McK suggests that corporates make China their corporate second home. Not for labour arbitrage, but because the hundreds of millions of people being brought into the working and spending populations dwarf the workforce in the developed world (e.g. only 150m in the whole US working population).
Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
Monthly Archive for June, 2010
I’m not sure who I want to win, but it is a day of upsets at Wimbledon, and the crowd seems to be behind the underdog…
Just back from Billy Budd at Glyndebourne. Brilliant.
The sequence where they are preparing to chase down a French ship put Master and Commander into the shade. Not bad comparison between an opera and a Hollywood film.
Last night so you’ll have to watch the DVD or see it another season.
It absolutely rocks after finishing the largest chicken ever. It will have feed seven people over three days.
So there I was watching the budget on a Sky plus recording, when who should call but HMRC asking me for money.
Now I know we all have to pay for the excesses of the banks, but that’s really, really faster than I expected.
Live map of London Underground trains. Neato. Traintimes.org gets it spot on again. The yellow pins are tubes. See how they move.
Wordbooker was doubling or tripling things. I hope it has stopped.
Having completed the line of school friends turning 40, I got a copy of Playboy for June 1970 ($1 seems quite expensive, but it is 200 pages long!).
It is really, really tame and full of unreadable densely packed articles. On a sad note, I noticed that the featured Playmate of the Year died in 1979 in a car crash.
Here’s a safe-for-work alternative X-ray pin-ups. Genius.
So, to start with, it won’t work on my TS-219 as it is an Arm not an Intel-based device. I now have a TS-239 Pro II for exactly this reason. The instructions worked well.
Links and my notes below:
- General instructions
- Installing QPKGs is a question of downloading them, unzipping and installing through the admin interface. Don’t forget to enable them once you’ve installed them.
- You need to enable the QPKG once you’ve installed it. Click on the QPKG icon and click enable in the pop up screen.
- I restarted the server once the QPKG was installed.
- (without the restart, I needed to cd /opt/bin and then type ./qpkg to get the install commands to execute.)
- I used vi to edit the install.sh file (just needed to add /opt/bin to the path).
- When installing, I said no to change to root user, changed the install directory to /opt/crashplan and yes to download JRE.
- JRE for QNAP (Didn’t need this for the TS-239 Pro II)
- Headless client for Crashplan
- Remember to press the add button when you are setting up the port tunnelling in Putty.
- The shares to backup are found in /share/MD0_DATA not anywhere else you might think.
- You can get Java for ARM here (the old evaluation version is available), but it doesn’t work with the Intel-compiled Crashplan.
I have been back and forth on the issue of whether the public sector has it better or worse than the private sector (at average wage levels, not the high end).
Whatever it means, the median wage has been consistently higher in the public sector. How exactly to measure this and what it means overall is difficult to clarify.
During the debate about the additional cost of pensions to the Treasury rising. The note by Stephanie Flanders brings some fascinating addtional thinking to the debate. Firstly, the cost to the Treasury is not the target: it can be reduced by increasing the size of the civil service, for example. The important piece appears to be the promises we are making to the public sector and the cost to the country of making them.
What the OBR is saying is that every year we, as taxpayers, are giving the five million or so people who work in the public sector rock-solid guarantees of future pension payments which, on the open market, would cost them at least £26bn a year.
In exchange for those promises, the individuals themselves are contributing £4.4bn, and their government employers are contributing £12.6bn – meaning a net subsidy by the Treasury of at least £10bn a year.
Ask the average employee in the public sector how much his pension is worth, he or she is unlikely to say that it is worth another 30-40% of their gross salary. But that is almost certainly what it would cost a private-sector employer to offer a pension on the same terms.
That does seem amazingly generous given the number of ways in which the environment might get more challenging: fewer people in work means the non-funded pension system will creak as in France; higher interest rates may require greater subsidy.
Recently listened
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This Love Ain't Big Enough For The Two Of Us
Charles Bradley & The Bullets
Daptone 7 Inch Singles Collection, Vol. 2
13 hours ago -
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(from cache)