Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

construction-physics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 531 posts

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#71

Post by chairmansteve »

mmooss wrote: post #54
porknubbins wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reas…

> Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country There's a culture in industries. As you said, look at Germany. Look at the culture in SV - it would be hard to open a development business of any size that ran completely against the SV engineering culture. > the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce…

"That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history".

What absolute rubbish.

Rolls Royce is one of the leading aero engine makers today. They make the engines for the 787 and the A350, and many other planes.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#72

Post by mrcsharp »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #38
mrcsharp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. But you won't get such an answer from the "important" people because they are busy imposing useless laws every other day. The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.

If the people who have the most to lose don't think that something is in the national interest, then is it really?

Disagreements about what is of national interest is always going to be a thing.

In my opinion, having a country that doesn't have the means to build, at the very least, what is needed to keep its economy going is not in a good spot at all.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#73

Post by stogot »

DrewADesign wrote: post #37
mike_hearn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality issues are inevitable if the unions see their role as preventing anyone from getting fired.

Which, it should be noted, is not a common goal among unions. I’m a union metalworker in the US shipbuilding industry— our products are expensive, but in very high demand domestically and internationally. That’s true for various reasons, but in no small part because our quality is exceptional, and people regularly get fired for compromising it. Some unions do seem to strive to protect incompetence at all costs, but n…

How can union rules get crafted to keep the company in business, fire incompetence, and breed innovation, rather than self-perpetuation?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#74

Post by xboxnolifes »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #38
mrcsharp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. But you won't get such an answer from the "important" people because they are busy imposing useless laws every other day. The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.

If the people who have the most to lose don't think that something is in the national interest, then is it really?

They're also the people with the most ability to jump ship should something happen.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#75

Post by stogot »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #23
elcritch wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems a naive simplistic philosophy. The UK is larger than South Korea and has a similar population size. Yet South Korea has outcompeted the UK and US in ship building. By most accounts by investing in advanced technology and ship building technologies. Having population and talented populous is a requirement but not sufficient for achieving big things. It requires leadership as well. Look at Taiwan out competing Ch…

> Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries. it wont last long. even china dont use military to take taiwan, china will still win on this in the the end. It's just a matter of time. A lead of a few decades doesn't mean everything from the perspective of historical dimensions, it's still too short. also, china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a…

So your solution to “Taiwan is outcompeting on silicon” is that the PLA Navy should take it by violent force and overthrow a peaceful nation and justify that calling that normal?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#76

Post by jay_kyburz »

protocolture wrote: post #69
jay_kyburz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.." Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently. I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes. We have free trade all over t…

>Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones. I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.

Yeah, so much drama around the gigantic submarines, we should be building water drones of some kind.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#77

Post by lmm »

mike_hearn wrote: post #5

It's a good analysis but probably over-fixates on shipping specific factors. The UK also lost its car industry, its steel industry etc. The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. From the comments: > I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on…

> The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result.

And yet Germany, the great success story of retaining manufacturing in a western developed country, had and has far stronger leftists and far stronger unions than the UK. So evidently this was not the reason at all, although I'm sure getting the public to think it was is very useful to certain monied interests.

> By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift.

Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#78

Post by jacquesm »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #28
jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry? How could Switzerland? How could Japan? How could the Netherlands? And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1…

Their USP was their empire, a source of free raw materials.

I don't think so. It certainly did not hurt but there is another major factor: The UK is the house where the industrial revolution was born. And they still have the scars from it. And I think that is in part why they lost it: they were ahead but with fairly primitive stuff and then others overtook them because they didn't have that heritage to maintain and keep up. Just have a look at the London subway for an excellent example of why being early out of the gate with stuff like that isn't always the best in the long run.

Some more examples: Some countries in Africa are now ahead in mobile usage for all kinds of official stuff including payments, insurance and government interaction. Countries that were late to adapt to mobile infrastructure ended up with 4G or better where as the rest is having trouble phasing out their 3G networks because they've become invisibly dependent on them.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#79

Post by jacquesm »

chairmansteve wrote: post #67
porknubbins wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reas…

There are lots of manufacturers in the UK right now who have fantastic quality. Rolls Royce aero engines. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Airbus wings and landing gear. Lots of cars as well. Medical devices. The list is endless. The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year. https://www.makeuk.org/insights/reports/uk-manufacturing-fac...

That's all true. But the list could have been a lot longer. The UK had a lot more industry than it does today and there definitely were quality issues. At the same time: competition that wasn't even on the horizon back then (for instance: Korea) became a major factor and at some point you need the scale. For the UK driving on the left side of the road made that all of their exports had to be made for domestic or foreign use, foreign manufacturers often chose to simply not field a model in the UK, so that was an extra cost.

It's funny, I've a complete love/hate relationship with cars from the UK. I love them, love the looks, love to drive them. But I hate the unreliability that was part and parcel of it and I hated even more to buy a spare part and then to find out that it subtly didn't fit because of some defect in body geometry with as a result that it looked like crap (fenders... subframes... don't get me started on that one, I can bore you to death about the kind of crap they sold).

The Metro could have been what the 206 was for Peugeot, instead they made fairly nice design in the most cheap and unsafe way possible. In comparison the 206 was a little tank.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#80

Post by dwd »

protocolture wrote: post #69
jay_kyburz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.." Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently. I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes. We have free trade all over t…

>Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones. I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.

During Talisman Sabre 25, a RCAF C-17 air-dropped a Himars and some ADF personnel on Christmas Island, simulated a firing and then left.

Pushes the defensive line quite a bit further out from the mainland, and you could potentially cover choke points for a naval invasion from the north.

Post reply on HN