pardon me for asking but PFI? 🙂

Private Finance Initiative

Rather than spending money off the ledger to buy something (school, hospital, ICT system, IFR assets) the government signs a contract with a private company for them to rent it to the government.

The key advantage (although not admitted by previous UK government) is that spending on this project does not show up as capital expenditure.

There are a number of downsides.

Firstly in the details of the contracts signed. The supplier unsurprisingly is looking to maximise profits. So much as when leasing a car there can be extras (such as PFI schools which are locked in to buying stationery supplies from the supplier and the unit cost is far above that they would spend independently).

Secondly (and bizarrely) sites for PFI plans are often sold to the supplier at a cost well below market rate. i.e. sell old hospital to contarctor for £1million when as a development site it is worth multiple 10s of millions and then rent it back. At an inflated price.

Thirdly the contractor will charge far more interest on the capital than the government would spend in borrowing the same amount from the open market. i.e. building the new hospital will cost £100 million, this could be borrowed for 2% over the lifetime of the PFI government pays 10%.

Fourthly, government does not own the asset. Which can be rather important if one intends to send it into harms way and its owner has other ideas.

Caveat: every number in the above was plucked from thin air. If you are interested enough I have no doubt that you could find real numbers easily enough.

Totally agree, i see lots of complaints, but it is a fantastic library.

2 comments 1 ontopic one on the new offtopic topic.

Wikipedia is a single source. As such no different to any other single website or single book. Children and the lazy have always gone to one book, taking the info as read and assumed it is correct. The rise of the internet has not changed this. If one checks multiple sources and uses wikipedia as one of them then its no less reliable than any other single source. Its combined strength/weakness of public authorship and peer review check balance is interesting but it does not automatically make it any less relaible than any other single source.

Of course you’d need to check all of the above before believing it.

The fascinating thing for me about V2/A4 is the way that its guidance gyroscopes were saboutaged by the slave workers at penemunde (very much sp). Whenever I despair for humanity I recall that story.

Al

I’m for either nationalizing the major defence industry,

I cannot see the US nationalising defence contractors. That’s a cultural (and ingrained cultural) thing rather than anything pragmatic.

The mantras of private = good, public = bad and private = bad, public = good both have their own flaws.

Private companies make a profit (that is their raison d’tre).

Making a profit means selling what you make for more than it cost you to make it (no great insight I’ll confess)

$Sell = $Make + $Profit

Exponents of private companies therefore claim that this means that they have to be efficient, otherwise they cannot sell for more than they spend. Thus they would claim that such companies cannot afford to carry incompetents or excess stock or unecessary capabilities.

They would further argue that all of the useful things ever were invented by tightly focused entrepenerial (sp) private companies and individuals and that all of the bloaty rubbish was created in government labs and by state owned companies.

Public owned or state business proponents say that by not needing to pay an owner or shareholders on the stock exchange they can charge less

$Sell = $Make

And that they can afford to have reserve stocks and reserve capability
And that they can afford to indulge in white space thinking

Al

There was a conceptual plan to use launch rails and skyhooks to deploy sea harriers from small platforms. The mooted advantage there appeared to be deleting the undercarriage altogether and thus saving all that nasty mass.

The Harrier’s Pegasus engine is a brilliant compromise but its still horribly inefficient. Even with that seperate lift fan the F35 powerplant should be more efficient. And not just because of improvements in metallurgy, fluid dynamics and manufacturing processes the concept is inherently more efficient.

My bugbear with the F35B powerplant is that coupling between core and lift fan. That’s got to be a maintenance nightmare. And if it fails the B versions USP has gone south. Even worserer the pilot and airframe are in real danger.

In which case the orders should fill up nicely then 🙂

IMO, the torpedoes from the helicopters and destroyers would have been just as effective as the ones from the SSN.

You are fully entitled to your opinion but I would disagree that a lightweight ASW torpedo would as effective against a skimmer as a heavyweight dual role fish

You may well be right. (And I missed your previous post before putting that one up, so don’t take it as an attempt to correct or ‘correct’ your figures)

I served with a couple of chaps who thought that SeaDart used in its SSM role would have been more effective than MM38 anyway (combination of MM38s low range, RNs inability to make use of range it had, the huge kinetic energy of a supersonic sea dart and explosive power of remaining jet fuel) so maybe the 42s would would have been the deciders anyway?!