Rear Admiral Chris Parry with some lessons on preparing for war, and risk

In Warfighting at Sea: What Has Changed Since the Falklands War of 1982 Rear Admiral Chris Parry and Arthur Herman discuss the Falklands War and modern conflicts.

A couple of things to note from this video.

Parry basically states, to paraphrase, that you shouldn't buy equipment that's only suitable for peacetime because you won't get the chance to change it if you go to war.

At 19:10 in the video Parry states:

We accept things in peace time which we would never go to war with.

At 19:56:

And I'm afraid to say that there is a consipiracy of silence in peacetime about whether you would take stuff to war or not. Now if you won't take stuff to war you shouldn't be fitting it, you shouldn't be putting up with it and you shouldn't be reporting to Congress that you know what it's alright for current level of provision and the technical specification is ok. If it isn't you should say so because you'll kill your young people.

At 21:10:

And so we put up with a lot of things in peacetime, you do in the United States Navy as well, which you would never dream of going to war with. It's all in the shop window but should not be with you in wartime.

Later Parry, in answer to a question, makes some points about risk. I think these hold true for many other areas and not just the military.

At 1:06:44:

Strategy is always a tricornered fight between policy, what you thing you want ..., resources, what you can afford and  miltary practicality. But I'm afraid those decisions are made on the basis of what you would do today, not in any future war. So you take risk in peace time which you pay for with your sailors lives and your ship's hulls in wartime, and you get it right and you may not.

At 1:05:09:

We have to anticipate, we have to incorporate technology, we have to have contingency plans for saying this is where our risk is, we need to know about that between friends, and we need to have that for a contingency both technologically and resource terms against the day that risk gets its bluff called.

In another presentation 8 Bells Lecture | Rear Adm. Chris Parry: Falklands War and the Importance of Naval Corporate Memory Parry states at 55:15:

You plan for war and you adapt for peace, not the other way around.

Value or Marginal Cost and Price?

Carmela Chivers discusses Mariana Mazzucato's book The Value of Everything in Makers and takers.

If neoliberalism is dead, what should take its place?
In her new book, The Value of Everything, Mariana Mazzucato draws a roadmap to an alternative economic future — one that measures productive activity by the outcomes it generates rather than the money it makes.

In a brave and uncompromising take on the economic developments of the past forty years, Mazzucato calls out the shallow economics that allowed rent-seekers to proliferate and caused policy-makers to lose sight of the public interest. To change our economic system for the better, she says, economists need better tools to distinguish productive from unproductive activity. In other words, we need a new theory of “value.”

...

The book is full of examples of how we’ve got this wrong. Three whole chapters are dedicated to the explosion since 1980 of the finance industry, which Mazzucato sees as more a value extractor than a value creator. And she shows how confusion about value has masked the real story of how value is created. Innovation is mistakenly seen as the result of a few smart inventors tinkering in their sheds, rather than a collaborative and iterative process, often supported by public funds.

The implications are large. Without a strong idea of what sort of activities are productive, policy-makers are at risk of being “captured” by stories of wealth creation. The policies that result (such as tight intellectual property laws) may favour incumbents, inhibit innovation and promote “unproductive” entrepreneurship.

...

Mazzucato offers a glimpse of an alternative: a framework that puts value back at the heart of economics. Leaving behind the labour theory of the early economists, and moving beyond simply linking of value to prices, she suggests a new way of identifying productive activity: the notion that value comes from actions that promote the sort of economy and society we want.

Writing Tips for IT Pros

Lenny Zeltser has put together some Technical Writing Tips for IT Professionals.

38 Ways To Win An Argument

Schopenhauer's 38 Stratagems, Or 38 Ways To Win An Argument

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896.

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