Utilities can easily be modeled in graph theory. Whatever the product (electricity, water, sewage, gas) is produced and consumed in certain nodes, and the product is transported through the edges. Some edges branch out, some close loops.
The fractal nature comes when you look at the consumption nodes: each consumption node branches itself into a new graph of edges and vertices, with several new consumption vertices, each of which..... etc., etc., from Hoover Dam all the way to the plug in the wall where your laptop is charging.
(In other words: in the high level power graph of the USA (including Canada), New England in a node, then NE, if I open It, I see Boston, if I open Boston I see large city areas, then neighborhoods, then streets, then houses, then inside the house. It's the same in Power, gas, water.
There's a lot of operating information I want in real time about every point of the system: in particular, probability of outages given current condition and expected new condition. I have the hunch -and it's only a hunch- that I could exploit the fractal nature of the system to run high level simulations that will give me information about things in veronica's street.
Other possible applications are probably more of the planning type. How do I allocate restoration resources after a hurricane or ice storm? What's the optimal number of spare parts of X type I should have?
As memory constraints and processing speeds improved, utilities left sparsity and other techniques behind. And went brute force full steam ahead: we will add every last pole and every last screw in the pole to our data base.
Now that distributed generation is a thing, I think this on line fractal analysis can have value. Should I turn off large generation because clouds are breaking in Boston and rooftop solar will kick in?
Anyhow, I have never seen anyone exploit the fractal nature of utility grids, and when I was still thinking that that would be a cool subject for an engineering Ph.D., I got sucked into technicolor-economical feasibility analysis of generation projects, and by the time I looked back, I was CFO of a generation company fighting with the Auditors about whether the fuel tanks bottoms should be written off or not (I won that one).
Lee is right on one thing. The old factory jobs in MI and PA no longer exist. They don'r exist here, they don't exist in China. They were automatized to death. In the early 90s Caterpillar was able to cut 90% (ninety percent) of the workforce in their Peoria spare parts distribution center through automation. That was over 800 jobs destroyed, as robots picked up boxes and put them in conveyors that would direct the box to the correct truck, where the remaining human would put the box inside the truck.
Right now we have a crumbling infrastructure that needs replacement. If you want jobs for the displaced working class, jobs that would last at least 20 years, we should engage in long-term, massive, infrastructure projects. There is one party that is in favour of infrastructure projects, and one party that it is against them.
In the USA, and other places, the WWC has two problems: a jobs and economics problem, and a social/cultural problem. My (perhaps mistaken) observation, is that the WWC would not consider solutions to their economic problems that do not address, first, their cultural problems.
Even our bete noire, Rod Dreher, says it: Hillary probably has better solutions for the WWC, but because Hillary hates the WWC, thinks they are a bunch of hicks, and mocks them over quinoa fritters and Chablis, the WWC does not care about what she might be offering, because the WWC prefers their dignity to three square meals. At least that is how I read him.
"My current “interest” is non-smooth, non-linear optimization. It’s a subset of operations research that a decade ago was considered too hard, too slow. Back then everything had to be abstracted down to something “linear.”"
veronica, if we ever meet, i will need you to talk to me about this for as long as you care to spare, while I keep feeding you fried eggs. I do good fried eggs
I was born too soon. 25 years ago my mind buzzed with ideas about how utilities were fractal in nature, and how a fractal analysis (of almost any subject) should be far more efficient without any significant loss of accuracy. Regretfully, the math wasn't there (or if it was it was too far over my head), and instead efforts were diverted towards the brute force answer: if you model every single last tree, you will have modeled a forest.
Bummer, I need to learn more. Do you like your eggs fried in bacon fat and olive oil?
On a complete sidetrack, I want to commend you on the ability that you have to express these very complicated issues in a language that is "simple" enough and high level enough that I can understand what you are saying even when I have no clue what you are talking about.
In case is not clear, this is me praising your communication skills: general and high level enough for a person with basic math (1st year college I would say) to follow, while not dumbing down. So thanks again.
On a separate, separate, issue, if I can think it, I can do it in FORTRAN. And I was a wiz kid programming the HP41. I was able to program complex number (a+bi) matrix inversions, which was one of my proudest days in college.
Boris Johnson has given up on running for Tory Leader.
Another proof that Brexit was just an intraparty fight. Never having thought Leave would win, they are scared of the impossibility of fulfilling the promises made
I promise I didn't say a word. We know our litigation guy (Enron's Head of Litigation for the International Businesses) screwed royally in the shouting match. He, too, knew it immediately.
But it was scary. Mr, Fairly is not a nice guy. And he was acting as a madman. Literally stopping us from leaving the office. Saying he would not let us go until we signed X papers (which we never saw, nor would I have signed them under any circumstances - Ihad the full Power of Attorney of the company)
And you are right about something. There was never an engagement letter with FL&T. Only the one with the original boutique firm. And our lawyer did point that out, which made Fairly scream even louder.
A new engagement letter was, of course, the first thing N&F asked after this.
This is but a mere fraction of the whole saga, which still baffles lawyers, insurance people and engineers.
Our claim, supported by our independent expert, and accepted as good by the Adjustor prior to the Reinsurers rejecting the Adjustors report was that:
1. The lightning hit the top of the 80 mt stack, but did not drain via the grounding system, but via the actual metal stack to the metal covering of the turbine-generator set.
2. The metal encasing of the generator potential versus ground, floated and was raised several kilo volts whereas the generator coils were Y connected with the neutral to the ground, which had not yet felt the lightning impact.
3. Coil insulation failed and burned the coils.
This is were it gets better
4. During repairs we noticed that the insulation( to stop eddy currents) between the plates of the iron core had disappeared in some points. This creates hot spots that burn more insulation and would eventually -matter of months- melt the core.
5. Because the core had not melted there had technically not been a core stoppage, only a coil stoppage, and there is the argument that we should have replied the coils, reassembled the machine, wait for the core to melt and then reopen and reconstruct both core AND coils again.
6. This is a stupid proposition, wasting a huge amount of money and there is precedents in insurance case law that if a valid stoppage has occurred and you find something that does not allow the machine to be restarted you can repair it under the insurance, but, the law is not settled in this matter.
7. The Adjuster concurred with these conclusion and recommended payment. The Reinsurers rejected the Adjuster's report: claimed that no lighttning had occurred because if it had it would have drained via the lightning arrestors, and that the coil damage was wear and tear and not a sudden incurable stoppage (and thus the core damage could not be brought in either)
8. The core itself was not wear and tear. Insulation between plates is forever, though it can be damaged if the core overheats, but we didn't have records of enough overheating. We concluded the core issue was a latent manufacturing defect.
The repair was awesome for engineering nerds. But that's another beer
"Professor Asimov, what do you think about Superman supposedly flying faster than the speed of light? Isn't that against Einstein's Relativity Theory?"
"Einstein's Relativity is just a theory, but the speed of Superman is based on actual measurements"
It's a fairly long story. It gets better when you get the details, but the whole thing is at least three beers long.
Short version
The power plant I was CFO in (somewhere in Lat Am., but still property of Chapter 11 Enron) was stroke by lightning, and one of the generators was fully destroyed. From an engineering point of view it was a very fluke incident, requiring a lot of things to go wrong (cue first beer courtesy of Oscar Gordon, who would love this bit)
We submitted an insurance claim of about $10 million. Reinsurers denied the claim arguing it was all, or almost all, wear and tear. We decided to sue the insurers in Houston, since Enron had negotiated the insurance on our behalf. The court agreed to take the claim.
We hired a boutique firm specialized in insurance claims, with only two partners, paying a small retainer (50k) and any other payment based on contingency . A couple of months later the firm dissolved itself and our partner (*), and our case, moved to a fairly large, three partners names in the door, Texas based (Fairly, Texas & Large) firm.
After more than a year of prep, the trial is to start in two days. Enror's head litigation counsel, our internal counsel and myself come into the FT&L offices at about 10 am, to discuss the final details. Once we walk into our lawyers's office, she tells us that she has accepted a position in another firm, she is taking the case there (and the rights to the contingency fee), and tended her resignation that same morning.
The Enron lawyer is in shock. He tells us we have to get out of that office immediately and silently. We try, but the first named partner (Mr. Fairly, a really nasty guy) is standing in the front door blocking our exit, surrounded by like ten people. He stops us.
Shouting ensue, mainly between Fairly and the Enron litigation lawyer, who at some moment says "quantum meruit". Fairly turns around and starts screaming to the ten witnesses saying "You heard him. He said quantum meruit. You are all witnesses. He said quantum meruit". Fairly is so engrossed in this that he stops watching us and we can literally squeeze past him out of the office.
I didn't know them what quantum meruit meant, but it felt like we were screwed. And the Enron lawyer 'fessed that that was the last thing he should have said.
The following day FL&T sued us in the same court we were about to start the trial, which got bumped out of the calendar and delayed for two more years. We had to hire a lawyer to defend ourselves not only from FL&T but, in principle, also from our original lawyer, and the new law firm (New&Firm) that now had the case, which they nevertheless continued to have and work on, with plenty of paperwork waiving and not waiving certain privileges.
FL&T and N&F settled and agreed to a split of the contingency fee. We went to trial two years later, the jury found for us.....
And then the judge threw out the jury verdict and issued a JNOV!!!
But that's a different story, that requires its own beer.
(*) This lawyer is a very interest person in his own right. He had been in an early morning meeting in the Twin Towers on 9/11, leaving the building minutes before the first plane hit it. He was in the subway when the plane crashed and only found about it when he got out in Midtown
1. There are thousands of positions in the federal government that are not confirmed by the Senate and serve at the plasure of the President (or the Governor) or are appointed by the executive for a fixed number of years. And these political appointees have the legal authority to direct the day to day activities of most USA agencies. That is how you get political appointees redacting reports from NOAA (or was it NASA?)
2. There's a difference in the level and authority of senior civil servants. The Permanent Secretary in any Department is as, or more, powerful than the Minister, and very few Ministers would act against the position of his Permanent Secretary. No permanent staff in a USA Department is ranked as equal or above political appointees, to the best of my knowledge. Nor it would be deemed acceptable in our political system to give "unelected" civil servants such levels of autonomy, discretion, and power.
