Development quotes of the week

It's not so simple. We're going to reach the point where there are only two working people for every elderly person (yay baby boomers), so we won't have enough people to hold everybody's hand. Already over 1 in 6 employed people is working in health industry, mostly looking after elderly people and that number will rise to 1 in 4. If we want to maintain our standard of living we're going to need to make everything *much* more productive, and tech is the biggest productivity multiplier we have.

So sure, a percentage of elderly is not going to be able to keep up, but every percent that does translates to workers who can produce other useful stuff.

The alternative is of course immigration, but that has its own issues.

[Stats for NL]

It's not even that. It's "Companies need to make obscene profits to pay for it".

Civil infrastructure should be owned by the users. They need to pay for it. But to take the UK (and the GPO / BT in particular) as an example, before 1984 the UK phone system was (mostly) owned by central government. It was falling to bits because management weren't allowed to manage, they couldn't replace or renew equipment, and were paying huge amounts of money to keep obsolete kit going. They couldn't borrow (like any normal business) to replace kit because it was part of the PSBR, and the government felt that a big PSBR reflected badly on them. But nor could they pay to replace it out of revenue, because any increase in prices to enable them to save a bit of cash promptly caught the Treasury's eye, who would then declare a big dividend and take it off them. So they STILL had no money to buy new kit.

Compare that with Kingston Telecom, owned by the City of Kingston Upon Hull or something like that. To the best of my knowledge (it was a long time ago), their system was state of the art because the local council just let them get on with it, and they also had the cheapest bills in the country.

Then the government sold the GPO off as British Telecom. I think they were legally obliged to cut prices by about 4% in real terms (ie if inflation was 10% they could only raise prices 6%). They didn't care, as they embarked on a massive modernisation project, and payback time for most investment was just a couple of years - the reduction in maintenance costs paid for the new kit outright in no time flat. The biggest problem was sourcing the kit and training up in the new skills. But now they're a big business, and replacing and upgrading infrastructure is seen as a cost that the longer they can delay, the better. And we've got the same problem with water, gas, electric, etc etc.

The government has sort-of fixed it, but that now brings almost more problems than it solves. For telecoms, the infrastructure is now owned by OpenReach who are sort-of a separate company from BT. But that's a horror story in itself. For gas and electric, local companies have a monopoly on infrastructure, but consumers can buy from any supplier and it's delivered over the local monopoly's infrastructure. But still there's not a lot of incentive to have good infrastructure.

Imho, the infrastructure should be spun off into local co-operatives, owned by the users! Whether I pay my co-operative for the infrastructure, or I pay my supplier of choice and they pay a transport charge to the co-operative is up for discussion, but either way I am directly affected by, and have a say in, the quality of the infrastructure. Equally importantly, there is no supplier monopoly for services over that infrastructure. So if us locals *choose* not to maintain the infrastructure, that's our problem. Equally, if we choose to upgrade it, that's our benefit. I suspect most people would pay to upgrade, because they can see the benefits.

But at present you get the current mess like at our local water company. The press make a huge fuss about "large bonuses", but I suspect that money is a drip in the reservoir. The government places demands on them to spend, then places caps on how much they can charge, then wonders why they go bust!

And the press makes matters worse by wilfully misunderstanding everything. What other industry does NOT raise prices at times of peak demand? Or alternatively cut the quality of service? But when a bunch of towns lost their water supply because the towns lower down the hill were using it all, the press scream blue bloody murder. I'm sorry, but if a company has no way of choking off excess demand, a lot of people are going to go short!

Cheers,
Wol

Aren't there still XP installs floating around? Is Microsoft (rightfully) milking them for exorbitant fees or are they just forging off into the wilds alone?