It's not so much about the scandals themselves, but more about people having their expectations betrays - hypocrisy in essence.

No one expects Trump to be noble or rightous, so there's no sense of betrayal when he behaves the way he does. By contrast, progressives/left-wing politicians usually do try to portray a position of virtue, so when they get caught ought people feel betrayed.

Here in Britain the Labour governemnt are a great example of this. The previous Conservative government had been as corrupt as anything, but that's sort of what people expect from them so it didn't actually do them too much damage. It was their hypicrasy over the Covid lockdowns that really killed them, because peopel felt so betrayed over it. The Labour government then comes in promising to clean things up and the bring change, and they do neither - in fact they almost immediately get caught in a scandal of taking free clothes and event tickets from millionaires, and their level of public support plummets.

Public support, like most of politics, is an emotional thing, not a rational thing. It's the betray and hypocrisy that does it for people, by and large.

.... jailbroken .....

Thank you. I don't know why the modern tech world can't make an attempt at fitting it's terminology to the basics of Enlgish grammar.

It's a tricky one isn't it. I agree that constitual ammendment route is a non starter - it has all the same problems as do those nice clever ideas to just tweak the rules a bit, and it doesn't solve any of the real problems: half the countruy just really hates the other half.

For what it's worth it's the same here in Britain (although maybe to a slightly lesser degree). Half the country (broadly speaking: the rural, older, less-educated half) cannot stand the other half (younger, better educated, metropolitan), and the its very much reciprocated. Our politics is going the same way - both sides running ever more to the extremes to play to their support bases' worst instincts.

Seems to me most people get the cause an effect wrong. Seems to me that the politics come from the culture, not the other way round. America's had this two-nations thing for half my lifetime, but its only since the tea-party movement that it's turned so nasty. Here in Britain it's brexit that's turned everyone so mean. No one's willing to accept anymore that two people can disgaree about something in good faith, so every disagreement becomes a moral crusade, and comrimise becomes nearly impossible.

Trouble is, to do this, you have to get it through Congress. Which you can't.

Before any clever ideas can be enacted to improve things, there's a much more fundamental problem to be solved - find a way to bring people together, to stop half the country hating the other half. Congress fairly well represents the people in this regard, and until something changes in the culture of t US society to take out the hate, nothing will change.

Until that happens, congress will remain completely divided and locked, and you'll have nothing but executive orders.

Out of interest, why can't we just replicate this logic with EV cars?

Since we're talking about tracking milage, we're presumably happy with hardware being installed in the cars to report information back to the government. Why can't that report back the number of KWH of electricity "pumped" into the cars, and tax that instead at some equivalent rate? That way more efficient cars get the same benefit as they would under a petrol tax, and so the same incentives still apply.

That's all fine, but like so many things in life the issue is perception rather than reality - specifically, the perception of risk.

More specifically, it's Google Analytics.

If you ask two people about whether the use of Google Analytics counts as requiring notification and opt-out, you will get two different answers. Ask 10 people, you'll get 10 different answers. Given the existence of drive-by-lawyers who will check for any cookie usage and throw a lawsuit at you to see what sticks (not common, but everyone's heard a scare story about it), and given the level of doubt, most people who use GA (which is most people who run a website) play it safe and use a cookie opt-out banner.

There's also the perception issue in that not having a cookie banner makes your site stand out. It looks odd, given how prevalent they are. A user coming to your site and not getting a cookie banner will have quesitons - Why don't they have one? What are they hiding? Should I trust them if they don't even have this basic requirement in place?

To be fair, that isn't really what limited liability is about. It doesn't protect anyone from criminial liability in the case of negligence or criminal activity. All it means is that if you own shares in a company and that company owes money to third parties, those third parties cannot come after you and your assets for payment, they can only come after the company and its assets.

You can lose your shares but nothing more that that - your finanical liability is limited to your share ownership.

For any public company, the owners / shareholders will appoint the management (normally via a board of directors as intermediaries), so you're right that owners set the direction of company via that mechanism. But that's the limit of it, they can't direct activity on a day to day level or on specific issues (outside of odd cases where a public company is larely owned by a single person, or the owner and the CEO of a public company are the same person). Since they have so little control over the company, it isn't clear how owners / shareholders of a public company can really be held responsible for it's behaviour in the sense that you're talking about.

"but of course it has the advantrage that your outage will typically not happen at the exact same time as a thousand other corporations' outages."

