Where do the smart, furtune-seeking graduates go?

The answer to this question goes in waves, according to the zeitgeist, and mirrored by the (ridiculous) starting salaries on offer.  Someone might put approximate years to these, but by my reckoning these are what we've witnessed over the past several decades, in rough chronological sequence of their peak vogue.  There's obviously overlap.

-  McKinseys and the like

-  Tech, of the NASDAQ tech-boom vintage: (various flavours during that run, but at one time B2B was the thing)

-  Investment banks

-  Green investment vehicles

-  Hedge funds

-  "Blockchain" (as a buzzword) /  crypto

-  Commodities trading (as a specific hedgie emphasis)

-  "AI" (as a buzz-phrase) / LLMs

Now, it seems, space flight has a massive vogue.  This one differs a bit, because to enter this field at least a high percentage of recruits will need to be decent engineers of one stripe or another - actual hard graft!  For some of the others, BS + "potential" were the criteria; although the ability to do Hard Sums also featured.

So - what do your bright young acquaintances all aspire after?  What is going to cream off / trendily waylay the next generation of ambitious wannabes?

ND

Father Ted: 30 years of comic joy

Some things that come your way are so engaging, they are automatically memorable, no effort required.  As with most memory-related issues, this is probably a stronger phenomenon with those of, errr, fewer years on the clock:  at a time where nobody could readily muster a tape recorder (and long before video), we'd all turn up at school reciting, word-perfect[1], the best lines of complete dialogue from the previous day's Round the Horn, Monty Python and Sorry I'll Read That Again.  And I can still give The Glidd of Glood (albeit that masterpiece is now available online now - but I've always been able to since first broadcast, long before ... etc etc).

Topping the charts, so far as I am concerned, is Father Ted.  So many extraordinary set-piece gags, many of them just a couple of seconds long [You let Dougal do a funeral?!], strung together in perfect half-hours strings of pure pearls.  And now it's been 30 years ...  scarcely seems possible.  Three short series, one superb Xmas Special; just 25 episodes.  And then Dermot Morgan dropped dead, 24 hours after filming the last one.  That's heavy stuff, as comedy goes.

A decade or so ago, business took me for a sustained period to Dublin.  To my delight, in the office where I was consulting, of a quiet moment[2] or in the staff canteen during lengthy ad hoc mid-morning breaks[3], someone would launch an apposite Father Ted line, and everyone would gleefully chorus the script that followed.  Happily, I was able to join in.  Taking care not to regale them with my attempt at an Oirish accent ... [4]  

Your nominations, please, for best Father Ted one-liner or five-second clip.  Here's a good one for starters.

ND

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[1]  At least that's how I, *ahem*, remember it ...

[2]  There were, just occasionally, quiet moments.  Mostly, it was uproarious.  A remarkable "working" environment - highly enjoyable & something of a career highlight in its unique way.

[3]  Over the massive rock cakes they would all eat.  "Mid-morning" pretty much started at 10:00. 

[4]  Unless the occasion called for the Cork accent, as some sketches do.  Dubliners (including Ted himself: A Song for Europe) affect not to be able to understand it, and they don't mind a bit of mockery in that direction.

PS: I can't resist one more story.  The department held a quiz night in a big upstairs room in one of those rickety pubs you get, even in the smarter reaches of Dublin.  Beer flowed, the craic was amazing.  Spot prizes were given throughout the proceedings, and one of these saw a likely lad summoned to the front to receive a smart little box.  This he ceremonially opened before the assembled host (senior management present), and exclaimed in disgust: Aaah, shoite! Feckin' commmpany cofflinks!  As they say in those parts, you Brits think Father Ted is comedy, but actually it's a documentary.

EDF and its nukes: "we're sh*t, and we know we are'

As so frequently stated hereabouts since forever (since 2007, to be precise), the whole point of French energy policy is to have someone else pay for France's humungous nuclear decommissioning liabilities. 

Now they'd like "negotiations" over Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C to be merged into one big financing deal.  Well, well.  

First of all, what "negotiations" are needed over HPC, pray?  We already have a definitive financing deal: a binding contract that clearly has EDF on the hook for the stonking cost overruns.  (Its alternative is to walk away: such is that inane deal, struck by the dickhead Osborne and signed by the fragrant May, that EDF is under no obligation to finish the thing at all.)  Do contracts signed by the French mean anything?  Silly question.

