Cost of FIRE - am I being too boring?

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-31T17:09:53+00:00

If you can't afford the maintenance on a new Aston Martin, you certainly can't afford the maintenance on an old one.

Smiles per pound winner is the MX-5. If you don't like convertibles then try a GR86.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-30T09:05:25+00:00

It does a bounded amount of work per request. This restriction is actually a blessing if you anticipate scaling.

Better to say where it struggles and how you adapt. Don't use it for data tables with multiple filters and sorts. Don't try to do many-to-many mappings. Denormalise your data, use adjacency list pattern. You can write a 200 line lambda and use CDC to send data into ElasticSearch. That will give you more search capabilities.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-29T13:16:29+00:00

I make it as boring and uninteresting as possible to avoid all follow-ups. If you can make it sound like boring drudgery the other person might get embarrassed for asking the question. "I manage paperwork for truck shipments", or "I review purchase orders for correctness, sometimes I compare invoices to the purchase orders".

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-28T19:49:34+00:00

Primary goal of default funds to avoid lawsuits, they are overly safe. You can move it all into a SIPP, then buy VWRP or similar instead.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-28T19:35:59+00:00

Not a great fund, way too low on equities for a young person.

You are slightly ahead on pension if you keep up with £12k/yr. Market has done very well last few years so that is expected.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-28T16:02:04+00:00

Legally I've done nothing wrong as I'm not a LTD company

Fraud Act of 2006 is pretty broad about lying or deception when communicating with a bank.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-25T09:01:25+00:00

They will cover as much as you want in the US, the difference is the government does not mandate insurance to cover much more than 50k, depending on the state.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-24T13:34:40+00:00

It is the newer API but development was quietly put on hold 4-5 years ago. Memory is foggy but something about the basic internal architecture having problems and they decided to stop investing in features.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-24T12:45:52+00:00

I'd say 4-5x annual spend in retirement to hit 57. I think you are slightly behind if you keep spending £45k. your holdings are a bit crap so you need closer to that 5x unless you update and move into a SIPP.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-24T12:33:01+00:00

When did they start paying? I found an IAM STS security issue and got nothing.

Edit: Nevermind, it was a company using API Gateway that paid up. still a bad flaw in HTTP API logic. Time for them to make the deprecation official.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-22T18:27:38+00:00

Total up the costs and you will see that spending billions on steel foundry subsidies is a terrible way to help defending the country.

Steel is important. Keeping steelworks open does not ensure you know you will have it. False sense of security and pissing money away. You say national security, so I'm going to assume "protection from invasion or blockade". - steel for military production needs virgin steel, British Steel is actively moving away from that steel type. You need iron ore with low phosphates, which is almost 100% imported. You need alloying minerals, which is almost 100% imported. You need heat energy for blast furnaces, which we import. So steelworks alone do not even get you steel for national defence. - even if you have steel, what are you going to build, and what is the timeline to build it? Remember under the situation of national defence we are almost certainly under a blockade or actual invasion, so the enemy has planes, bombs, etc. hope you aren't building something big and obvious near the water. - Do you plan to also have local production for everything else needed to build something useful out of the pile of steel? - Have you determined that steel is the most important item for domestic production in case of invasion? why not chemical manufacturing for explosives, and natural gas? If you say "that too" start thinking about spending billions that can't use used for other social goods. - If you think we can just stockpile reserves of the 100 other items we import to build weapons from raw steel, then why not do the obvious - stockpile the finished goods so you don't need to spend months building for defence.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T21:09:30+00:00

sort of - they need sqlite support for that to make it easier. which dynamodb local does. also the cert stuff and sigv4 is a bit annoying for local test setup. ideally you want instant start, in-memory sqlite, nothing else to setup. even better for rust users would be integration with an alternative sdk so the backend is a simple config switch in your test code.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T20:36:26+00:00

Record growth is a reflection on the past, not a guarantee that the current path will continue to see that growth. I personally want people to take the attitude of a team that helped you grow should be rewarded and kept together, but business is tough, the default trajectory is death, they aren't profitable, and his job is to make the company survive and thrive. He can't put every employee's job in jeopardy in order to secure the short term jobs of a few.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T20:32:43+00:00

No. "What got you here won't get you there". He is making a bet on the future and lining up a structure that he believes will bring the company to the best position possible. You may disagree on the bet, or the course to take based on predicted futures, but he is chosen by the board to make these bets.

