141–150 of 210 posts
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Bridge, yes. Tunnel, no. It’s very feasible and practical from a civil-engineering perspective, but the economic value of a road connection between NI and Scotland has not been demonstrated to outweigh the economic cost of its construction.
Infact: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/14/rail-bosses-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comment is making fun of a proposal Boris Johnson once made about building a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland, which is considered borderline physically impossible as far as I understand.
Bridge, yes. Tunnel, no. It’s very feasible and practical from a civil-engineering perspective, but the economic value of a road connection between NI and Scotland has not been demonstrated to outweigh the economic cost of its construction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the U.S. everything is technically exempt from FOIA to a degree. Having gone through that process while I was in the military, I found many of the loopholes. The obvious ones are that the answer can be "Classified" or "Decline to answer" or in my case, the answer can be boxes and boxes of paperwork that is worded so vague that it may as well not have existed. No idea if this is the same in the U.K. Is there anyone…
I haven't submitted one personally, but from knowing someone who has (and has received them) and reading Private Eye (satirical & investigative magazine here) I gather a more common/easily usable excuse this side of the pond is 'commercial sensitivity'.
I’ve also seen fees being used which is technically legal and is supposed to be a reasonable administrative charge but can be multiplied by the number of subjects involved for instance.
The FOI part means this is dead on arrival and will be abused all ends up. For this to work you need the public to understand why DARPA worked. Hiding details of failures makes that impossible (and again, completely open to corruption).
Genuine question: why did DARPA work?
OK so the British HNers commenting seem to be unimpressed. :) Leaving this specific agency/project aside, what would be the right way to do this? How do we do public investment in high risk projects well?
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DARPA gets used as an example a lot, so let's take it as a our type specimen. What makes an (D)ARPA? What (besides funding) made it work? Is secrecy and/or low accountability important? Defense/weapons focus? Was the cold war a necessary condition? Do they have an investment philosophy that could be copied? Managerial philosophy? Is high level stuff even relevant or is it details like 5 year PM appointments and selec…
Likely more than you ever wanted to know on the topic: https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw A couple things I'd pull out: Program managers sit limited terms to prevent empire building Program managers have a great deal of autonomy once funding is initially allocated DARPA has a high appetite for risk. They're ok with 90% of projects failing to hit their goal.
> I would rather this be read by a few people motivated to take action than by a broad audience who will find it merely interesting. In that vein, if you find yourself wanting to share this on Twitter or Hacker News, consider instead sharing it with one or two friends who will take action on it. Thank you for indulging me!
You maybe shouldn't have shared that here, but thanks!
I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community. As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around pe…
Equally, the UK has a gap in research funding. The private sector has had, literally, decades to close it. The gap is closed in many other economies by the govt, so this is a reasonable solution. The govt has also done a huge amount to involve the private sector, most of the approach has been about the private sector but this is targeted on an area where it is basically understood there is market failure.
There are always risks around politics, this has happened to an extent with Scottish Enterprise and the new SIB, but this problem isn't going to solve itself, and the path to oversight is relatively straightforward. Saying that has to be corruption just makes no sense when any funding is going to be under the same constraints as most other govt funding (I have no idea why people FOI is public scrutiny, it isn't, FOI would not help you uncover corruption to any degree...that isn't what it is for or how it is used, if you believe that the govt is corrupt, defund all services, that is it...that is the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that belief, we have FOI and it isn't stopping corruption...so defund it all).
The FOI part means this is dead on arrival and will be abused all ends up. For this to work you need the public to understand why DARPA worked. Hiding details of failures makes that impossible (and again, completely open to corruption).
In the U.S. everything is technically exempt from FOIA to a degree. Having gone through that process while I was in the military, I found many of the loopholes. The obvious ones are that the answer can be "Classified" or "Decline to answer" or in my case, the answer can be boxes and boxes of paperwork that is worded so vague that it may as well not have existed. No idea if this is the same in the U.K. Is there anyone…
This might be controversial, but it's very hard to have negotiations in good-faith with a company for services, and drive a hard bargain, if the company knows that the pricing offered to government can be FOI'd by a rival or other customer, to get granular price offered.
If you want to get the best value for money, and get below list price, you need the ability to have a commercial negotiation, with the confidence that granular pricing information (i.e. emails with discounted price lists for government customers) aren't becoming public.
That's not to say the total amount spent should be kept secret, but if exact breakdowns of unit pricing were going to be made public, it would likely cost the public more in the inability of government to negotiate around price with suppliers (or rather their unwillingness to enter into such negotiations)
Similarly, any kind of serious negotiation needs to have secrecy - it's very hard in a practical sense to have a negotiation with a party that has to (or might be forced to) publish everything. The number of startups (and even larger companies) that do everything as price-on-request should show industry's willingness to see the kind of price tarnsparency that FOI would expose. And that would give the taxpayer poorer value for money in the long term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bridge, yes. Tunnel, no. It’s very feasible and practical from a civil-engineering perspective, but the economic value of a road connection between NI and Scotland has not been demonstrated to outweigh the economic cost of its construction.
What’s feesible? The tunnel or the bridge? I’d heard the tunnel wasn’t possible due to the particular geography of the channel. But a bridge? Now that I’d be interesting I seeing. There used to be a giants causeway across there in mythical times ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s feesible? The tunnel or the bridge? I’d heard the tunnel wasn’t possible due to the particular geography of the channel. But a bridge? Now that I’d be interesting I seeing. There used to be a giants causeway across there in mythical times ...
The bridge is unfeasible because the channel is around 200m deep in places which makes it crazy expensive. I also found a couple of references to nuclear waste in the trench, but that might have been for another site.