engineertony

I have to agree with you on London property, I thought you were referring to r&d. I have lived in the north west most of my life excepting five years in Bedfordshire.

I have written, researched and edited publications with a statistical focus on careers and employment. Experience makes me agree with you on the generally poor level of numeracy among journalists. There were honourable exceptions at the Telegraph, Guardian and Times. The FT was always streets ahead and although I no longer have day to day contact with the media, the FT and Investors Chronicle are excellent still. The latter being my opinion as a reader.

I don't know what to suggest regarding your own writing for publication. Maybe you could publish your own online blog or newsletter? It is harder than it looks to keep churning out interesting, original and well written copy day after day.

engineertony

I entirely agree with what you are saying. Everyone I know with an engineering, science or economics background says exactly the same. There was a scheme (possibly only in London) to charge utilities for closing roads. This was intended to force them to combine their efforts. I have not heard much about it lately.

Combined tunnelling should be compulsory for all new developments. Reworking brownfield sites is more problematic. In the long run, redoing all utilities' pipelines and ducts would be in the public interest but in the short term it is often in the individual utility's interest to make do and mend. Some of it is down to budget constraints. The sorry state of our roads illustrates this perfectly. The same potholes are patched every year by the local authority. We all know that a complete reconstruction with utility access built in is the long term answer. But the budget allows for repairs and not rebuilding or new construction. This is because central government holds the purse strings and, by turning funding on and off at unpredictable intervals, refuses to allow long term plans to be implemented.

This obviously applies to every aspect of life. Disruption caused by wild swings in government policy is wrecking or has wrecked our entire infrastructure - roads, rail, ports, airports, schools, universities, hospitals, housing, North Sea oil and gas and so on.

I wish it was only one political party to blame but they all do it.

Still on life support

I agree with most of your last post. An interesting point made in the FT last week is that per Standard & Poor research on the collateralised mortgages which sparked the crisis, the default rate in Europe was 0.07 per cent and in the USA 9.62 per cent. The difference is down to the American real estate industry being infested by organised crime.

Company failure is a natural and healthy feature of dynamic efficient capitalism economies, only by companies failing is sufficient capital released to fund new and innovative enterprises.

Forgive if i misunderstand but i do not believe that a refinery or cement factory provide power to the grid. I would suggest that these businesses are the same as other firms, when the owners (shareholders) pay the price for failure and that is correct. If that failure was your fault, you would correctly no longer have a job.

Essential services and utilities are a different matter entirely.

For non-essential enterprises, there is risk associated with ownership, be it a one man band or a plc. RBS shareholders were not complaining when the share price went up 50% from 2004 to 2007 whilst paying out a healthy dividend. Sensible investors may have considered this return on equity a little high and done some digging in the accounst to see how it was being achieved. It was clear to see the mis-match between long term liabilities and short term funding which ultimately casued the company to collapse when funding avenues dried up. It was a calculated risk that worked for several years and then failed. Same with Northern Rock (although in a more extreme fashion). There a strong argument to suggest that these businesses should not have been rescued at all. This would have made more space for Tesco, Metro, Santander, Virgin, take your pick who else to have stepped in, and the outstanding liabilities and derivative contracts would have cleared through the market system in the same way that Lehmans dids.

If you trust someone to look after your savings and investments, its up to you to do some due diligence in the same way that you would if you picking a nursery to look after your children or a builder to extend your house. In the instance of HBOS, RBS and NR, savers did not lose out, share and bond holders did. Risk taking investors. If you had exposure to these risk assets in your pension, this was probably as a result of selecting an investment approach that took on additional risk for greatewr expected return. If you make that choice, you cant then complain when the risk element of the choice appears.

Prof.

We do differ in viewpoint and it does illustrate my point. I can't do due diligence in any depth on a company handling my savings, pension, mortgage, ( I am with NRK at 5.49% fixed), I didn't know what they were doing in detail, particularly the risk factor. How could I, they didn't know the risk themselves. In fact what was clear about liablities and funding was not too clear to NRK.
For nurseries & builders, I used to drop our little girl off at the council nusery some years ago, before staff were vetted, usually in a rush to get to work and again no idea who the staff were, or how to check their criminal records, perhaps a big risk. Now builders, I know every trade in great detail, I can tell a cowboy by looking at his face, so no risk.
There is a team of engineers and technicians keeping a cement plant or refinery going, and the electrical & instrument teams are perhaps the most important part of the operation. A breakdown, lack of maintenance, lubrication, monitoring of thousands of alarms and operating parameters such as pressure, flow rates, temperature, this is the part of my life I was referring to. No, we don't supply power to the grid, we take a lot of power from the grid, except when it fails, then we have emergency systems that take over, if engineers like myself know what they are doing. I like to think engineers at my level don't take risks, personally I check, double check, do my homework, get second opinions, get as close to the work as I can, all to miimise risk of failure.
This is the point about competency, skill and expertise, which you obviously have in your own field, but perhaps not in the engineering in an oil refinery or cement plant.
Hence my point, if I cause an explosion in an oil refinery I will be blamed, and I see little difference in any profession with an element of responsibility. A childrens nursery is an essential service as much as a decent pension, or a supply of electricity or water, I don't see much difference. One might not see oil & gas or cement as essential until they stopped. If I had invested in what is now revealed as a risky investment was it up to me to check the credentials of the financial adviser, and then the background of the company shares he recommended, do I have no comeback if these people are seriously incompetent, only myself to blame.

Jeremy

I have many many more of these engineering gaffs/oversights, it's a national scandal, my wife tells me to write a book, after all my attempts at having articles published have been rejected.

General

This thread has underlined to me something I realised long ago, that we cannot ever fully grasp the depth of someone elses knowledge. Beethoven wrote his ninth symphony when he was deaf, he could see it all in his imaginatio/mind. On desert island discs a famous conductor said he preferred to take the scores rather than the records, he could read the scores and fee the sounds from a full orchestra. There was an economist.........