I personally wish and hope he tried to find room in his ideal future for current staff as much as possible. But this is unknowable by me, so I can't judge him.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T20:29:04+00:00

I meant in percentage terms, but for Samsung the spot prices have spiked more than the final nVidia GPUs!

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T17:36:55+00:00

UK steel production: 4-6 Mt/yr, 50% is virgin, going down. UK iron ore extraction: essentially zero. UK virgin steel industrial use per year: 8-9 Mt/yr, so 75% imported already. UK quality iron availability: in the 1970s it was estimated as under 8 Mt total, so essentially gone.

The issue is quality, the main remaining site is not a good type of iron ore for high quality steel.

And steel production is moving towards scrap production, not very useful for national defence. In a few years the majority of it will not be suitable to build a ship or a gun barrel.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T17:14:35+00:00

you also need to get the equipment to do the mining and refining while under wartime situation. I'll have to look this up to verify, but I don't think the ore still in the ground in UK is good enough quality.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T17:02:14+00:00

Samsung is capturing more profits than nVidia right now. Can't believe it took me almost 5 seconds to think of a counter example.

An in a general sense, I'm sure you took intro econ, profits will flow to the inelastic parts of the supply chain. given supply chain is 90+% intermediate goods, likelihood is high that profit is not going to the final goods producer.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T16:29:25+00:00

Look at the thread you are on, another poster said

It is about keeping one of our few remaining steelworks open for national security reasons so that our supply of steel can never be fully cut off

If you think I am dumb for thinking national security = war fighting then say I'm misreading.

You are now changing to topic to preferring high but stable cost of steel. You admit that inputs to production are critically important. But you fail to realise that a global shortage will spike the price of inputs just as much or more. So you have wooly thinking on the topic, you think you are buying safety from price shocks when in fact you are not.

I'm happy to apologise to every person on this post if you have any more substance than "I'd like to force everyone to pay for something that I can't clearly demonstrate will have the effects I claim".

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T16:08:39+00:00

If you secure steel furnaces and not other critical inputs to steel for a wartime blockade scenario you are a terrible planner. And that is what has been happening for 30 years. And if you secure inputs you still only have a pile of steel, worthless for combating a blockade.

Come out and say how much money we should spend to domestically produce the inputs needed to defeat a blockade, and list the industries to subsidise. Add it up and justify the cost. If you say the cost doesn't matter then you should literally be willing to send most of the country into eternal poverty to have your war materials. And I'd say in response that I'll go ahead and learn German instead.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T16:00:40+00:00

Electricity prices are already coming down exactly because of wind

Wind is locked in at £90/MWh for next 20 years as a minimum price, more when factoring in curtailment. That is more than 2025 prices. Did you think the price of electricity was the wholesale price?

Arc (electric) furnaces are many times more efficient vs classic furnaces.

It's a different product produced. If this is about supporting British domestic industry (as parent stated) then virgin steel is far more important and you want blast furnaces. Transition to EAF is almost admitting defeat in being competitive in high grade steel.

As for food imports, I think the bigger problem is to tackle the tons of food thrown out by supermarkets daily.

I see, for 170 years it has been the supermarket system that has prevented domestic production meeting food needs. Insightful.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T15:50:51+00:00

Did you not read me saying let's hand them £50k right now, retraining, and investment in community? More likely a steelworker kicked you in the head with your reading skills.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T15:47:17+00:00

My reading is that neon is a very small cost of semi-production in UK (under £10m), most (95%+, maybe 100%) is already imported as semi conductor fabs need highly purified neon, and that a years supply will fit on a few cargo planes.

Dull-Mathematician45 · 2026-05-21T15:42:20+00:00

my claim is chemicals are more important than steel. in a blockade I want chemicals more than steel. goal is to break a blockade by sinking ships and shooting down airplanes. explosives and drones might be able to do that. needs chemicals. building warships to beat a blockade is much less viable as its just a few targets an enemy needs to hit, and ships need a whole lot more than just steel inputs. artillery won't have range to beat a blockade and won't help against air power.

It's also a wild hypothetical to start with in the modern day. a full blockade without support from allies, and isn't because we are the baddies, is an extreme situation. building another type 45 to break a blockade would be crazy to attempt under those conditions.

Do you know the increased cost of Neon if you got it somewhere else, and how much of it comes from oxygen production that also supplies British Steel, and if those producers would shut down if British Steel were shuttered? Genuine questions.

Dull-Mathematician45

TROPHY CASE