Anecdote: I had the chance to have meetings with the Minister(s) of Energy(*) and the Permanent Secreatary in a Commonwealth country. It was a great experience to be able to get deep into details with the Permanent Secretary while it was obvious half of our conversation was going over the Minister's head.
(*) Between meetings one and two a snap election occurred and a new party took power, but we were able to continue the discussion after five minutes of summarizing for the new Minister.
I might have misinterpreted your smoking the mirrors comment. If so, apologies. I took is as someone clouding the issues and playing a con.
There is a side in the campaign that focused on fear and the likely consequences of Brexit. It was, possibly, a bit of a downer, but no one has identified actual falsehoods in their arguments.
There is a side in the campaign that promised things that they knew were impossible to deliver, like 350 millions per week to strengthen the NHS, continuing the subsidies to Cornwall and Wales, free movement of Britons in Europe and sending the Polish plumbers home.
There must be a technical term to describe what people do when they promise things they know they can't and won't deliver. And I'm sure that that technical term is not "Truth".
The opinion of entertainers about a highly complex political and economical issue is of no interest to me. There is nothing I can learn from Idris Elba about the macroeconomic impact of immigration, so I didn't read your link. I'd rather read Krugman's opinion, if you have it handy.
About your second link,, but "and now, something completely different", I have the honour of having had the company I represented being sued by our own lawyers (and to be deposed as material witness by our ex lawyers in this litigation)
It's one of my most successful cocktail party stories, particularly with lawyers present, who can barely believe it
I think he is right, but the response is to to toss out the adultery charges, but to update the definition of adultery to sexual acts with someone not your spouse (it's not clear to me if heterosexual sodomy with someone not your spouse is or not adultery. Is sodomy intercourse?)
I know better than to reply to this, but if you really believe Remain was the one smoking the mirrors, I have a red bus with a big sign about sending 350 million pounds weekly to the NHS to sell you.
My experience is sort of reverse. I'm an engineer with an M. Sc. In engineering. I have been doing business around the utilities most of my professional life raising all the way to the C-suite (CFO, COO, CEO). I don't have an MBA.
Business professionals want to talk about the Business Problem because they have no fishing clue about how the technical aspects work. They come with brilliant (so they say) ideas that cannot be implemented.
I can see that developing software for massive sales is a completely different animal, where marketing and other commercial aspects are very relevant (who is our customer? What does our customer need? What does he want (not the same)? But in my particular world the order in which questions must be answered is:
- What can physically be done?
- What can physically be done at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time?
- Of the above, what is the best business option?
That's been a problem like, forever. The traditional solution was to restrict the franchise to those people that could be expected to reflect and understand the issues.
At the end of the day, there's several answers to that question nowadays, not all of them applicable everywhere
As who they are, Experts prove themselves initially through credentialism, and further by being more right than wrong. Is kind of elitist, and does not guarantee anything, given that expert consensus drifts through time, but I can't see a replacement
A good, practical, way to introduce experts in the system is a mechanism like the UK civil servants, where an independent group is in charge of the details (the How) with elected (responsible) ministers only in charge of determining the What.
Now, in my opinion, in order to have a strong civil service you need to separate the State (permanent, steady, not subject to political changes) from the Government (ever changing following political winds). Parliamentary democracies have better mechanisms to do this. Civil servants are servants of the Queen, the State, not of her Ministers, the Government, and can stand up to them. This is an organic development that was incorporated in the XIX century in most Western monarchies, including those that, like Germany, later became republics (France, like the USA is an outlier, never having had a real constitutional monarchy except 1814-30)
The USA was founded before there was a real Civil,Service, or a built-in separation of State and Government. Obama is both Head of State and Head of Government. Plus, the fixed terms set in our Constitution contrast with the more precarious environment of Parliamentary Governments, that may last week's or years. In that uncertainty, Civil Service developed as a mechanism to continue managing, on a permanent way, the day to day of what became more and more complex societies that could not be subject to continuous, unpredictable, changes in Government.
By adding predictability to the changes in Government, the FF made it very difficult for the difference between State and Government to develop. Civil servants ere servants of the President, or the state governor. Not servants of something different, outside politics.
And let us not forget that people did not decide out of the blue to disbelief climate or other experts. They were told that "so-called experts" are just tools of the despised [fill in the blank]. Once every politician in the country has belittled at least one type of expert for political gain, you have destroyed the Experts.So, really, the USA has no mechanisms to protect those who work on the How from the attacks of those that want to change the What. Pity.
I was in the UK when, just after the elections, Cameron started the trip for his first round of negotiations. At the time he was, if not promising, at least strongly hinting that he would negotiate a limit on the Freedom of (Eastern)(*) Eurpopeans to settle in the UK and to collect the same benefits as nationals
I told my family then and there that there would be Brexit, because he had promised the one thing he would never get.
Months later he had moved away from immigration restrictions focusing only on trying to agree on benefit restrictions.
If you look at the final concessions, which are so wonky and puny they don't seem worth printing the 28 copies for signature. The gap with respec to the original expectations was so huge that I knew the referendum would come out for Leave.
I lobbied my family intensely for them to vote Remain, but I haven't asked the details of how they voted. We settled for, if Leave won and a year from now they think Leave was a mistake, I'll get a posh dinner in a fancy London restaurant. If we had settled for a week, instead of a year, that dinner would already be in the bag.
(*) I don't remember if he explecitily mentioned new entrants to the EU or EU nationals in general, but the Eastern subtext was quite clear
I agree with you, but I think that the only way to win the debate, is to "win the debate". To clarify what leaving means, and the relative cost of the things the Leavers want: no Polish plumbers.? That means no Norway deal. No S.E. Asians? That's not even a EU thing. No EU EHS regulations? Probably doable, but requiring Parliament to pass a minimum floor of EHS regulations, and so on and so on.
The Leave promised rainbow excreting unicorns, to the Leavers delight (and regret, now that they are finding they were conned)
But the Remain refused to address the Leavers real issues (probably because they refused to even acknowledge the existence of anti-Polish-plumbers Britons, for reasons of European politics and national pride) and instead focused on GDP and economic threats, which sounded as if Remain's only concern was for their precious bankers.
If anything, I would require power to be in the hands of Experts. But somehow that's part of what the Senate was designed to do. It didn't work well.
I'm not particularly against referenda. I think certain questions, like Brexit, should be put to referenda. Certain supermajorities are probably needed in most cases.
Now, I have specific, technical, if you want, issues with the Brexit referendum, which makes Brexit a particularly bad subject for a referendum
The main technical issue is that the way Article 50 is written, you cannot propose STATUS QUO or A SPECIFIC change.
You'll only know the end state two years after calling Article 50. Today, yOu can only ask: "should we trigger Article 50 and hope for the best, but understand that the best will likely include Polish plumbers (a Norway version), and the worst might be we end with nothing whatsoever but the WTO (*)?"
This was not the question posed, or it was (to Leave, or not to Leave?), but no one said the important bits out loud. No one knew what Leave looks like because it is by design unknowable. So the referendum question was never really binary.
My other technical problem has been discussed at length. This referendum was internal Tory party politics by other means. The Leave Tories did not expect to win the referendum (UKIP is different). They expected to win the internal power in the party by losing the referendum but mobilizing their base (paging Ted Cruz). That's why they promised impossible things, so impossible that they had to start backtracking not 24 hours after winning. You have now each of the Leave leaders (including Farage) saying that they themselves never said that the 350 million pounds per week (a figure that is also allegedly untrue) will go to NHS, while they campaigned in a red bus with a big sign that said so (https://www.google.com/search?q=red+bus+350+million+nhs&rlz=1C9BKJA_enPA592PA592&hl=en-US&prmd=nsiv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisoNWy3svNAhVP-GMKHax-BmEQ_AUICSgD&biw=1024&bih=653#imgrc=reUQ9Lzu4W7hkM%3A )
(*) is there any country in the world that is not part of any special trade deal and can only rely on the WTO for every single international trade transaction? I'm not sure if China qualifies, but I can't think of any other. Because the UK is inside the EU, unless it settles a deal with the EU, the day after Brexit it will have trade deals with exactly zero countries
The problem I have with your doctors metaphor is that one doctor more or less told the truth (Brexit will mean less economic growth, a worse trading position, at least at the beginning, a loss of resources in impoverished regions like Wales and Cornwall, jeopardizing the Good Friday agreements and giving up on being the Finance Capital of Europe).
The other doctor basically promised things that they knew were impossible from the start: no negative economic impact, Polish plumbers out, Southesat Asians, Subsaharan Africans and West Indians also out, even though they have nothing to do with the EU, 359 million pounds a week of super avid to fund the NHS, no interruption to subsidies in Wales and Cornwall, pensioners will continue to be allowed to live in Southern Europe, no reduction in free trade, no impact to the role of London as financial capital, and no pestering EU regulations about cucumber size OR workers safety.
Should the Remain have campaigned differently, emphasizing the positive instead of relying on a Fear campaign? Probably yes. But it's abundantly cleAr thT the Leave campaign was not a doctor honestly recommending a therapeutic alternative. It was snake oil selling.
Regretfully, only the AMA or the FDA (experts) can denounce quack doctors. So the proper question should be:
Is there a mechanism to guarantee that politicians promises are somewhat based on reality? Must, in the name of Freedom of Expression, politicians be allowed to distort the reality so much, particularly in matters that are not obvious to the man in the street, in a way that, in essence, invalidates the voter's capability to make a reasoned (not necessarily rational) decision?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Siege of London”
You are thinking of Fight Club. Easy mix-up
"
Utilities can easily be modeled in graph theory. Whatever the product (electricity, water, sewage, gas) is produced and consumed in certain nodes, and the product is transported through the edges. Some edges branch out, some close loops.
The fractal nature comes when you look at the consumption nodes: each consumption node branches itself into a new graph of edges and vertices, with several new consumption vertices, each of which..... etc., etc., from Hoover Dam all the way to the plug in the wall where your laptop is charging.
(In other words: in the high level power graph of the USA (including Canada), New England in a node, then NE, if I open It, I see Boston, if I open Boston I see large city areas, then neighborhoods, then streets, then houses, then inside the house. It's the same in Power, gas, water.