For many companies, that isn't an advantage. When AWS or Microsoft goes down, for a lot of companies, you can at least reassure yourself that OK your IT systems are all down for the day buts it's OK as so are all your customers - you're not actually missing any work, and a lot (most) of it will get caught up with later/tomorrow when everyone's back online.

If it's just you that's down you dont have that luxury - if your customers want the work doing now and you can't do it, they probably wont wait and will go elsewhere.

I've always assumed its an issue of incentives, like most things of this type.

The people signing the contracts are incentivised to come in under budget, since they will then get rewarded for saving money in that financial years / term / parliament / etc. They know that the rewards will be fairly immediate (annual bonus, pay rise, promotion, etc.) and they know that they will likely have moved jobs to somewhere else in a few years.

By the time the problems with the contract are discovered it is typcially (for stuff this size) many years later, and is someone elses responsibility. The person/people who agreed to the orignal contracts are no where to be found, and have already been rewarded years ago.

In the corporate world, companies sometimes face the same perverse incentives - e.g. a CEO will be incentivised to maximise short term gain at the expenses of long term sustainability (the "Enron" problem). They often respond by making the short term rewards contintingent on long term success - for example, some portion of the executive's renumeration being in long term stock options that can't be realised for 5 years. What's the equivalent that can be done in public service contracting?

Cool, thanks for explaining. It's always good to get someone else's view on things.

For what it's worth, I'm very aware that the European financial markets as a whole seem to do a poor job at directing capital to startups and fast growing businesses, compared to the US. I've never been able to get any good information on this to form an opinion as to why.

I've just found an interesting site that shows realtime info from the UK national grid. Never really looked at it before:

https://grid.iamkate.com/

At this moment (8:30am in the UK), we're using about 30GW, and of this about 16% is coming from gas. 43% is coming from wind, and 8-9% each from Nuclear and biomass (I never knew biomass was such a big player).

Solar is doing almost nothing (0.5% percent), but then its filthy weather at 8am. I'll check this again in better weather conditions, as I'm curious.

We're generating about 80% of it domestically, and importing the rest, with around half of that import coming from France.

I've never really looked at it in any detail before. Clearly gas is a player, but a minority player none the less.

Interesting. I can certainly see the argument around volitily, and other people above have referenced how a large company will gear a lot of it's activity around the reporting cycles - slow these down a bit, and you slow down this disruption from getting real business done.

I'm not sure I understand your second comment, about the relationship between managers and shareholders and the difference between European and US markets. Can you expand on this a bit please?

Hmm, not so sure about that. By any measure, us here in the UK have energy costs a bit more than twice that of the USA. Ours is probably cleaner (and improving over time), but it is certainly not cheaper.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

https://worldpopulationreview....

This is a good point. It is one subject that almost never seems to come up when peopele discuss surveys like this - the psychology of the experience.

Some of it falls under the rubric of "sample bias" and is well known - are all people in all types of cicumstances equally likely to response to a survey? No, they aren't.

But even then, for the people answering, the way they answer is at least partly determined by psychology. Lots of people will tend to want to answer anonymous surveys by portraying how they wished things were (or by portrayingg the sort of person they think they are) rather than purely based on reality. They (we all) have an internal image of themselves and often answer for that, and not for the real person who everyone else sees. You see this more in lifestyle surveys, where people will answer in ways that suggest they are more virtuous, responsible, etc. than they really are.

This is true of economic surveys too. These surveys always ask about the respondants outloot for the next 12 months, or how they see their business doing in the next 6 months or whatever. The way a person prefers to answer these questions (i.e. the answer that causes the least disonnence within them) might not always be the most straighforwardly honest. It isn't dishonest, but it isn't necessary a true reflection of reality either.

I get involved in audits for ISO compliance from time to time. The ones that are about general business management (e.g. ISO 9001 and similar) make a very big deal about "satisfaction" surveys after major interactions with customers, suppliers and other "stakeholders".

Its fine as far as it goes, but trying to them to understand basic concepts such as sample bias is nearly impossible. Imagine for example that you are required to issue a survey invite to each customer after delivery of the product or service you provide. You can imagine immeditely that 90%+ of the responses are going to be in the 9 or 10 out of 10 or in the 1 or 2 out of 10 range. The only people who will reply are those who were extremely unhappy or extrememly happy (the extremes) and you'll almost never hear from the people in the middle (who are probably 90% of your customers).

You would pass the audit with flying colours by doing this, but never learn anything useful.

(I suppose you could say that measuring the change over time in the answers you get is useful - are you getting more 1s and 2s this year than last year - but I don't think that's what's really intended)