Not sure this fits in any of the existing topics so I'm starting a new one for 'things we think are interesting or useful that aren't youtube videos are aren't quite random enough for the random thread'.

I attended a lecture by the BoE's chief economist a few days ago and the university have put it online. It's quite interesting.

Is it time to think radically about how companies are run?

I'll give this a watch later.

The problem is everybody thinks a company is failing, if it doesn't produce record growth each quarter. In reality, a market can only take so much and at some point it will become mature, which means that people won't buy products as often - the PC market is suddenly a failure, not because people have stopped buying PCs or because the companies aren't making a profit, but because the market is only growing in single percentage points, or declining in single percentage points. But the market has matured, the technology is not changing as fast as it used to, my old 2010 laptop now has an SSD and, with its Core i7 processor and 8GB RAM is still plenty fast enough.

Then you have the reduction in build quality. Appliances used to cost "real" money a couple of decades ago, but they would last a good 20 years, now they are designed to need replacing after 2 - 5 years. Why? Because they are built down to a price and the company needs to keep selling new devices in order to have any form of growth.

But do the companies need to keep growing? Do they need to make exhorbitent profits by selling cheap tat at inflated prices, tat that will only last a few years? What is wrong with building high quality products that will last and last, but cost "real" money?

Society has come to the point where growth is sexy, but everything has to be as cheap as possible, or it has to be a designer brand, in which case it can be expensive, even if the actual components or materials aren't really any different from the cheap tat. This goes for clothes, often designer labels are made in the same factories as the cheap "no label" products for discounters like Kik. Electronics even more so. Look at the price of an iPhone or Samsung phone and price of cheap imitations, even well specified ones don't cost more than 50% of the price of the Samsung or Apple phones, yet they often have pretty much the same performance and almost identical components. But even those twice-as-expensive devices don't last any longer than the cheap ones...

It's worth checking out some of David Heinemeier-Hanson's talks on that subject. His focus is a lot on venture capital vs bootstrapping companies, but a lot of the same underlying thinking applies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlhAkNWC1qo

I pretty much agree with everything Dave said. I have considered for some time that the stock market's convention that growth is the major objective rather than profit or sustainability is a systemic failure on the part of business leaders in the developed world.

Coincidentally, I was reading an article by Andre Geim, Nobel prize winner for the discovery of Graphene. Discussing the fact that graphene products aren't on the shelves yet, one of his responses was as follows...



The requirement for short term benefit is an inhibitor of innovation, not an enabler of it.

That is something I've been saying for more than a decade. They only look at short term benefits.

Will the company be there in a year? In a decade? In a century? Who cares, I reaped my profit this quarter and sold the shares, I'm all right Jack...

We should be looking at long term investment and rewarding forward thinking companies, not rewarding those lacking any vision, but that can pump out tat that won't last five minutes.

That's interesting. I'd never considered the errors caused by limiting the decimal places used, and there's not that many needed to create an error that seems that insignificant.

The hunt still goes on to see if PI is a repeating number though.

Accuracy is one of the major things you learn as an engineer. You can waste a lot of time ( and money) calculating to an unnecessary degree of accuracy when it could have been simplified to a coefficient. Also in construction there's huge safety factor so calculating to 0.1 mm accuracy is ridiculous. Obviously if you build aircrafts and engines, it's very different.


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It doesn't actually, it was proved to be irrational back in 1761:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_tha ... irrational

That was actually very interesting. Never thought about how much error is introduced with using limited decimal points.

How to make the perfect cup of tea (and cut a cake) | Vanessa Heggie | Science | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/the ... cut-a-cake

I know we've got some serious tea drinkers here...

Brain parasite could be behind rage disorder in adults | Science | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... -in-adults



Going off like, well, an IED, usually happens because of pressure build-up over time IME. Though that's not to say there isn't a family member who needs a beating present, or a bunch of USB cables that are attempting to procreate when all you need is to charge something...

Former BBC radio host puts the boot in
http://www.martinkelner.com/wtitten-by- ... adio.shtml

Didn't hit the wall, did he?

Yours for £20m: the Yorkshire village where 'time has stood still' | UK news | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016 ... tood-still

I love that places like that still exist.