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Choose life. Choose Mining. Choose a career. Choose no family. Choose a fucking big hole in the ground. Choose high explosives, rock drills, det cord and non-electric initiators. Choose bad health, high risks and no insurance. Choose working in a fucking dodgy West African dictatorship. Choose a rented tin shed. Choose your friends. Choose boiler suits and a matching hard hat. Choose a giant dump truck any colour as long as it's fucking bright yellow. Choose Nonel and wondering what the fuck your doing a mile underground on a Friday night. Choose sitting in that giant dump truck looking at a mind-numbing, spirit crushing spoil heap, stuffing even more fucking crap on top of it. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, breathing your last in a collapsed mine shaft, nothing more than an embarrassment to the brain dead, fucked up, tree-hugging, sustainability spouting retards spawned to replace proper engineers.
Choose your future.
Choose mining.
I have to admit that I make fun of you engineers. All in good fun of course, but y'all have no notion of how to properly do things (says the physics/math man).
 
I have to admit that I make fun of you engineers. All in good fun of course, but y'all have no notion of how to properly do things (says the physics/math man).

The physics / maths man - that's the guy who set up the totally fallacious boundary conditions so he can solve the problem from first principles:p;)

Sometimes you just have to build it big enough and strong enough to account for the "shit happens" factor :D
 
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TheExecuter - Isn't that the motto for Obamacare?

I am waiting for Chamberlain...I mean Obama to wave around the healthcare reform bill with one Republican vote on it and declare "Bipartisan healthcare reform in our time!"
 
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I am waiting for Chamberlain...I mean Obama to wave around the healthcare reform bill with one Republican vote on it and declare "Bipartisan healthcare reform in our time!"

:rofl:

truth is life said:
I have to admit that I make fun of you engineers. All in good fun of course, but y'all have no notion of how to properly do things (says the physics/math man).

Don't worry. We make fun of you guys for living in a fantasy land of oversimplified problems...

:D

TheExecuter
 
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Jalex - Ahhh that explains it. :)

RAFspeak - As you say such things must be spotted at the time to receive credit. Though as always uour devotion to the aerial cause is most impressive.

Davout - To each department it's own prejudices. We tended to view law students as light-weight whiners who would be unconscious after half a weak shandy, were completely lacking in a sense of humour and were clearly lacking an immortal soul. Basically we all agreed with the most famous line in Henry VI Part 2.

While I've moved on from the first few of those, I still wonder if we weren't actually correct with the latter ones. ;)

Carlstadt Boy - This is mostly democratic system so second place RN/FAA will indeed come after scheming.

On the index point I prefer linking to the in-thread posts as I don't like the single post style. However I take your point that at the moment some of the links are broken, I'll sort it next time I edit the index.

The tanks and trucks update will cover the head of theatre/region commanders and the ministers. It shouldn't be too much work to add on a high level troop disposition, though it may require another tweaking of reality to explain why the army is so large (I churned out a dozen INFs for Italy then the war ended early, gotta justify them somehow...)

It also appears I will have to do similar for the RAF/Air Ministry, which will get RAFspeak over-excited I'm sure, but I probably can't fit that in till early 2010!

truth is life - Just as a physics/maths man has no idea just how to actually do anything. Sure if anyone invents massless string, ideal infinite beams and some way to ignore friction when it's inconvenient then you will come into your own, but until that time the world will still need engineers.;)

Derek Pullem - Very true. The other big factor of course is 'making it last 150yrs of use', an alarmingly common requirement these days.

Nathan Madien - I'm looking forward to the healthcare version of The Guilty Men in a few years. :)

TheExecuter - Accurate and to the point as always.


So it appears I'm now committed to a large RAF update sometime in the future. However I have India and scheming to finish first, followed by boats/planes and tanks. Which should keep me going till Christmas in all probability. :eek:
 
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truth is life - Just as a physics/maths man has no idea just how to actually do anything. Sure if anyone invents massless string, ideal infinite beams and some way to ignore friction when it's inconvenient then you will come into your own, but until that time the world will still need engineers.;)
Bah! Physicists do it numerically! Who needs approximations... ;)

EDIT: Anyways, those terrible mining engineers earlier were clearly given inadequate physics education! Hand them over to us, and they'll be either competent or a quivering mess by the time we're through!
 
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Bah, you guys have no consideration at all of the costs involved in these things. How much do you REALLY NEED for those works, or are you guys taking the six sigma percentile chance of failing in 150 years and over-engineering things, not caring whether non-invasive and preventive maintenance will be cheaper in keeping those things standing.

Now you abstract number crunchers also have no idea what those REALLY represent, and how it would affect the value of real world items; but I should admit that being the crazy nuts who thought about doing derivatives and becoming quants was a stroke of genius. But we'll blame you there for stoking the financial crisis!

