Author Archives: James - Page 121
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Economics of New Colonies
I often play in Jim Wallman's hard SF games set in the universe he's created. I've been thinking about how new colonies get set up and the sort of funding they need. There is a lot of infrastructure required to build a viable colony on a new system. Firstly you need to survey it to find a good spot with a reasonable confluence of resources, mining sites, farming space, fresh water, building land and a suitable area for your drop zone and spaceport. Once you've done that some cheap housing, utilities, early resource processing plants and factories for essentials have to be built. Once you get to that point you might just start exporting valuable things, although you'll still need to import lots of essentials, not to mention more people. I reckon that it is a minimum of two years…
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Collaboration
For some people collaboration is a dirty word, with connotations from those who collaborated with the nazis in WW2. Not for me though, I think that it makes for a generally better outcome than trying to do everything oneself. However it does have its downsides. You often need to compromise, other people may have more time than you and drive things faster than you'd like, and perhaps not in the direction you'd choose. That said, good collaboration gives you more than you could have achieved on your own. Where has this sudden enthusiasm for collaboration come from I hear you think. Well its not a sudden enthusiasm, but a timely articulation. My OU course (B301 Making Sense of Strategy) has just entered the collaborative block. Do for the next four weeks or so we need to work as a group…
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Some thoughts on Public vs Private Pay Comparisons
News articles like this are very misleading. One might well report that police officers earn more than McDonalds employees, which is largely what it says. Neither public nor private sector are homogeneous, and there are few jobs that are directly comparable. In general most of the low-skill jobs in the public sector have been contracted out and now exist in the private sector. There are also generally higher levels of qualification in the public sector, meaning that that the balance of job weight is probably different from the private sector. The only way one can scientifically compare wages between the sectors would be to look at those jobs where there is a broad comparison and job weight can be taken into account. This survey doesn't do that, and all it does is falsely scapegoat public sector workers. For the record…
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Alternative Vote?
I thought I would find out more about the Alternative Vote proposal and get past some of the rhetoric that I've seen in the news. It has to be said that so far none of the interviews I've heard so far (on BBC Radio Four's Today programme) have been particularly compelling cases for voting No (or Yes, but I've heard more No than Yes). One interesting thing though is the way the two primary campaigns brand themselves on their website URLs. On the Yes side there is which sort of suggests a wider campaign about electoral reform and also an attempt to give an argument for their case in the URL. On the other side there is which suggests a specific campaign and perhaps it is just AV they object to. Anyway, starting with keeping the status quo here are…
Family Mystery
A cousin sent me an entry from the 1911 census for my great, great grandfather who lived in Old Kilpatrick in Scotland (which is where I grew up). James and his wife Ann Kemp are recorded as living at number 90 (Lusset Cottage) in Old Kilpatrick (the street isn't explicitly named, I guess that is on the page with the first house on it). This sparked an intriguing mystery, as there is a death certificate for Ann Kemp (nee Dewar) in 1890. Her husband James died in 1911 (for which I also have a certificate). His address on the death certificate is different to the census one (Smith's Land, Old Kilpatrick - but the person reporting it is listed as a neighbour and lives in 2 Neil (or Hill) Street Kilbowie), It is hard to be sure as the 1911…