Re: energy in UK

On 13/04/2025 4:16 am, john larkin wrote:

 https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/10/uk_ai_energy_council_meets/

The UK still suffers from an old decision to base it's civil service on a misunderstood version of the Chinese civil service.
Chinese orthography is horrible and it took a lot of effort for anybody to get literate and stay literate. Entry to the Chinese civil service depended on proving that you could read and write, and any other expertise was secondary.
The UK imagined that the candidates were being tested for pure intellectual power. Being able to read and write English wasn't difficult enough to test this, so they tested for competence in Latin and Greek.
Science was despised - the civil service formula was scientist on tap, not on top. When it comes to technical matters like generating and distributing electric power cheaply, the English are still behind the game, because the crucial choices are still made by some classically educated mandarin who doesn't understand the problems in any detail.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney