Freki

Do we know the interest rate on the bond? Was it price at gvt level? Or was there a premium? And did the government ever explicitly (or implicitly) guarantee the debt? Unless the answer is no on most of that list, then the bond holders were just hoping for a free lunch without doing their due diligence.

Apparently not having money at the end of the month for a large chunk of the population is something to aspire

WTF are you on? It is illegal to plant/ carry a fake road sign. You can cause arm with human drivers just the same.

because this country is set up to offer an alternative to cars in a consistent and meaningful way? I think you confuse us with the Netherlands

A bit dense that comment. How much would it cost me to enjoy the same access I currently have? You can draw a strawman point about what could happen in the "future". But I could just as well, claim that in the "future" all the platforms are open because genAI will generate the music itself instead of reading it. A pointless unsubstantiated argument. Two can play this game

Alright fine, you can be pedantic about the absolutism of my comment. A bit disingenuous but this is internet for you. Anyway, in many parts of European cities, people pay a subscription to get access to public transport. They don't own their bus, their train or their metro, but get access to efficient transport. People still have the freedom to buy a car. I am a happy car owner, but I wish I had the freedom to not own a car. Cars are incredibly expensive assets that are immobile for 95% of the time ( I am generous here) The issue in your original comment is you assumed there will be only one company and a monopoly will be able to extract any price in the process. How often has this situation happened in our society and been left unanswered?

I don't own any music, but I am happy to stream hours of music every day without being limited by which tune I can access. Yeah I am happy not owning.

We can do this all day of anecdotes. Anecdotes don't make a stat. Here is mine, it's over 50s that I see in the country pubs driving their luxurious cars. Not the under 30s

You don't, copilot and bard not fit for purpose. But something will be. Misdiagnosis is still very high currently, a quick google search says 11%. Ultimately a diagnosis is entering a bunch of inputs and giving a bunch of yes/no for any catalogued condition. I don't see the difference, aside of the fact a doctor is unlikely to know everything in his field. People are advocating for people to have free access to the tool. What and how your company implements the usage is a human problem, not a machine one

It will still lower the barrier to entry to novices, which is a big plus

So your problem is with the human and not with the tool. We agree, AI is a powerful productivity enhancer when used the right way.

One of the query of the day, I tweaked the code to suit my environment, done. My value was in how I wanted to present the data, not in my ability in doing it. I could have just as easily plugged in a BI tool and used drag and drop tools. The task is not to write code, the task is to produce a visualization for my audience. The junior analyst on this produced something impossible to read. I explained him why it was bad but thank goodness for LLMs. I can easily get my output to a senior level using a junior (that I'm training to be a senior)

You can be sceptical but why are your more sceptical of LLMs than online research? A good manager is strapped for cash and doesn't have the team they need. Same with our politicians, MPs are the first to come to mind, but so are any local councillors. I don't know in which world you operate where people are adequately resourced to perform research.

yeah but a 10min conversation with an LLM in a field you don't know, teaches you a lot, a lot faster. We have a ton of decisions makers that don't know what they are dealing with, yet are taking decisions. Politicians are a prime example. Also any top manager does not have a full understanding of what is "under the hood" in the organization they are working.

I am a data analyst / data scientist and middle manager. AI is going to be big in my field. Last Friday, we used bert and llama to analyse company surveys. The sentiment analysis is way better, the grouping of topics much stronger as well than what we used to have before. It took us an afternoon to prototype a better way of analysing this than the company has ever done before. Once the data engineers ingest the data, we can apply it to any kind of comments / surveys / social media to provide feedback on where we are failing. We are GDPR compliant so we only care about the comment and not about the person who posted it. Otherwise, chatgpt is my copilot for a lot of my tasks, I know how to do it, but it is so much faster to give the idea and a bit of context with the name of the variable to produce certain stuff. Especially python visualisations can be a pain to do, now it is streamlined. And instead of humming and ahing at my screen, I give the vision and the computer execute. Other use case are emails to top management, write a draft, let chatgpt rewrite it, control for mistakes, small rewrite here and there, done. Instead of wasting 3hours to make sure I have the perfect email, it takes 1. Finally, real time understanding of meetings. When you have meetings happening and you don't know what that one key concept was about, well a quick prompt on chatgpt brings me up to speed. The use cases have the potential to change / disrupt / revolutionize some large parts of the economy. Not necessarily with the current LLMs. But soon, I will trust more a properly AI trained to perform diagnosis than a doctor, a trained AI to my question about law, and so on and so on, self driving is going to be based on transformers (the tech behind LLMs) instead of logic and a bit of data science, forecasting will be based on that as well. Agriculture will be able to see some impressive improvements from better targeted treatment of pests, to more accurate weather forecast ...

Because the last 2 times had no impact what so ever on improving their ratings, this time it will work? Talk about being tired and useless.

Moral hazard? The government should not intervene. The business has been provided clear guidelines on the level of public services the company was expected to deliver. They loaded on debt and gave a kid of those to shareholders and bondholders. The gravy train has to stop. If a new company is appointed hopefully they will do better than mismanage the SE water network

I have an EV6 which handles one pedal driving like a champ. And still I use my brakes, pelican crossing, maneuvering, light turning red without the proper anticipation ... Plenty of cases where you can't avoid using brakes

Data harvesting, the sales agent can do follow ups and provide other recommendations

You had built in resistance to E Coli obviously

I answered your concern that the people of heading the regulator need to come from that industry. But if you want a simple one, to address the simplest part: you can't work for the industry you are regulating for 5 years.

BS, you have a contractual agreement, the industry has to follow it. What you need first and foremost is specialists in monopolies. You don't let monopolies get so much profit, by loading so much debt without stripping them off their assets. Besides, at this level the role is one of stakeholder management, the technicality you leave it to the analysts and their reporting. What kind of expertise do you need to understand you are being taken for a ride?

They failed due to poor governance. When you have a revolving door between the regulator and the industry it is meant to regulate, there is an obvious issue. Ofwat has been toothless and complacent. If there is no risk of losing, people will act as thieves. Thames water's debt is held by the shareholders, a nationalisation due to bankruptcy would mean they would lose everything, as they should.

Do you know that the road tax is not enough to cover the cost of roads? It's all subsidies from the tax payer

Any living creature would have a very short lifespan in my garden with the amount of cats roaming around. Gardens are for grown ups to chill, the usual "go play in the garden" is very poor parenting. Kids want to socialise, the back of the garden is not the place for them to do so.