Finally, and this is for you crazy tome-readers who have nothing to do but ask us to put inane warning labels and drive up our insurance premiums because of your clients not wanting to accept that they were stupid and/or did not read the fine print and file irrational class-action suits to recoup their losses, for less thinking and more reading, you should be earning less than we do.

TL;DR Version: You guys have no sense of present value.

- the Business Graduate

On topic: How would the Empire drive the gears of market capitalism and not stifle any growth? I cannot easily foresee how/where the computer and information technology industry will grow under the aegis of the Empire. Remember that TTL will not have IBM, Steve Jobs, Arpanet and (god forbid but YES) Bill Gates.

:D
 
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truth is life - Clearly you have no knowledge of geotechnics, one of the first rules of which is "You will have no idea on what the ground actually is."

There is therefore no point being numerically accurate as the numbers are guess work and your making assumptions on ground properties based on tiny samples. Uncertainty tends to scare academics, especially when you ask them to produce something that will actually happen rather than just an abstract model with no useful application. :D

Ciryandor - When the client says "Much of our current asset base is ~150 years old, still in critical use and survives with bugger all maintenance, give us the same for the new stuff." I have yet to hear a decent argument why they're wrong.

If you ever got your nose out of that spreadsheet and looked at the reality of the matter you would know that something designed to need maintenance is in effect being designed to fail. When that thing is a) underground and b) critical infrastructure the consequences of failure are unpredictable but usually severe and almost always very expensive.

Big risks and a lifetime of operational costs just to save minimal up front capital costs sound a bad deal to me, but then I can't produce a contrived spreadsheet that assumes the world is simple and that unpredictable failure events can be reduced to a number. ;)


As many before you, you under-estimate British computing. The hardware is easy, take the code-breaking Colossus or the work at Manchester Uni, while on the industry side don't forget the world's first commercial computer was British (LEO I) and was just the first of many. And that was with an essentially broke country that was suffering under a Labour government. Imagine what they could have achieved with money and a competent govt. not nationalising everything and taxing them till they bled?
 
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Well, I've seen one too many contrivances that created unneeded redundancy in machinery. ;) I like it when it's simple and all the parts work as intended. What I also intended to mean with maintenance is preventive, not reactive, those little costs that do stop mission-critical items from going haywire just when the proverbial thing going wrong happens. The costs of failure both in time and money are too much, and it's also a headache for you to rectify when it occurs. No sense in cutting costs when it results in catastrophe, which we all want to avoid. :p

*remembers that the Brits even have standards for how to brew tea* :D

Also, what I'm much more concerned about isn't the hardware nor the infrastructure; as the bombe and a certain guy named Shockley will illustrate. I'm much more worried over software development. :eek:

Now that leads me to ask where he's currently working... Still doing RDF research or already going down the path that will earn him a certain prestigious prize in the
future? My fervent hope is that he won't turn out to be racist. *runs around in circles for saying that*
 
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Davout - To each department it's own prejudices. We tended to view law students as light-weight whiners who would be unconscious after half a weak shandy, were completely lacking in a sense of humour and were clearly lacking an immortal soul. Basically we all agreed with the most famous line in Henry VI Part 2.

While I've moved on from the first few of those, I still wonder if we weren't actually correct with the latter ones. ;)

Of course I have an immortal soul. I have several. I keep them in an orb of thesula at work.

In other news, tanks for Christmas - yay!!!
 
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I must admit that when I was studying law, we used engineering as a pejorative. We always thought they were like Tolkien's dwarves - they drank copious amounts of beer, they had no sense of personal hygiene, and there were never any female engineering students.

Of course there are female engineers! It's just that they have beards.
 
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Ciryandor - Preventative maintenance is over-rated, it assumes an excessive level of knowledge of the item which you can only obtain by seeing the item repeatedly fail in every permutation.

Off the top of my head; trains. Newer rolling stock is never as reliable as the old stuff, not because of inherent problems (though sometimes it is) but simply because the old stock has done millions of miles and so failures can be empirically predicted very accurately. The new stuff has only testing data to go on, which never matches real life service so failures occur unexpectedly.

Or the easy answer for my industry; there is no preventative maintenance on reinforced concrete, it either works or it fails. :D

And your interest in software is misplaced, a badly shaved monkey can (and likely do) write software. Given the industry so acceptant of failure, cockup and the entire concept of 'patching' (Where's the pride? Why not do it properly first time?) it's hard to imagine a version of it that is worse. :eek:

Davout - I hope for tanks before Christmas. But then I am on occasion a cock-eyed optimist about updates, so put no faith in that hope.

C&D - "And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no female engineers."

And let me tell you that belief is damned close to the truth, though you'd have to be a braver man than I to publicly speculate on the reasons.
 
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And let me tell you that belief is damned close to the truth, though you'd have to be a braver man than I to publicly speculate on the reasons.