There's a lot of operating information I want in real time about every point of the system: in particular, probability of outages given current condition and expected new condition. I have the hunch -and it's only a hunch- that I could exploit the fractal nature of the system to run high level simulations that will give me information about things in veronica's street.
Other possible applications are probably more of the planning type. How do I allocate restoration resources after a hurricane or ice storm? What's the optimal number of spare parts of X type I should have?
As memory constraints and processing speeds improved, utilities left sparsity and other techniques behind. And went brute force full steam ahead: we will add every last pole and every last screw in the pole to our data base.
Now that distributed generation is a thing, I think this on line fractal analysis can have value. Should I turn off large generation because clouds are breaking in Boston and rooftop solar will kick in?
Anyhow, I have never seen anyone exploit the fractal nature of utility grids, and when I was still thinking that that would be a cool subject for an engineering Ph.D., I got sucked into technicolor-economical feasibility analysis of generation projects, and by the time I looked back, I was CFO of a generation company fighting with the Auditors about whether the fuel tanks bottoms should be written off or not (I won that one).
"
I'll do butter, and I'll do bacon/olive oil mix. Blind test, we'll see what you like best
P. S. The first law of tastebuds is "Everything is best with bacon"
"
That's exactly what I was trying to say about the primacy of cultural vs economic issues for the WWC.
"
@saul-degraw @leeesq
Lee is right on one thing. The old factory jobs in MI and PA no longer exist. They don'r exist here, they don't exist in China. They were automatized to death. In the early 90s Caterpillar was able to cut 90% (ninety percent) of the workforce in their Peoria spare parts distribution center through automation. That was over 800 jobs destroyed, as robots picked up boxes and put them in conveyors that would direct the box to the correct truck, where the remaining human would put the box inside the truck.
Right now we have a crumbling infrastructure that needs replacement. If you want jobs for the displaced working class, jobs that would last at least 20 years, we should engage in long-term, massive, infrastructure projects. There is one party that is in favour of infrastructure projects, and one party that it is against them.
In the USA, and other places, the WWC has two problems: a jobs and economics problem, and a social/cultural problem. My (perhaps mistaken) observation, is that the WWC would not consider solutions to their economic problems that do not address, first, their cultural problems.
Even our bete noire, Rod Dreher, says it: Hillary probably has better solutions for the WWC, but because Hillary hates the WWC, thinks they are a bunch of hicks, and mocks them over quinoa fritters and Chablis, the WWC does not care about what she might be offering, because the WWC prefers their dignity to three square meals. At least that is how I read him.
"
@veronica-d
"My current “interest” is non-smooth, non-linear optimization. It’s a subset of operations research that a decade ago was considered too hard, too slow. Back then everything had to be abstracted down to something “linear.”"
veronica, if we ever meet, i will need you to talk to me about this for as long as you care to spare, while I keep feeding you fried eggs. I do good fried eggs
I was born too soon. 25 years ago my mind buzzed with ideas about how utilities were fractal in nature, and how a fractal analysis (of almost any subject) should be far more efficient without any significant loss of accuracy. Regretfully, the math wasn't there (or if it was it was too far over my head), and instead efforts were diverted towards the brute force answer: if you model every single last tree, you will have modeled a forest.
Bummer, I need to learn more. Do you like your eggs fried in bacon fat and olive oil?
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.06.28.T}”
veronica
On a complete sidetrack, I want to commend you on the ability that you have to express these very complicated issues in a language that is "simple" enough and high level enough that I can understand what you are saying even when I have no clue what you are talking about.
In case is not clear, this is me praising your communication skills: general and high level enough for a person with basic math (1st year college I would say) to follow, while not dumbing down. So thanks again.
On a separate, separate, issue, if I can think it, I can do it in FORTRAN. And I was a wiz kid programming the HP41. I was able to program complex number (a+bi) matrix inversions, which was one of my proudest days in college.
On “Relationship Status: It’s Complicated”
Boris Johnson has given up on running for Tory Leader.
Another proof that Brexit was just an intraparty fight. Never having thought Leave would win, they are scared of the impossibility of fulfilling the promises made
On “Morning Ed: Education {2016.06.29.W}”
i'm surprised no legal nerd has asked about the Judge throwing out the jury verdict and issued a JNOV.
That was one of the biggest surprises in my career. The jury ruled for us and several days later we are back in square one
"
I promise I didn't say a word. We know our litigation guy (Enron's Head of Litigation for the International Businesses) screwed royally in the shouting match. He, too, knew it immediately.
But it was scary. Mr, Fairly is not a nice guy. And he was acting as a madman. Literally stopping us from leaving the office. Saying he would not let us go until we signed X papers (which we never saw, nor would I have signed them under any circumstances - Ihad the full Power of Attorney of the company)
And you are right about something. There was never an engagement letter with FL&T. Only the one with the original boutique firm. And our lawyer did point that out, which made Fairly scream even louder.
A new engagement letter was, of course, the first thing N&F asked after this.
"
This is but a mere fraction of the whole saga, which still baffles lawyers, insurance people and engineers.
