“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts
It's probably even more than that with the "Buyer's Premium" tacked on - the Christie's cost calculator linked reckons that would be another EUR540,000 on top...
AIS is an aide to navigational safety, but cannot and is not relied upon as a sole source of data. Not every vessel is required to have it, or have redundant systems for it.
As this article suggests it's not verifiable information and can be spoofed in various ways, or just switched off if you're up to no good. Various international bodies are keen to come up with standards to reduce the opportunity for spoofing AIS, but it will likely not go anywhere.
The Project Sandstone series from RUSI digs into various techniques smugglers and sanctions busters use to hide or mask illicit activity at sea.
It's in the early days but this is exactly what Architecture the Hard Parts[0] is working on: finding for each system the right balance between pulling things apart and putting them back together again.
This article explicitly goes down the "micro" in microservices route, which does have the problems you identify. There's an alternative school of thought that regrets, or at least downplays the obsession with "micro". Much of the drive to microservices was a reaction against things like the Enterprise Service Bus in the SOA world becoming the big ball of mud no-one can easily change - SOA and microservices don't have to look a world apart.
I'm a big fan of Mark Richards and Neal Ford's emphasis of architecture being about trade-offs. No one thing is a silver bullet.
Rural poverty is a real thing, and often overlooked by politics / media / society. Rural villages no longer tend to have a shop or post office, the bus services can be erratic and infrequent, it's a real problem.
The student rental market 12 or so years ago was definitely full of horror stories about getting deposits returned, knowing which letting agents to go with useful insider knowledge. The Scottish deposit security scheme is only a few years old and has definitely helped improve the situation. The rental market is one in which there can be significant power/information imbalances and where some protections make absolute sense.
The supermarket ones are free - though only 7kW, as they're for customer use. I park up and go for a walk round the local park then do my shopping.
For the rest I use Charge Place Scotland - it's a scheme where you pay £20 a year and get free unlimited charging at various locations around Scotland, they do have some separate locations you have to pay, usually for faster charging. Certainly amongst my friends with electric vehicles it's a point of pride to never pay for charging beyond that £20.
I live in Edinburgh, one of the more car-unfriendly cities in the UK and recently bought a Model 3. I park on the street, the city has gone nowhere with its plans to provide on street chargers.
Yet it isn't a problem, despite a relative lack of public chargers compared to elsewhere in the country it is still perfectly feasible. I've tweaked my habits to go to the supermarket that has a charger in the car park, when planning what to do at the weekend I check nearby charging locations.
Business locations can acquire visitors by offering them, and there's all sorts of upsell benefits. A garden centre that has one might get me to stay and visit their cafe if I know I'm going to be there for an hour for instance.
It's more complicated than that - as the article says PE can be used to diversify an investments. If you have a few extra billion you might not want to tie it all to the performance of the US equity market. So PE doesn't have to beat the S&P to be attractive if the ups and downs happen at different times to the S&P.
Then there is also the question of fees, if the fund is beating the S&P by 1-2% after fees, and their fees are 2 and 20 then the strategy is significantly beating the market. The problem is that there is so much money chasing PE, and that leverage means they don't need that much in client funds, that there isn't a push to lower fees that you see in the equity market.
There is also BBVA's Mirrorgate that was inspired by Hygieia. It looks like Hygieia has been split out from Capital One and more connectors are being produced to make it usable by people who have other tools beyond just what they use.
If you're operating in a financial services world with audit requirements and other large scale organisation joys this could be well worth a look.
The documentation may do but many of the official images run as root and provide little to no documentation on how to change that, the Bitnami images in comparison are light years ahead.
It's a really satisfying thing to work with paper charts, rolling rulers and dividers. These days for proper navigational planning it is all ECDIS (or WECDIS for really fun stuff) and electronic.
Being punchy about it you've never moved on from thinking you need admin rights on your machine. Chocolatey for Business' self-service installer, SCCM jobs, and a variety of other tools exist to enable you to get specific things that require elevation executed. If you're changing things to test various configurations wouldn't it be handy to have those scripted, get them peer reviewed / linted and you've got yourself the start of a process to get that script executed on demand.
This stuff isn't that hard - but those of us doing it see the mad things that people do when they're given blanket, even time bound, admin access. They're the ones dealing with the support calls when then every SQL Server installation has been done differently with no details of what specifically was done. IaC works.
The problem is that spending is at 38.95%, down from 43.75% in 2010. UK Government spending in real terms is best described at a plateau for the past 10 years rather than slashed. The Government and Opposition were both happy (for different political reasons) to portray what we experienced as mass cuts. They weren't compared to what happened when the IMF imposed greater cuts in a single year back in the 70s.
The credit crunch destroyed government revenues, in response the Government ballooned the deficit rather than impose massive cuts. They've spent the past decade not growing spending so that GDP growth has caught up - in the process massively increasing the national debt.
It's great that young people are getting involved in politics. One can't but help think of the much attributed quote: if a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.
It also very much depends on who is doing the investing. If you're CALPERs with ~$320bn you don't want to put it all into the S&P 500. Diversification through exposure to other, ideally uncorrelated, equity types or asset classes.
The best asset managers charge low fees, they make up for it very comfortably in volume and long term holdings. Warren Buffet famously doesn't sell, he doesn't need to make thousands of deals a year to eke a small profit from each, he needs to judiciously pick fewer things that are going to do well in the long term. All too often people don't want to properly invest however, they want to speculate.
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!” ― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts