, because the structure of Excel makes these errors inevitable.

Well, no. There may be a pay-off but it's unlikely you'd ever trade anyone else's money again. And if the risk controls are done right, then such actions are entirely transparent to the SEC.

Traders have limits they cannot (well, should not) breach. And normally, you'd hedge your exposure as well, so you're not just exposed to the stock going up in smoke.

If your risk controls work properly, you treat unauthorised wins as severely as you do losses. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. However, it does happen more often than you think - just with no attendant publicity.