Our claim, supported by our independent expert, and accepted as good by the Adjustor prior to the Reinsurers rejecting the Adjustors report was that:
1. The lightning hit the top of the 80 mt stack, but did not drain via the grounding system, but via the actual metal stack to the metal covering of the turbine-generator set.
2. The metal encasing of the generator potential versus ground, floated and was raised several kilo volts whereas the generator coils were Y connected with the neutral to the ground, which had not yet felt the lightning impact.
3. Coil insulation failed and burned the coils.
This is were it gets better
4. During repairs we noticed that the insulation( to stop eddy currents) between the plates of the iron core had disappeared in some points. This creates hot spots that burn more insulation and would eventually -matter of months- melt the core.
5. Because the core had not melted there had technically not been a core stoppage, only a coil stoppage, and there is the argument that we should have replied the coils, reassembled the machine, wait for the core to melt and then reopen and reconstruct both core AND coils again.
6. This is a stupid proposition, wasting a huge amount of money and there is precedents in insurance case law that if a valid stoppage has occurred and you find something that does not allow the machine to be restarted you can repair it under the insurance, but, the law is not settled in this matter.
7. The Adjuster concurred with these conclusion and recommended payment. The Reinsurers rejected the Adjuster's report: claimed that no lighttning had occurred because if it had it would have drained via the lightning arrestors, and that the coil damage was wear and tear and not a sudden incurable stoppage (and thus the core damage could not be brought in either)
8. The core itself was not wear and tear. Insulation between plates is forever, though it can be damaged if the core overheats, but we didn't have records of enough overheating. We concluded the core issue was a latent manufacturing defect.
The repair was awesome for engineering nerds. But that's another beer
On “Westeros is Poorly Designed”
Allegedly, a true Asimov anecdote:
"Professor Asimov, what do you think about Superman supposedly flying faster than the speed of light? Isn't that against Einstein's Relativity Theory?"
"Einstein's Relativity is just a theory, but the speed of Superman is based on actual measurements"
On “Morning Ed: Education {2016.06.29.W}”
It's a fairly long story. It gets better when you get the details, but the whole thing is at least three beers long.
Short version
The power plant I was CFO in (somewhere in Lat Am., but still property of Chapter 11 Enron) was stroke by lightning, and one of the generators was fully destroyed. From an engineering point of view it was a very fluke incident, requiring a lot of things to go wrong (cue first beer courtesy of Oscar Gordon, who would love this bit)
We submitted an insurance claim of about $10 million. Reinsurers denied the claim arguing it was all, or almost all, wear and tear. We decided to sue the insurers in Houston, since Enron had negotiated the insurance on our behalf. The court agreed to take the claim.
We hired a boutique firm specialized in insurance claims, with only two partners, paying a small retainer (50k) and any other payment based on contingency . A couple of months later the firm dissolved itself and our partner (*), and our case, moved to a fairly large, three partners names in the door, Texas based (Fairly, Texas & Large) firm.
After more than a year of prep, the trial is to start in two days. Enror's head litigation counsel, our internal counsel and myself come into the FT&L offices at about 10 am, to discuss the final details. Once we walk into our lawyers's office, she tells us that she has accepted a position in another firm, she is taking the case there (and the rights to the contingency fee), and tended her resignation that same morning.
The Enron lawyer is in shock. He tells us we have to get out of that office immediately and silently. We try, but the first named partner (Mr. Fairly, a really nasty guy) is standing in the front door blocking our exit, surrounded by like ten people. He stops us.
Shouting ensue, mainly between Fairly and the Enron litigation lawyer, who at some moment says "quantum meruit". Fairly turns around and starts screaming to the ten witnesses saying "You heard him. He said quantum meruit. You are all witnesses. He said quantum meruit". Fairly is so engrossed in this that he stops watching us and we can literally squeeze past him out of the office.
I didn't know them what quantum meruit meant, but it felt like we were screwed. And the Enron lawyer 'fessed that that was the last thing he should have said.
The following day FL&T sued us in the same court we were about to start the trial, which got bumped out of the calendar and delayed for two more years. We had to hire a lawyer to defend ourselves not only from FL&T but, in principle, also from our original lawyer, and the new law firm (New&Firm) that now had the case, which they nevertheless continued to have and work on, with plenty of paperwork waiving and not waiving certain privileges.
FL&T and N&F settled and agreed to a split of the contingency fee. We went to trial two years later, the jury found for us.....
And then the judge threw out the jury verdict and issued a JNOV!!!
But that's a different story, that requires its own beer.
(*) This lawyer is a very interest person in his own right. He had been in an early morning meeting in the Twin Towers on 9/11, leaving the building minutes before the first plane hit it. He was in the subway when the plane crashed and only found about it when he got out in Midtown
On “Relationship Status: It’s Complicated”
Two minor quibbles
1. There are thousands of positions in the federal government that are not confirmed by the Senate and serve at the plasure of the President (or the Governor) or are appointed by the executive for a fixed number of years. And these political appointees have the legal authority to direct the day to day activities of most USA agencies. That is how you get political appointees redacting reports from NOAA (or was it NASA?)
