Wait till you find out how India lost it's ship building industry.....
How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
311–320 of 531 posts
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre. I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples. With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus. The triple lock is a politically motiv…
> With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus. What are you referring to here? Higher rates of income tax are only taken on the money earned over the band. So If you earn £50,271, you pay 20% on £50,270 and 40% on £1. Are you referring to some other kind of tax then? https://w…
there are benefits such as child tax credits which are not tapered. You either get the full benefit if earning £99,999 a year, or nothing at £100,000. This benefit if you have children can be worth tens of thousands of pounds, thus resulting in a net loss. If you look at income data after tax this causes a weird drop in take home pay in the roughly 100-130k range, where people just salary sacrifice all their extra pay to make sure they are under 100k. This is not productive to the economy.
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody here is talking about unions in 2025 except you, the whole post is about the decline of British shipbuilding which happened in the second half of the 1900's, along with a lot of other industry.
Sorry, this is just untrue. You were responding to a comment that was only talking about contemporary issues, so at least someone was talking about contemporary issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873952 So I responded, quite logically, as if you were talking about unions in a contemporary context. Not least because you replied in the present tense to a comment about the present.
Parent referenced push cart use which is from the article, hence my reply was also intended in that context. For future reference you might want to go a little easier on people rather than coming straight in with the snarky 'you must be independently wealthy' remarks, and make the goal to understand each other.
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy. Except that we don't have monopoly on that. Assembled in China, designed in California worke…
> For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China. What am saying is that this is not happening because shit got assembled in China but because of internal issues in the West. Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; and I think this is where I (and most?) people disagree here.
This is the fundamental thing you get wrong. The whole industrial knowledge thing was build because we were building stuff internally. When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing. For free.
We live at a physical world - so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper is extremely important for continuous dominance.
The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#315Italy is barely mentioned in the whole article. Today Italy is the biggest shipbuilding manufacturer in Europe: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s... I feel the double standard of such articles quick in pointing out Italy being behind in many statistics (which it is and is fair to point it out). When it's Britain behind the whole article is written only from the point of view of the UK and a…
England is an island, both geographically and culturally. This is the culture from where Brexit comes. They still think that the world spins around their navel, that football (soccer) is their game and the sun never sets in their empire. At the end of WWI, 4 empires collapsed: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian tzar, the Ottoman Empire and the British. The Austrians accepted it and moved on. The Russians and Turkish a…
The Premier is the largest soccer league by revenue. England also spends the most on players. So yes, soccer is 'our' game currently.
And the sun still doesn't set on our Commonwealth.
Also, Great Britain is an island, not England.
We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#316Italy is barely mentioned in the whole article. Today Italy is the biggest shipbuilding manufacturer in Europe: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s... I feel the double standard of such articles quick in pointing out Italy being behind in many statistics (which it is and is fair to point it out). When it's Britain behind the whole article is written only from the point of view of the UK and a…
The Brits don't produce anything anymore except money laundering in the City of London (where i work btw) and some cattle, so you should expect that kind of biased narrative from them. We in Italy are among the best and most profitable in the high-tech mechanical manufacturing industry, but we also have the worst paid engineers and technicians of the western world. The Italian Miracle.
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China. What am saying is that this is not happening because shit got assembled in China but because of internal issues in the West. Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; and I think this is where I (and most?) people disagree here.
This is the fundamental thing you get wrong. The whole industrial knowledge thing was build because we were building stuff internally. When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing. For free. We live at a physical world - so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper is extremely impo…
> When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing.
I don't think so. Employees on the chain line are not going to become literate and engineers just because you are outsourcing the menial stuff.
> so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper
That is knowledge work.
> The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.
It didn't stop Brazil from creating a rather very good aerospace company.
I am afraid we cannot reconcile the difference in our thinking.
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear energy belongs in the "unaffordable industries which failed to adapt" category. They could have maybe eventually reconciled with the safety question and the weapons question, but getting undercut by renewables means that's the way forwards to green energy. Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
> Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be. Which is a policy choice that people were pretty clear on when they bought the policies in. That is basically the only way to get a negative learning curve on an exciting new tech like nuclear. Bet you that China is seeing a more natural learning curve.
There is very little new with nuclear except bubble money. It’s fundamentally a ton of capital spend with high operational cost and risk.
Would be energy barons like it because it really begs for concentration of generation from a political perspective, as every marginal unit of distributed generation hurts the P&L of the nuclear generator.
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China. What am saying is that this is not happening because shit got assembled in China but because of internal issues in the West. Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; and I think this is where I (and most?) people disagree here.
> Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; How so? Why would bringing back domestic manufacturing be worse for a country than outsourcing all of it to another country that is actively working to replace the few parts of the process your country's still involved in?
Of the top of my head: pollution, jobs that negatively affect your countryman and then require expensive healthcare, side effects (noise, truck traffic) that negatively affect knowledge workers, low pay.
I can't also think of any reason why bringing these jobs is a net positive. Like I get it, China is adversarial but there are 2-3 billion more people you can outsource this work to who are unlikely to get adversarial.
Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're going to talk about Edinburgh (I could almost see the Tasman ferry from my house), may I introduce you to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_ferry_fiasco "Originally intended to come into service in 2018 and 2019 respectively, both ferries have been delayed by over five years, and costs have more than quadrupled to £460 million" The Scottish government tried to do what commentators here are saying is t…
The is rarely some kind of inherent cultural or socioeconomic failing on the part of the producers, it's more often a failure of institutional will and a failure of scale. Take any product that you actually produce well in Scotland for X Euros per unit in M months, scale production down by 99.9%, wait 20 years for them to lay everybody off, sell off all the factories, start relying on more and more stockpiled or impo…
I'm gonna take it a step further.
Garbage in. Garbage out.
Our institutions and organizations are bad because they're running on bad morals, bad culture and bad people. If these institutions were not staffed with bad people with bad morals peddling bad organizational culture, they would no so readily produce bad results.
The bureaucrat cooking up the absurd rules, the academic writing the conclusion of some study to lead the bureaucrat to that conclusion, the politician doing the haranguing, the executive shipping it all overseas knowing it's not a long term solution, they all either a) believe in what they're doing b) know it's bullshit and don't care as long as the paychecks don't bounce. And these organizations adopt rules and policies that result in just about anyone who isn't one of those two types washing out or becoming one before they're senior enough to do anything about it.