Second, why would we buy a second nuke - of the very same design - from the same imbeciles who clearly acknowledge they can't finish the first, under a different deal structure where we are on the hook for the inevitable overruns?

Is there any point in telling Starmer and Miliband to grow a pair - maybe just one pair between the two of them?  EDF are shit project managers; and successive governments have been shit negotiators.  Each deserves the other.

ND 

Self-sufficiency steel? Ore? Coal, oil ... gas storage ..?

The old debate we often return to, has surfaced again a propos of steel manufacturing.  To what extent is self-sufficiency in strategic commodities and capabilities to be maintained?  Procured?  Or even desired?  Some have strong inclinations to one extreme or the other, whatever the prevailing circumstances.  I tend to say that there's no immutable answer, no formulaic way of "optimising".  War and peace are critical input variables: but also the key given fixed externalities.  China has no oil, as I once diplomatically reminded a Chinese commissar who had just scorned Europe's enthusiasm for electricity interconnection and stated that a nation should not rely on imports of such a vital resource.

In the here and now, I and many others would put primary steel manufacturing on the strategic side of the line.  Clearly, Starmer has taken the same view at Scunthorpe (though curiously unmoved by Port Talbot, as the Welsh Nats bitterly remind him and indeed by Grangemouth / SNP), leading others to note that those vital "raw materials" we were all on the edge of our seats waiting for ten days ago, came from, errr, elsewhere (abroad).

Then comes Nils Pratley, extending the debate to gas storage and specifically, Centrica's huge offshore Rough storage facility.  Pratley is usually quite sound, and here he sets out a reasonably balanced range of pros and cons.

Steel was a security risk. What about UK gas storage? The government refused to allow steel furnaces to be turned off. Should it be happy with just six days of stored gas?

So here we go again.  

Nobody could disagree that now and for many years to come, gas ticks the 'strategic necessity' box.  Since we ceased to be self-sufficient in natural gas in terms of production from our own territorial waters (the early 00's), without any government intervention or subsidy the miracles of the free market secured a healthily diverse range of import sources and facilities through which to convey them.  How so?  We've told this story before.  

Because the decline of indigenous production could be, and was, seen coming a mile off, demand remained strong, and the companies involved were themselves strong, capable and confident. And that's where we are: able (as the energy crisis of 2021-3 showed) to withstand remarkable buffeting from the global market, and still keep homes warm.  For sure, the cost of doing so [i.e. paying world prices] was to some extent socialised, but the means of doing so were free-market means.  

And all this happened without Rough, which had been "permanently shut down" (© Centrica 2017 et seq) some years before as being uneconomic to its owners, the Tory government having more than once declined to bail them out.  But lo!  Miraculously, it transpired Rough had not been permanently shut down, but merely mothballed, and was rapidly pressed back into service by Centrica to avail itself of the profitable opportunities presented by Putin's gas crisis.

See, here's the problem in this very particular case: Centrica has form as a would-be subsidy-farmer.  That's the trouble with going down the "strategic" road.  Just like "green" or any other government-favoured enthusiasm, once the subsidies are spotted, every man-jack starts greenwashing / strategy-washing or whatever.  It becomes very hard to disentangle what could be a respectable strategic case from their self-interested special-pleadings.  

Even in 2025, with that recent crisis experience in hand, for all the ticks that natural gas puts in the 'strategic necessity' box, I'm not sure Centrica should be indulged.

ND 

Easter sermon: the 'religious' Russian character

Icon, pressed into military service        see Update note below:  (Russian MoD)

So Putin has graciously declared an Easter truce[1], doubtless hoping to impress the simpleton Witkoff.  A little while back we had a long thread in which the matter of judging Russian attitudes to this and that cropped up BTL.  I said I would add some additional thoughts to this suggestion regarding how Russian propaganda goes down with Russians:

[Russians] are, at the same time, (a) very good at reading between the lines; but (b) "believing" the crap, in some strange way. It's a bit like "well obviously this is crap, but it's our crap". I find this has religious echoes: "well obviously transubstantiation is, errr, a bit odd - but it's what we believe" Orwell, of course, suggested "Doublethink" as the technique involved. Western psychologists use "cognitive dissonance" - at least, when the doublethink is causing psychological disquiet: but that's what is notably missing from many Russians, which is why I reach for a religious-type explanation