2. There's a difference in the level and authority of senior civil servants. The Permanent Secretary in any Department is as, or more, powerful than the Minister, and very few Ministers would act against the position of his Permanent Secretary. No permanent staff in a USA Department is ranked as equal or above political appointees, to the best of my knowledge. Nor it would be deemed acceptable in our political system to give "unelected" civil servants such levels of autonomy, discretion, and power.
Anecdote: I had the chance to have meetings with the Minister(s) of Energy(*) and the Permanent Secreatary in a Commonwealth country. It was a great experience to be able to get deep into details with the Permanent Secretary while it was obvious half of our conversation was going over the Minister's head.
(*) Between meetings one and two a snap election occurred and a new party took power, but we were able to continue the discussion after five minutes of summarizing for the new Minister.
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I might have misinterpreted your smoking the mirrors comment. If so, apologies. I took is as someone clouding the issues and playing a con.
There is a side in the campaign that focused on fear and the likely consequences of Brexit. It was, possibly, a bit of a downer, but no one has identified actual falsehoods in their arguments.
There is a side in the campaign that promised things that they knew were impossible to deliver, like 350 millions per week to strengthen the NHS, continuing the subsidies to Cornwall and Wales, free movement of Britons in Europe and sending the Polish plumbers home.
There must be a technical term to describe what people do when they promise things they know they can't and won't deliver. And I'm sure that that technical term is not "Truth".
The opinion of entertainers about a highly complex political and economical issue is of no interest to me. There is nothing I can learn from Idris Elba about the macroeconomic impact of immigration, so I didn't read your link. I'd rather read Krugman's opinion, if you have it handy.
On “Morning Ed: Education {2016.06.29.W}”
About your second link,, but "and now, something completely different", I have the honour of having had the company I represented being sued by our own lawyers (and to be deposed as material witness by our ex lawyers in this litigation)
It's one of my most successful cocktail party stories, particularly with lawyers present, who can barely believe it
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I think he is right, but the response is to to toss out the adultery charges, but to update the definition of adultery to sexual acts with someone not your spouse (it's not clear to me if heterosexual sodomy with someone not your spouse is or not adultery. Is sodomy intercourse?)
On “Relationship Status: It’s Complicated”
I know better than to reply to this, but if you really believe Remain was the one smoking the mirrors, I have a red bus with a big sign about sending 350 million pounds weekly to the NHS to sell you.
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.06.28.T}”
You just destroyed a big bunch of sweet childhood memories of that show.
Josey and the Pussy-cats
My eyes hurt
Now, I should be going. I have to go cover the legs of the tables in my house. It's indecent how they look now.
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My experience is sort of reverse. I'm an engineer with an M. Sc. In engineering. I have been doing business around the utilities most of my professional life raising all the way to the C-suite (CFO, COO, CEO). I don't have an MBA.
Business professionals want to talk about the Business Problem because they have no fishing clue about how the technical aspects work. They come with brilliant (so they say) ideas that cannot be implemented.
I can see that developing software for massive sales is a completely different animal, where marketing and other commercial aspects are very relevant (who is our customer? What does our customer need? What does he want (not the same)? But in my particular world the order in which questions must be answered is:
- What can physically be done?
- What can physically be done at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time?
- Of the above, what is the best business option?
On “Relationship Status: It’s Complicated”
"Who guards the guards themselves?"
Lord Vetinari (*)
That's been a problem like, forever. The traditional solution was to restrict the franchise to those people that could be expected to reflect and understand the issues.
At the end of the day, there's several answers to that question nowadays, not all of them applicable everywhere
As who they are, Experts prove themselves initially through credentialism, and further by being more right than wrong. Is kind of elitist, and does not guarantee anything, given that expert consensus drifts through time, but I can't see a replacement
A good, practical, way to introduce experts in the system is a mechanism like the UK civil servants, where an independent group is in charge of the details (the How) with elected (responsible) ministers only in charge of determining the What.
Now, in my opinion, in order to have a strong civil service you need to separate the State (permanent, steady, not subject to political changes) from the Government (ever changing following political winds). Parliamentary democracies have better mechanisms to do this. Civil servants are servants of the Queen, the State, not of her Ministers, the Government, and can stand up to them. This is an organic development that was incorporated in the XIX century in most Western monarchies, including those that, like Germany, later became republics (France, like the USA is an outlier, never having had a real constitutional monarchy except 1814-30)
The USA was founded before there was a real Civil,Service, or a built-in separation of State and Government. Obama is both Head of State and Head of Government. Plus, the fixed terms set in our Constitution contrast with the more precarious environment of Parliamentary Governments, that may last week's or years. In that uncertainty, Civil Service developed as a mechanism to continue managing, on a permanent way, the day to day of what became more and more complex societies that could not be subject to continuous, unpredictable, changes in Government.
By adding predictability to the changes in Government, the FF made it very difficult for the difference between State and Government to develop. Civil servants ere servants of the President, or the state governor. Not servants of something different, outside politics.
And let us not forget that people did not decide out of the blue to disbelief climate or other experts. They were told that "so-called experts" are just tools of the despised [fill in the blank]. Once every politician in the country has belittled at least one type of expert for political gain, you have destroyed the Experts.So, really, the USA has no mechanisms to protect those who work on the How from the attacks of those that want to change the What. Pity.
