Meeting Sign In Sheet Modified: Fill & Download for Free

The question and headline are rather click bait: Germany isn’t scrapping talks.But the wider issue is right and it is Pretty obviousBoth sides have red lines and walk away.It is obvious that current negotiations are outside both of those: there is no landing zone given the respective political boundaries.In those circumstances there is nothing to negotiate - the haggling can only take place within certain areas and the current situation requires one or both to change their guidelines - that is a political act, not a negotiation decision.Both sides have said No Deal is fine.“No deal is better than a bad deal” applies to EU as much as it does to UK.So both sides have a BATNA and can walk away.(or at least have claimed that, correctly or not).The UK has broken its word.The current negotiating positions are wholly different to the commitments made in January when Boris signed the Political Declaration.Those are not legally binding (ie the EU can’t sue that we breached them) but they were promises.If I were in negotiations with someone: we made a handshake deal, agreed Heads of Terms and signed them - only for them to renege on them then I would probably walk away too.Details below for those who want to challenge this.Brexit is much harder on UK than EU.They hold the cards: it is logical for them to demonstrate that now. If Uk wants a deal, UK has to show it will make concessions and move redlines.Germany is not scrapping anything.As President it is taking Brexit off the agenda for the September discussions of EU ambassadors because there is nothing to discuss.There is no decision for the heads of government to make.What are they supposed to talk about in that meeting?A couple of hours of everyone repeating that talks have stalled?—-Paradoxically I think this is good. I'm hoping EU hold the line and go for 'no deal'.No deal gives clarity. We know what the situation is and what exactly we want to do about it."be careful what you ask for" Leave leaders said no deal was fine - let them own it. Leave voters regularly say they voted for No deal. Fine - then no-one can complain.Anything else lets them blame EU "It would have been brilliant but EU forced him to accept..." this way it is on themThe harder the exit, the more likely a crisis: a short sharp shock and an opportunity to restart. Conversely any fudge just spreads the pain. Acute is better than chronic.Annex: UK has broken its word.In January the Government signed the Political Declaration.That is not a treaty but it is a legal agreement, with lots of very detailed commitments. It is essentially Heads of Terms, a Term Sheet or MoU - a legally drafted set of very specific promises. It is not something to treat lightly or a position document.That included British commitments: to give one major example, on Level Playing Field.This is routine in all FTAs - it is in EU-Japan, it is in CETA and it promises that one side won’t “cheat” by subsidies, dumping or dropping standards on environment or workers protection.The issue is not whether those are appropriate or right or we want them: that issue was settled in January when Boris signed a document committing to them.Article 77 says“maintain a robust and comprehensive framework for competitive and state aid”“maintain environmental social and employment standards at the current high level”“existing common standards”“appropriate mechanisms … enforcement and dispute resolution”Then compare that to the UK Government current position:Our approach to the Future Relationship with the EUNothing about restricting state aid.The only obligations are “transparency” and “notify”No enforcement or dispute resolutionNothing about existing standardsAgain, the point is not “this is wrong” - the point is that in January we made promises: we promised to maintain existing standards, to implement rules on state aid and tax, to an enforcement mechanism — and now we are refusing to honour those promises.There are lots of similar ones: commitments in the PD that are wholly different to the current position. (“The Agreement should not constrain tax sovereignty in any manner”, “the Agreement should recognise the right of each party to set its labour priorities and adopt or modify its labour laws”, “the Agreement should recognise the right of each party to set its environmental priorities and adopt or modify its environmental laws”) — all contradict the promises made in January.And all those things are weaker than other FTAs: both EU-Japan & CETA including binding commitments on Level Playing field including non-regression. The same as in the PD but not UK current position.A good discussion on the moral hazards of being seen to break your word from David Allen Greene.The moral hazard of the United Kingdom casually breaching the Political DeclarationState aid, COVID-19 and Brexit: these are a few of my favourite things | Travers Smith

There is so much that goes into the design of a road. Wes Ashworth hit on many of the things that we have to consider.First of all, I am going to assume that we are designing a brand new road. It will be connecting to existing roads.I am assuming:We have a proposed horizontal alignment. For the preliminary alignment:We meet the design criteria based on the design speed selected, such as curve radius.We try to avoid as many impacts as possible, environmental and property, among other things, without sacrificing safety.A horizontal alignment looks something like the pictures below:All of the traffic studies have been done to show that this road is needed.We have determined how many lanes are needed in each direction;We have determined how much storage, or how long, the turn bays, if any, need to be, or even whether we need any turn bays;We have determined whether we will have stop signs, traffic signals, or other to control traffic movements such as turn and the intersections.We know how many passenger cars and trucks are anticipated to use the new road;We know who owns the right of way, or properties, that we are either adjacent to, or taking the road through.We will be negotiating to purchase right of way, or property, if needed, as soon as we know the proposed alignment. This will take several months to purchase right of way.We either know where utility facilities are located, such as water, gas, sewer, electrical, etc., or