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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#891

Post by nprateem »

epanchin wrote: post #889
bombcar wrote: post #882

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem always ends up being that it's extremely local (read: NIMBY). Everyone wants more Z, Y, X. Nobody wants to change where they are to support it. This is why even areas that redevelop in places that are friendly to it, take decades. The "old" solution was to just build a whole new factory town elsewhere, but that doesn't work as well, and especially doesn't work when you're not building megafactories that e…

Fast internet, communal office space, and a fast cheap train to London is just as good as a factory. Build new towns. Get a grip of bat and heritage protections which slow everything down by months or years.

LOL. HS2

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#892

Post by Cumpiler69 »

jillyboel wrote: post #847
analog31 wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I've worked in hardware dev, the biggest bottleneck is software.

It's because hardware developers don't take the software side seriously and either assume they can just do it themselves or don't think it's worth a decent salary

Couldn't be more untrue

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#893

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ren_engineer wrote: post #883
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What statistic are you citing for your claim that "Germany is now de-industrializing" ?

their energy policy has essentially crippled their economy

Do you have a metric, or not?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#894

Post by llm_trw »

Animats wrote: post #833
llm_trw wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go one further and say you have to be at least a journeyman in whatever tools your process is using. The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day.

For a while, we had the "maker movement" and "maker spaces", and people were learning that stuff. But that all tanked when TechShop went bankrupt. There are still maker spaces around, but most of them are now more into sewing, paper folding, and hot glue than CNC machining. Few go beyond a 3D printer. The ones that do tend to have some kind of subsidy from a larger educational institution.

We used to have shops in schools back when funding for education went to education instead of administrators.

That's not been the case for a generation so no one under 70 even knows what we've lost.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#896

Post by daz0007 »

davisoneee wrote: post #886
archsurface wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An illustration of this which I happened to be looking at: Average home sizes (sq ft, sq m): Australia 2,303 214 New Zealand 2,174 202 United States 2,164 201 Canada 1,948 181 UK 818 76 Edit: formatting.

...that's not really an illustration of that. When you actually consider population and land size, the numbers don't seem so strange. Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling) % area housing = area_house * population So... aus 0.08% nz 0.42% us 1.82% can 0.08% uk 2.14% The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with housing than the other nations mentioned. When you consider pop…

it's not only the area of land but the material's used in the housing, as well as when the housing where built.

The stagnation in other countries housing markets like the us is interesting, I don't know the answer but have they ever had social housing on the scale of the uk?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#897

Post by pipes »

ashergill wrote: post #663

> The reality for most graduates is even grimmer: > • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms > • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better This is _exactly_ my career so far. The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the wh…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl...

You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British industry. It started long before her.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#898

Post by pipes »

rjsw wrote: post #819
ImHereToVote wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't what I mean. The moral hazard is caused by the bailouts. It isn't about the sum itself. Merely the guarantee that the tab for large gambling losses will be taken by the taxpayers.

We should have shot a few bankers in 2008 to encourage the others.

Quite a broad term "bankers". Who does that include?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#899

Post by loglog »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #860
tormeh wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a disease that has infected the entire West. It's just become impossible to do anything that requires space. Even industrial giants like Germany are now de-industrializing because it's just too hard to get permits for building anything new. Sure, labor costs, energy costs, environmental regulations, etc. are all bothersome, but what really makes German industry emigrate is how hard it is to get permission to…

What statistic are you citing for your claim that "Germany is now de-industrializing" ?

Industrial production is in decline since 2018: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2025/01/PE25_008_421.html
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