Ewan Birney opened a betting book at a meeting of the Human Genome Project in 2000. For a dollar a bet, he asked the world’s top geneticists to predict how many genes a human has. The prize for the nearest guess was the pot and a bottle of scotch. The winning bet, by Lee Rowen, was 25,947. The real number is around 20,000.
-Adam Rutherford, A Brief History Of Everyone Who Ever Lived 2016
In my current team we all sit down about every six months and agree how we should communicate, giving our own preferences.
After a few weeks, it's back to normal, i.e. 90% of the team making real-time interrupts in Teams, irrespective of stated preference, urgency, whether info is supplied as agreed, etc.
I don't see it being much different because an AI tells them so.
It actually makes sense strategically. Britain already has more steel than it will likely ever need, in fact it's one of the world's major exporters of scrap metals. But it depends on imports for iron ore. Why import iron ore (and coking coal, for that matter) when the resource you need to make better, more valuable steels more efficiently is already here?
Of course it is possible! Around 25% of the world's steel is already produced by electric arc furnaces. 100% in some countries, and over 70% in the USA.
The UK exports 7-8 million tonnes of scrap steel every year, while producing about 5 million tonnes in blast furnaces. There's more than enough feedstock to replace all the UK blast furnace steel production with EAFs and still have some left over.
Does that apply in the case of war, which was intended by ‘strategic’? I’m reminded of Australia’s supply of iron to Japan before WWII. Which earned future prime minister Robert Menzies the nickname ‘Pig Iron Bob’.
I’m not sure that’s the case. I worked for Irish subsidiary of a financial software company. Management openly said the main reason we were there was for the tax benefit. We cut standard code for the product, then once a year had to fill out a form describing the ‘R&D’ component of what we had done. As I understood it, that was required for the tax treatment we received.
You get a 33% tax rebate via a research credit. You probably filled out a form for PWC to attest to that. There's 10s of 1000s of Engineers directly employed in R&D in Ireland, spanning automotive, telecoms, fintech, SaaS etc.. with a large number of companies receiving the credit.
We have a HUGE network effect now via the Silicon Docks and the other tech hubs around Ireland - Cork, Galway and Dublin are absolute inundated with groups of companies in certain industries. Seven of the ten of the world's top pharmaceutical companies including Janssen, AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck/MSD, Novartis, and Thermo Fisher Scientific are based within 50km of each other in Cork.
AFAIU it’s a soft requirement so that IE can claim that losing taxes is offset by employing (a few) people. The actual tax structuring discussed in this case and similar for other FAANG, is all about where the company is registered vs making revenue vs paying taxes, and how none of it is intuitively what you’d expect.
(Aside). To expand slightly, what robertsdionne is highlighting is the changing usage of this expression. In its original sense, e.g an issue is so important that it is impossible to overstate its importance. It is now increasingly used the other way around.
Old me would have said it’s used wrongly, but this happens all the time with language. Especially things being used in the opposite of their original sense, e.g. inflammable for flammable.
In my mind, "cannot overstate" always meant "impossible to overstate", but I think some people interpret/intend "cannot understate" to mean something like "must not understate". I don't know if that's really what they're thinking, but it is how I make sense of it. I have come to just avoid such constructions.
Edit: reminds me of an ancient SNL skit with Ed Asner in which he's a retiring nuclear engineer and as he heads out the door he says to his incompetent co-workers "Just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor".
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