know that we need to delineate where they will go on the plan drawings;Hopefully, we even know who owns the utility facilities;We may have to pothole, or dig a hole, to find the exact location of the utility vertically and horizontally. We call Digline, or Underground Service Alert, or equal, before doing this. We will draw these into a utility base file that will be used as a reference.Based on the traffic data, we can design a pavement section that will be appropriate for the number of vehicles anticipated.We have taken soil borings to determine what types of soils exist at the location and whether we need to modify the pavement section based on this information.We know where the storm drainage needs to go:Conveyed through inlets and pipes to a river, a detention pond, retention pond, treatment facility, or infiltration system;Conveyed with sheet flow off the road into drainage swales;Among other possibilities.We have done an environmental evaluation to determine what types of impacts we might have and how much. We have worked with the appropriate agencies to decide if the cost of the impacts is too much, or if we may proceed while trying to minimize the impacts as much as possible.Wetlands;Archaeological and/or historical;Species of plants and animals;and Cultural; among other things.We have done a topographic survey to determine the existing topography along the proposed alignment.We create a 3 dimensional model of the existing surface near the proposed alignment with this topographic survey. This will be part of our electronic design files. This model is created by triangulating the survey points together. It looks something like the picture below.From this model, we can develop contour lines and start to refine our proposed horizontal alignment to fit the topography, if that is a priority.We lay the horizontal alignment over the top of the digital terrain model, or dtm. From this, we can get an idea of how the earth fits vertically with the horizontal alignment of the roadway.In the picture above, the existing ground is the rough surface. When you place the proposed horizontal alignment on the existing surface, the vertical surface will be as rough as the topography. Then you create a vertical alignment in profile view, as shown above, that meets the design criteria.Steepness of grade;Grade differences for vertical curves or point of vertical inflection;Vertical curve lengths;stopping sight distance;sight distance (eyesight);Balancing cuts and fills (excavation and borrow);and the list goes on.This topography will also help you determine if a bridge is necessary in some locations.Once you have your refined horizontal and vertical alignment and profile, you generate plan and profile sheets in order to show how to build it.Several types of plans will be included in a set of roadway plans:Utility plans (existing and proposed);Drainage;Roadway Details;Roadway Quantities, or Summaries;Roadway plan and profileAlso displays where to put guardrail if needed;Total Ownership Maps;Right of Way Plans;Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plans;Signing and Pavement Marking (striping)Traffic Signal;Sign erection plans;Sign Summaries;Temporary Traffic Control Plans;Project Clearance Summary Sheets;Bridge Plans (usually separate set);among others.I have left quite a few steps out. There is a lot of administrative work to do with the regulatory agencies as well as within your own agency.We would then write the contract documents, including special provisions, that would define exactly what we want built. This and the roadway plan set is a big part of the documents that go out to bid to be built by a Contractor.

A person's programming memories of the 70s are dependent when in the positions and experiences of one's programming life: I was a student, but there were pros who learned to program in the 60s and 50s and I would work with some of these guys (and women) in the latter 70s and later.Hardware, in particular memory and storage were more expensive in the 1970s. And the "religious wars" about the efficiency of assembly and machine languages existed in ways similar to today's religious wars. You did have slightly more architectural diversity in the 1970s than today's Wintel architecture, which is a bit paradoxical because IBM was such a dominate maker of hardware (and OS software). IBM was noted for card sorting hardware (don't knock it, it was useful! Not just for dropped decks).The typical programmer (student or professional) in the field worked on IBM mainframe hardware which meant punch cards (or by the end of the 1970s card images). IBM was and is the Microsoft of its era: all other computer companies combined (the major ones were nicknamed the BUNCH: Burroughs, Univac, NCR (National Cash Register <made cryptanalytic hardware in WWII {immense influence even 25 years after the War}>), CDC (Control Data Corporation <known for supercomputers>), and Honeywell (and others)) constituted a fraction of IBM's massive size. IBM men all had a certain professional look. IBM and Univac were synonymous with computers. You sometimes didn't work on computers, you worked on IBMs (far better documentation and quality) or worked on Univacs (what happened? I don't recommend working on this hardware except as a student to experience it).Programmers worked on coding sheets and also drew flow charts. Programmers rarely handled punch cards (student programmers and systems programmers, might, the "system" distinction was one adjective to be mindful). You spent a lot of time thinking. THINK was IBM's motto and you saw it on signs in IBM "shops". I will leave other people to tell you about punch cards. I just sent another 100 to the Air and Space Museum: where I went to college they just let you take and use them for free. I had a summer job which used UCLA's computer and you had to pay for them (they came from vending machines in packages of 100 and they were stamped with "UCLA" on them). I'd leave my extra UCSB blank cards in the boxes I took down with me. I finished school with a modest 8 boxes (I have barely 1 right now). Some of these I sent to the Smithsonian (Natl. air and Space Museum) as their request.You might have learned a programming language, but you quickly learned that this is inadequate to solve real problems and run real applications. You had