There's an additional reason for religion coming into the account, and not just because today is Easter Sunday.  Russians are strikingly religious, with a small 'r', in ways that the ancients would have understood rather than how we understand it now in the west.  They are not even remotely all practising Christians, or "believers" as they they term it: that was thoroughly shaken out of the system by the militant atheism of 20th century communism (although a wholly quiescent Orthodox church survived, of course, even in Stalin's long reign; and he reignited it to a degree - for his own narrow purposes - during WW2).  But as, in their own way, is the case with many of Judaeo-Christian-heritage in the USA and Europe, Russians very clearly recognise their Orthodox heritage, which under Putin's regime (building on Yeltsin's) has been progressively bigged-up in several very public ways, including the rebuilding of a mighty cathedral in Moscow and Putin himself engaging in various devotional practices, consulting priests for omens etc.   

But the average Russian can also appear totally godless in their everyday behaviours and attitudes.  (Read this account of the extreme brutalism inherent in the Russian military, and by extension in society more generally.)  In what sense, then, are they 'religious'?  In short, I suggest it is in the same way that the ancient Romans insisted very forcefully on their own piety: by giving a form of recognition to superior powers - of some ill-defined nature: the gods, or the fates, if you like (Russians are nothing if not fatalistic) - powers that are "out there"; that are extremely powerful and, what's worse, capricious; and that demand from mortals respect , but not any particular ethical conduct or way of life.

Here's the thing that will come as a surprise to anyone not following Russian writings on the war in Ukraine.  There is a major, officially-endorsed campaign underway to make the war a religious crusade.  Two aspects will illustrate it: suspend your disbelief and research it for yourself if you find this hard to credit.

Firstly, no end of religious devices are being deployed in support of the war - going way beyond a bit of morale-boosting and comfort from the padre.  Well, they say there are no atheists in a fox-hole, but ...  The earthly remains of various saints and historic Russian figures are being circulated around the frontline - often, broken up into bits so as to increase the number of troops that can receive the spiritual benefit of close contact with these relics.  Crosses bearing Putin's initials are being distributed, particularly to troops in the most dangerous positions.  Priests are officiating at all manner of exorcisms and the conferring of blessings[2].  When these measures prove ineffective as, curiously, they often do[3], all manner of dark rumours circulate as to what it all portends.

Secondly, a campaign is underway to eliminate neo-paganism from the soldiery at the front. 

I need hardly go on: you already think I'm kidding.

Hence, why one might readily look for a 'religious' aspect in how propaganda works in Russia.  If it comes across as an edict from on high, well, the audience hasn't lost its cynicism or ability to detect BS[4].  But they are inclined to 'accept' it.  It's their BS.  Let Trump not imagine he readily knows how to deal with them.  

Happy Easter!  To believers and non-believers alike.

ND

UPDATE: as luck would have it, the Russian Ministry of Defence just published the above pictures, with announcement here.  What it doesn't tell you is that Putin has initialled this beautiful replica icon in two places: but it was decided not to include this aspect in the official announcement.  

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[1]  Kadryov's militant Islamic 'Akhmat' Chechen forces are flamboyantly breaking the Easter truce, and publishing videos, just to make the point

[2]  Here's Khinshtein, a Kremlin apparatchik appointed to oversee the 'liberation' of the Kursk region occupied for more than 6 months by Ukraine, having his office blessed 

[3]  Examples: (i) when bits of saints are blown to smithereens as the golf-cart conveying them to the front is hit; (ii) when priests conducted a ceremony on day three of a particularly problematic fire at an oil depot, in order to advance the work of extinguishing the blaze; whereupon one of the fuel tanks promptly exploded and the fire burned for more than a week thereafter.  (Have you made contact with the right side, oh hieromonk?)

[4]  Russian milbloggers often provide assistance for those who can't decode it for themselves.  I particularly enjoyed the acid comment following one of the endless reports of a drone being shot down over a Russian oil facility with "fragments of the destroyed drone causing a fire".  Shooting down a drone directly over the target like that, the milblogger drily opined, "is a posthumous achievement".