Not that intrepid here either...

Nearly snorted my drink through my nose when I read that however... :D
 
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C&D - "And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no female engineers."

And let me tell you that belief is damned close to the truth, though you'd have to be a braver man than I to publicly speculate on the reasons.

Au contrair my good man, chemical engineering has a slight preponderance of females to males in university (the 2003 Purdue University class was something like 52% female)...

They only get like 10% more pay and 2x the job offers of the males...then decide after five years to get married and have a family, thus leaving us male slobs to carry on with their work, for less money. (Grr...) So very few old female engineers (and those have beards)...but lots of wannabe BYEs who haven't figured out that they don't want to be crusty, bearded purveyors of a working, technological society infrastructure.

I do agree that in Mechanical, Electrical, and the like there are very few females though.

But, I am hijacking this thread once again with truth...and it isn't coming from the light of God's shining face on the British Empire...so, get on with the schisms and schemes!

TheExecuter
 
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truth is life - Clearly you have no knowledge of geotechnics, one of the first rules of which is "You will have no idea on what the ground actually is."

There is therefore no point being numerically accurate as the numbers are guess work and your making assumptions on ground properties based on tiny samples. Uncertainty tends to scare academics, especially when you ask them to produce something that will actually happen rather than just an abstract model with no useful application. :D

Ciryandor - When the client says "Much of our current asset base is ~150 years old, still in critical use and survives with bugger all maintenance, give us the same for the new stuff." I have yet to hear a decent argument why they're wrong.

If you ever got your nose out of that spreadsheet and looked at the reality of the matter you would know that something designed to need maintenance is in effect being designed to fail. When that thing is a) underground and b) critical infrastructure the consequences of failure are unpredictable but usually severe and almost always very expensive.

Big risks and a lifetime of operational costs just to save minimal up front capital costs sound a bad deal to me, but then I can't produce a contrived spreadsheet that assumes the world is simple and that unpredictable failure events can be reduced to a number. ;)


As many before you, you under-estimate British computing. The hardware is easy, take the code-breaking Colossus or the work at Manchester Uni, while on the industry side don't forget the world's first commercial computer was British (LEO I) and was just the first of many. And that was with an essentially broke country that was suffering under a Labour government. Imagine what they could have achieved with money and a competent govt. not nationalising everything and taxing them till they bled?

And what was LEO used for.....making sure the nation had tea delivered on time and in great supply to tea shops around the country.....what a spiffing use for the worlds first commerical computer. I watched a programme about it not so long ago
 
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Ciryandor - Preventative maintenance is over-rated, it assumes an excessive level of knowledge of the item which you can only obtain by seeing the item repeatedly fail in every permutation.

Off the top of my head; trains. Newer rolling stock is never as reliable as the old stuff, not because of inherent problems (though sometimes it is) but simply because the old stock has done millions of miles and so failures can be empirically predicted very accurately. The new stuff has only testing data to go on, which never matches real life service so failures occur unexpectedly.

Or the easy answer for my industry; there is no preventative maintenance on reinforced concrete, it either works or it fails. :D

And your interest in software is misplaced, a badly shaved monkey can (and likely do) write software. Given the industry so acceptant of failure, cockup and the entire concept of 'patching' (Where's the pride? Why not do it properly first time?) it's hard to imagine a version of it that is worse. :eek:

:rofl: on reinforced concrete. Now as for software :wacko: I suppose we could just get a couple of gorillas from Africa to start compiling code eh? :p
 
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And what was LEO used for.....making sure the nation had tea delivered on time and in great supply to tea shops around the country.....what a spiffing use for the worlds first commerical computer. I watched a programme about it not so long ago

Meanwhile, we Americans were using the first computers to design weapons of mass destruction. There must be something wrong with us.
 
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There's nothing wrong with you Yanks, you just like making things go BOOM! better. :rofl:
 
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There's nothing wrong with you Yanks, you just like making things go BOOM! better. :rofl:

Yeah, but you guys get the honor of tea coordination. It's not fair.
 
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Au contrair my good man, chemical engineering has a slight preponderance of females to males in university (the 2003 Purdue University class was something like 52% female)...

They only get like 10% more pay and 2x the job offers of the males...then decide after five years to get married and have a family, thus leaving us male slobs to carry on with their work, for less money. (Grr...) So very few old female engineers (and those have beards)...but lots of wannabe BYEs who haven't figured out that they don't want to be crusty, bearded purveyors of a working, technological society infrastructure.

I do agree that in Mechanical, Electrical, and the like there are very few females though.

But, I am hijacking this thread once again with truth...and it isn't coming from the light of God's shining face on the British Empire...so, get on with the schisms and schemes!

TheExecuter

Ach not another Chemical Engineer!

Girls were only 25% of us in my days. Mind you I'm breeding them now, my son is in his 2nd year at Aberdeen!
 
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