to quickly move away from punch cards to learn about other hardware peripherals: tape and disk drives (and all their characteristics) which you learned to use via a control language (Job Control Language (JCL, Fred Brooks has gone on record apologizing for its highly incomplete state)).The programming world attempted to move away from assembly and machine languages (my friend Ed Post wrote an essay in the 1980s about real programmers not writing in Pascal). Real programmers could write assembler. You had religious wars for Fortran, BASIC, COBOL, LISP: and you know what? The guys who wrote these were alive, and you contact them.At the same time as IBM was dominating punch cards, minicomputers were coming on fast and would ultimately be more influential because they were 1) affordable, and 2) performed pretty much the same operations if smaller in scale storage and slower (but fast enough). Even IBM would come to sell it's mostly forgotten minis (The Series 1). Minis would be dominated with Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) and its other competitors (most notably Data General). DEC could never break into the mainframe market despite what many (internally) thought about their 36-bit machines (they could compete low end).Before elaborating on minicomputers, it should be pointed out that other countries attempted to compete with IBM: the Brits with ICL (still exists), and the Soviets bought and cloned IBM mainframes as did the Japanese. This early cloning was important in a number of ways: IBM would try to say they weren't a monopoly. These mainframes were entrees by these countries into the computer industry but their lack of software (homegrown) created issues, so they died on the vine.Computers and their staffs still had to prove themselves.On the high end, in the beginning all computers were "super" in that they could do arithmetic computation faster than humans. Supercomputers really took off behind closed black doors. Much of that history won't even be known (arguably going back to Alan Turing and others less well known until the 90s). For some, these high speeds were sexy, but they were more architecturally diverse for the sake of performance.Minicomputers and "midi-"computers like the mid-range DEC machines were important for low-cost real time process control and monitoring and even more important teaching the next generation of scientists, engineers and programmers (and not necessarily in that order). Cost conscious managers with IBM machines and WWII interests in efficiency made batch processing predominant. Minis were less expensive and while they could batch process, the further development of time sharing from mainframe experiments could take individual programmer creativity further.You could experiment, in the real sense, by attaching serial and parallel I/O connections (the IBM term "channel" has special meaning, you have to be careful in some of your terminology). This allowed robotics and graphics to take off, and a lot of other areas. The first experiments in voice and telephony, and computer networking were tried. The IBM SAGE air defense system was a homogeneous network and the ARPAnet tried the first heterogeneous networking (this was like cutting teeth). And all this led people from ARPA and Xerox toward some of the first workstations with various peripherals used by all firms from the light gun, the light cannon, and the light pen from IBM, to the mouse, and graphics tablet. The average COBOL or Fortran programmer of this time had no inkling of this interaction (it was a waste of machine cycles; inefficient).While all this was going on, engineers were trying to improve the manufacturability of machines. The first generations were mostly the noted tube computers: vacuum tubes, Williams tubes, etc. And they were still running in some places (not many). The 60s (late 50s) brought in discrete component solid state transistor machines which had greater reliability and speed (IBM System 360 family, CDC machines and the DEC minis). The 70s brought in integrated circuitry (chips). The 70s were the 3rd generation, as well as the first real consideration of software moving across generations (growing importance). People began to think about the 80s and even 2000 (odd considering the soon to come Y2K problem). Microprocessors appeared and the first microcomputers along with hobbyists, most notably the Homebrew Computer Club.I recall a lot of silly flame wars in the 1970s. I think of all the short-sighted guys, but also the wonderful opportunities and exposures I had. Programming could mean hand-held calculators, and I once cleaned up at a budget meeting because I had a calculator and others didn't. Meanwhile 3K miles away, my friend to be Bob was writing the first spread sheet. I certainly wasted a lot of time in the 70s (got game playing out of my system by the late 80s). In chatting once with one colleague from LLNL, communications was one area misunderstood by most programmers (in particular programming language as well as OS types).Many ideas in programming were fads: self-documenting code, self-modifying code (AI), etc. I started meeting some great men (and a few women) both in and outside computing. When you work for NASA, people could claim to know a NASA guy, even if you were not an astronaut. Modernizing the whole process was a career in itself.Women working in the computer field beyond key entry had to be good. I had a number as bosses, but younger men and women today can't begin to fathom the subtle prejudice against them. One JPL boss, in charge of minicomputers (JPL had 100s at the time), said to me that she could not afford to have a keyboard on her desk for the appearance of being secretarial. She was right. This placed her (and she knew it) at a disadvantage with the rise of the PC-era. Computers would go on to interrupt this power structure: and younger programmers could have more influence than over programmers. Alas Sue passed away from a neurologic disorder a decade or two ago.Sorry for such vague memories. I do work with the Natl. Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian as well as the Computer History Museum, but I would warn a reader about the limits of reading history. Experience is a good teacher.Sorry for the length and vagueness, but I'm more than happy to elaborate by editing or follow ons.