(*) nope
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I was in the UK when, just after the elections, Cameron started the trip for his first round of negotiations. At the time he was, if not promising, at least strongly hinting that he would negotiate a limit on the Freedom of (Eastern)(*) Eurpopeans to settle in the UK and to collect the same benefits as nationals
I told my family then and there that there would be Brexit, because he had promised the one thing he would never get.
Months later he had moved away from immigration restrictions focusing only on trying to agree on benefit restrictions.
If you look at the final concessions, which are so wonky and puny they don't seem worth printing the 28 copies for signature. The gap with respec to the original expectations was so huge that I knew the referendum would come out for Leave.
I lobbied my family intensely for them to vote Remain, but I haven't asked the details of how they voted. We settled for, if Leave won and a year from now they think Leave was a mistake, I'll get a posh dinner in a fancy London restaurant. If we had settled for a week, instead of a year, that dinner would already be in the bag.
(*) I don't remember if he explecitily mentioned new entrants to the EU or EU nationals in general, but the Eastern subtext was quite clear
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I agree with you, but I think that the only way to win the debate, is to "win the debate". To clarify what leaving means, and the relative cost of the things the Leavers want: no Polish plumbers.? That means no Norway deal. No S.E. Asians? That's not even a EU thing. No EU EHS regulations? Probably doable, but requiring Parliament to pass a minimum floor of EHS regulations, and so on and so on.
The Leave promised rainbow excreting unicorns, to the Leavers delight (and regret, now that they are finding they were conned)
But the Remain refused to address the Leavers real issues (probably because they refused to even acknowledge the existence of anti-Polish-plumbers Britons, for reasons of European politics and national pride) and instead focused on GDP and economic threats, which sounded as if Remain's only concern was for their precious bankers.
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If anything, I would require power to be in the hands of Experts. But somehow that's part of what the Senate was designed to do. It didn't work well.
I'm not particularly against referenda. I think certain questions, like Brexit, should be put to referenda. Certain supermajorities are probably needed in most cases.
Now, I have specific, technical, if you want, issues with the Brexit referendum, which makes Brexit a particularly bad subject for a referendum
The main technical issue is that the way Article 50 is written, you cannot propose STATUS QUO or A SPECIFIC change.
You'll only know the end state two years after calling Article 50. Today, yOu can only ask: "should we trigger Article 50 and hope for the best, but understand that the best will likely include Polish plumbers (a Norway version), and the worst might be we end with nothing whatsoever but the WTO (*)?"
This was not the question posed, or it was (to Leave, or not to Leave?), but no one said the important bits out loud. No one knew what Leave looks like because it is by design unknowable. So the referendum question was never really binary.
My other technical problem has been discussed at length. This referendum was internal Tory party politics by other means. The Leave Tories did not expect to win the referendum (UKIP is different). They expected to win the internal power in the party by losing the referendum but mobilizing their base (paging Ted Cruz). That's why they promised impossible things, so impossible that they had to start backtracking not 24 hours after winning. You have now each of the Leave leaders (including Farage) saying that they themselves never said that the 350 million pounds per week (a figure that is also allegedly untrue) will go to NHS, while they campaigned in a red bus with a big sign that said so (https://www.google.com/search?q=red+bus+350+million+nhs&rlz=1C9BKJA_enPA592PA592&hl=en-US&prmd=nsiv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisoNWy3svNAhVP-GMKHax-BmEQ_AUICSgD&biw=1024&bih=653#imgrc=reUQ9Lzu4W7hkM%3A )
(*) is there any country in the world that is not part of any special trade deal and can only rely on the WTO for every single international trade transaction? I'm not sure if China qualifies, but I can't think of any other. Because the UK is inside the EU, unless it settles a deal with the EU, the day after Brexit it will have trade deals with exactly zero countries
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Will
The problem I have with your doctors metaphor is that one doctor more or less told the truth (Brexit will mean less economic growth, a worse trading position, at least at the beginning, a loss of resources in impoverished regions like Wales and Cornwall, jeopardizing the Good Friday agreements and giving up on being the Finance Capital of Europe).
The other doctor basically promised things that they knew were impossible from the start: no negative economic impact, Polish plumbers out, Southesat Asians, Subsaharan Africans and West Indians also out, even though they have nothing to do with the EU, 359 million pounds a week of super avid to fund the NHS, no interruption to subsidies in Wales and Cornwall, pensioners will continue to be allowed to live in Southern Europe, no reduction in free trade, no impact to the role of London as financial capital, and no pestering EU regulations about cucumber size OR workers safety.
Should the Remain have campaigned differently, emphasizing the positive instead of relying on a Fear campaign? Probably yes. But it's abundantly cleAr thT the Leave campaign was not a doctor honestly recommending a therapeutic alternative. It was snake oil selling.
Regretfully, only the AMA or the FDA (experts) can denounce quack doctors. So the proper question should be:
Is there a mechanism to guarantee that politicians promises are somewhat based on reality? Must, in the name of Freedom of Expression, politicians be allowed to distort the reality so much, particularly in matters that are not obvious to the man in the street, in a way that, in essence, invalidates the voter's capability to make a reasoned (not necessarily rational) decision?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.