danieldwilliam

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• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  Singularity Sky was the first of your books I bought. I really enjoyed. I liked the tongue in cheek yet with serious thought approach to space opera. I tracked down Iron Sky as soon as I could. I enjoyed Iron...
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  Greg.Tingey @61 re @52 The Grand Guignol was a small Parisian theatre which sounded a touch Gothic to me....
• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  A celebrated science fiction author, well known for discussing the implications of artificial intelligence in his fiction and for using macabre, nay Gothic black humour sets up a blog where there are often discussions about hard take off singularities and...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  In the event of nuclear war my mum, a radiologist, was on some list to go and do something in some bunker somewhere. Which was ironic as she was an activist in the campaign against nuclear weapons. She used to...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  Greg.Tingey @72. What would I do? I’d like to think that I would try to stay alive whilst I worked myself into a genuinely stable situation personally and then was able to either effect some form of gradual economic reform...
• Commented on Obituaries
  When I was doing my Masters we had a class on accounting with several other MSc and Business streams. Quite a few foreign students of about my age who would have been about 8 during the Miners’ Strike and, also,...
• Commented on Obituaries
  If you are minded to rejoice at the end of Thatcher I think the time to have done so was following a Labour party victory at the 1983 General Election....
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  There are specific mentions of Northern Ireland in this context further up thread, which is why I mentioned Northern Ireland. I don’t find the idea of a union with the Republic any more attractive than a union with a separatist...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  A union between NI and an independent Scotland is certainly an interesting idea and I’d be fascinated to see what the response to the idea was from citizens of NI. And also from my fellow Scots. I’m not that the...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  I’m not sure we could have done anything other than expand the EU eastwards. Especially with the context of the Balkans. I think we were probably ideologically committed to it by the stance we’d taken during the Cold War that...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  How much telecommuting do the legislators actually have to do? Enjoying the peripatetic parliament idea....
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  This is a genuine question but does the EU in the 21st Century really need a capital city?...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  What else have you missed? As a British worker I don’t think I would relish having the Social Chapter removed along with all those restrictions on how beastly my employer can be to me. I like the trend of generally...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  I can see why you would not want UKIP to win many seats and I don’t disagree with your assessement of their views on sexuality at all. Which is one of the reasons I’d like them to win some seats....
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  I can not decide if UKIP are a libertarian party putting on the trappings of a no nonsense common sense populist right wing party for electoral purposes or the other way round. Either way, personally, they would never attract my...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  My personal thing to watch in 2013 is Kurdistan. I was reminded by my barber, a Syrian Kurd or Kurdish Syrian, that Kurdistan includes parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. With the conflict in Syria looking more like a...
• Commented on Understanding Reader Reviews
  Unfortunately, OGH doesn't get someone holding a golden wreath above his head and whispering "remember that you are mortal" as he drives his chariot through Edinburgh in triumph... No one is riding a chariot through Edinburgh in triumph at the...
• Commented on Understanding Reader Reviews
  I often find one star reviews really useful. Certainly as an initial filter on new authors. If the one star reviews are mainly – I HaTeZ Tihs BooKZ - then I move on to the four and five star ratings...
• Commented on Things that keep me awake at night #1: The end of telephony
  The thing about arms races is that it isn’t that easy to avoid getting involved in one if the other side is determined....
• Commented on Things that keep me awake at night #1: The end of telephony
  There is the potential for an amusing and diverting arms race here between spammers, genuine callers and those being called. Call receivers spend extra money trying to avoid spam. Non spam callers spend extra money trying to get through and...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  The cost of capital and consequently the amount of dividend income to be had seems to me to be a really key question here. If you accept that the price of capital is subject to the same laws of supply...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  One of the things that is most interesting about this scenario is the opportunity it affords me to be me in many different ways. At the moment I tend to show up in the world as the elder brother, sober...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Mmmh, depends what you think happens to reservation wages in this scenario. If you are essentially paying people enough to live on whilst they do their hobbies wages for hobby-work may fall significantly whilst leaving non hobby work wages unaffected....
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  I’d re-frame your comment about mass unemployment. There are plenty of very worthwhile things that are currently not being done because labour is too expensive and / or those who would do it as a hobby don’t have time. With...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  I totally agree about the ability to secure debt on the freehold land. So you would run with two mortgages. Maybe three. One on the bricks and mortar. One on the freehold of the land. One on the planning permissions...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  I don’t know that you would ever get a mortgage for 300 years. I’d be reluctant to lend you money secured on a house that it likely to need to be completely rebuilt before you’d paid for it. You might...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  I’d take the pill. I’d wait until it came off patent. That extra $8k per person would compound up nicely. It nearly pays for my wife and I to rebuild our flat in 100 years. For me the key thing...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  I find it difficult to divorce the macro effects from how it would change my own plans. The key macro question for me is what does this do to the long term cost of capital and what does it do...
• Commented on 2512
  I am not sure that I agree with those poster who think that by 2512 we will be post global warming and in a new status quo. A recent Canadian study on the persistence of climate change (rather than the...
• Commented on 2512
  A colleague of mine who is a much more gifted technical analyst of the way voting systems work has suggested to me that the best way to conduct a referendum with three options where one of the options is sort...