911–920 of 1001 posts
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What makes you think QoL in London is bad? I grew up in a rural farming town and much prefer London. Housing is expensive but that's about it.
Living there for 5 years. Unless you are in finance and live in city, it’s a shitshow.
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I can tell that you've read the Wikipedia page rather than going to Peterborough.
Could you clarify how the vast majority of people in the world who will never set foot in Peterborough (including me) should interpret that?
The county council covering the Cambridge area is actually based in Peterborough, and so effectively controls a lot of the countryside around Cambridge, as it is in charge of transport. So arguably the lack of development could be their fault as well.
Supposedly the government is plan is to reduce everywhere to one layer of local government (currently Cambridge is covered by both a county and district council). TBH the areas which are currently unitary seem to work a bit better but there's still massive opposition to building.
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The largest problem I see is shipping times. If I need to download a new software "part" (library or other), the shipping time is the download time, nearly instant. If I need new hardware pieces, its either next day shipping, a few days by air-freight or three weeks on a boat from china. This limits prototype turnover time, and means iterating quick is much harder. Finally you have the problem that hardware is expens…
Do you see potential for better software design and simulation tools including VR to reduce the need for physical prototypes?
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UK ignited the First Industrial Revolution. It's sad to see that UK has slipped to number 16 or lower when it came to the market share of global manufacturing. And the problem is not to just UK, but to pretty much all the developed countries. Many nations and people have benefited greatly from globalization, but I have to ask: is it worth it if the cost is forfeiting my own country's manufacturing know-how and supply…
The US outsourced its manufacturing to China in the name of comparative advantage. Bob bakes bread, Alice grow apples. Everyone is better off because of specialization. In Thomas Friedman's latest nyt column, he refers to China's manufacturing dominance as a play to de-industrializing other countries. It may just be globalization is incompatible with political realities.
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If we're talking about the UK, then London is already as dense as it can reasonably be. It went all-in on public transit almost 200 years ago. And of course, it made it all worse. Now you HAVE to work in London if you want a high salary. The only real way to fix the housing is to promote remote work and decentralized companies.
"Reasonably" is doing a lot of work there. It sounds an awful like you're defining the boundaries of reasonability at "Exactly what is built right now and using the exact borders of current municipalities", which is a tautology. Even if we limit ourselves to the current municipal boundaries of London, population density is ~6000 people per square kilometer. Kowloon Walled City survived with 3,000,000 people per squar…
So if you increase the population density, the transit to that focused area will have to carry more people. And it's already at capacity.
If you want to increase the density, then London will have to create new business areas outside of Canary Wharf, City, and Westminster. At which point, the question becomes "why even bother with London?"
> 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…
> but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it Labour just got into government and literally the third bullet point in their manifesto is: * Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy. So i would hope it's not political suicide to follow through on that
They could do this is one fell swoop with a single bill by the Parliament that dissolves these local councils, and land owners the right (and freedom) to build whatever they want on land they own.
Building safety codes would still apply; but zoning permitting could be erased in one fell swoop with a single bill.
> 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…
> but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it Labour just got into government and literally the third bullet point in their manifesto is: * Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy. So i would hope it's not political suicide to follow through on that
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> These days, what are your options realistically in this country? Particularly if you want to hang around your family in the south? In 2013 I was working as a CTO in London, managing a team of 40, and I could just about afford a run-down 2-bedroom in a just-ok part of Zone 1, assuming I wanted to make some savings too. My salary wasn't bad for the role, outside of banking. Anyway, that was pretty much the end of liv…
90% of the problems in the UK come down to the cost of housing in London (and maybe a couple of other key cities, but mainly London) This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London, so people on good salaries can afford more, so prices go up as supply is constrained and demand increases. The rest of the western world is starting to see this, and before London had the issue, city states in the far east like Hon…
I disagree on this cause, FWIW, and would say the cost is driven entirely by the constrained supply you mention. It's a very, very politically difficult problem to fix, because if you increase the housing supply, people who already own houses see their net-worth decrease. I am sure there are some smart solutions, but most MPs and many voters already own homes and don't have much of an interest in fixing it yet.
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Would it be fair to say that the "unicorn" effect is a lot harder to achieve as well? If VC rely on 1 out of N startups doing well then that 1 success needs to achieve over N-fold returns just to break even. On the other hand I have no trouble coming up with examples of hardware companies that did well: Apple, Nvidia, Intel... but those time scales are titanic.
It's funny that you didn't mention Dell, Lenovo, Sony, or even Microsoft and Nintendo which both make their money off the software than the hardware, but are also companies that produce and selling hardware.
The main issue now is competition for capital: the majority of tech investors regard software startups as much safer paths to huge returns. Whether they’re right or wrong in any individual case is a separate issue; they’re playing the percentages.
I don’t think it’s just a UK thing, or that it’s much easier to start a hardware startup in the USA. I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in the world. Personally I’ve been trying to self-fund and bootstrap a hardware startup (based in Australia but I’m reasonably well connected in Silicon Valley as I’m a YC alum). I’ve had pl…
What are your thoughts on Anduril?
I don't know much about the details about how it got started (i.e., how much Palmer Luckey self-funded it in the early stages) but the fact that he'd already built/sold Oculus was always going to make it easier to open doors and close funding deals (even if the politics/FB drama was a complication).
Also, building tech for the US military has some advantages. You have one customer with very high stakes and very deep pockets. Obviously it's hard to get started and you need to be building something that's uniquely useful and valuable for defence purposes, but once you achieve that, once you're in the door of the military industry, you're on pretty solid ground, and that's attractive to investors. The one hardware company i know in Australia that's doing well is also making defence tech.
It's much harder if all your potential customers (in my case, farmers) are small family businesses spread thinly in non-urban areas all over the world. Investors know that makes distrubuition much more challenging.