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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

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Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#361

Post by dylan604 »

throw0101d wrote: post #350
eru wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry. As long as your friends build ships, you are fine. The UK is friends with South Korea, for example.

> As long as your friends build ships, you are fine. Canada and many other countries collectively thought the US was their friend, which it was, until it wasn't. Friends stopping being friends is a risk that needs to be at least considered.

Similar to prenups. People don't like thinking about prenups at the beginning of a relationship as that suggests you're already thinking about how to end the relationship. Never mind the facts that more relationships fail than succeed. Protecting oneself when things go bad seems to be a logical concept, yet emotionally it is most definitely not.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#362

Post by pjc50 »

gausswho wrote: post #339
pjc50 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article re: Norwegian customers: "…every reported speech by a British shipbuilder in the Norwegian press usually comprised a list of excuses for poor performance, ranging from official and unofficial stoppages, shortages of labour, failings on the part of subcontractors, modernisation schemes not producing the anticipated results, to recently completed contracts having entailed substantial losses. The impres…

Could you elaborate further on that working theory? Are there unique tendencies in British workforce that devolve into class warfare? Also, I don't want to misinterpret that phrase. Do you mean this about fiscal policies that tax the wealthy to a higher proporation or something more?

This is absolutely not about money and entirely about interpersonal culture and class signifiers and prejudices. It's a little difficult to articulate to people who haven't grown up with it. I don't like the idea of attributing "no good" to whole swathes of people; it seems both prejudiced and inaccurate to say that either British workers were no good at working (although they were on strike a lot) or that British managers were no good at managing (although the businesses such as British Leyland were empirically not very successful) because, as we can see in more recent times than the BL era, there's still successful manufacturing industries.

What I want to argue is that they existed as two cultures which were fundamentally different and in conflict with each other. The endless strikes weren't entirely about pay but a desire for confrontation in and of itself.

Compare and contrast these two individuals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Edwardes vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Robinson_(trade_unionist...

(yes, the M word and the C word are involved, but those don't exist in a vacuum either)

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876617 mentions the "low social status of working in Trade" which is another aspect of the class system entirely among the management class.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#363

Post by dylan604 »

eru wrote: post #58
ggm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Korea is a long way away, if supply chains are contested and there are competing bidders for their outputs. South Korea is far closer to Singapore. "Friends" is a strange concept in national strategic planning. You might ask yourself "just how much are those friends going to come and help when push comes to shove" and look at current politics, and re-assess what has been commonly felt these last 50 years: no pr…

There's always trade-offs. Even local shipping producers can't magic together a ship in a week. Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends. My main point is that close allies (both geographically and in terms of relationship) are about as good as having your own local industry. In a few important cases and areas, having production with friends is better than at home. Mostly because it's harde…

> Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends.

Nobody likes being a back up friend to only be called on when your primary friend is unavailable, or you want to do something your primary friend wouldn't like. Countries make treaties/trade agreements accordingly

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#364

Post by showerst »

dijit wrote: post #343
AppleBananaPie wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing :) I have very little context but it's interesting that, presumably, the lower profit industry was replaced with the higher profit one. And on top of that the higher profit one is probably of less value to society.

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food. The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials). The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food. This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" co…

Do we need more farmers, or for food to be more 'valued' in a monetary sense? The developed world is awash in affordable food. Even machine tools are incredibly cheap and accessible, the issues around those are related to where they're built and creating skilled labor to run them.

I work laughably far from anything that provides basic needs to anybody, but that's not because I don't value food, it's because our system is _incredibly_ successful at creating it so I can go do other stuff.

I do agree we have some huge policy issues to deal with around food affordability and skilled labor and supply chains, but I don't think it's because we've de-valued food production.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#365

Post by pjc50 »

dijit wrote: post #343
AppleBananaPie wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing :) I have very little context but it's interesting that, presumably, the lower profit industry was replaced with the higher profit one. And on top of that the higher profit one is probably of less value to society.

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food. The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials). The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food. This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" co…

That rather implies a society of subsistence farmers is the "most valuable", which is the one thing everyone in every society runs away from as fast as possible when technology prevents economic alternatives.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#366

Post by [deleted] »

lenerdenator wrote: post #356
parados wrote: post #332

Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards). The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems: - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world. - Poor quality management. "Working in trade…

> - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world. > - Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturin…

[deleted]

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#367

Post by dijit »

showerst wrote: post #364
dijit wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food. The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials). The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food. This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" co…

Do we need more farmers, or for food to be more 'valued' in a monetary sense? The developed world is awash in affordable food. Even machine tools are incredibly cheap and accessible, the issues around those are related to where they're built and creating skilled labor to run them. I work laughably far from anything that provides basic needs to anybody, but that's not because I don't value food, it's because our syste…

ehhhh, lets be real. I’m a dyed in the wool meat eating junk eater.

But, a lot of how we produce food today is not humane or sustainable, and a lot of the food itself is so poor in nutrition that it leaves us unhealthy and unbalanced.

This isn’t a lecture, just an observation, I am guilty of eating (almost exclusively) poor quality, over processed, mass produced foods.

But realistically speaking, if we solve the worlds hunger, what should be left is the pursuit of art and science.

Not whatever we seem to be doing with Excel; how can that be more valuable than feeding and healing humanity?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#368

Post by zdragnar »

jack_tripper wrote: post #354
dwayne_dibley wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'"Working in trade" had a low social status' I think the push in the 90's to drive everyone to university also had a big negative impact on the status of 'working in the trades'.

Don't worry, this trend has been in reverse the past couple of years.

I don't know about the UK, but in the US this is only half true. Degree-requiring jobs still have better social status over trades and low/no skill work, at least from a "what do you want to be when you grow up" point of view.

However, many more people than previously are skeptical of the math behind the cost of a college degree. Going into significant debt only to find a field flooded with others, competing with overly ambitious expectations for AI, and it's much harder to see the value in becoming a desk jockey at big corp versus becoming a plumber or field tech, or welder.

I'm sure someone will point out the math still works in favor of getting a degree, but I'm not really the one that needs convincing.

The local state flagship public university has $18k listed for annual tuition for residents of the state, and double that if you're from out of state. Add in their estimates for books, housing, food, and a surcharge for computer science majors, and you're looking at $40k for the 2025-26 school year... $160k worth of debt for a 4 year degree, at a public school, with nothing but a piece of paper and a bad economy to greet you on the other end.

Conversely, trade schools in the same city offer $8k tuition for a full 20 accreditation course load, no book costs, and no mandatory dormitory stays. You'll spend the rest of the time probably in a lower paid apprenticeship, especially if you do go for being an electrician or something similar, so it isn't all roses.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#369

Post by bee_rider »

parados wrote: post #332

Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards). The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems: - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world. - Poor quality management. "Working in trade…

What does modern manufacturing look like? Are you limited by a lack of people who can, like, use a screwdriver? Or by a lack of people who can use a CAD package?

I worry that kids might hear “not enough people in the trades” and work on their hammer swinging skills. But in the US at least, you can get through k-12 without learning basic intro math stuff, like linear algebra or calculus.

If that was the minimum, we could, I guess, handle basic applied math like intro differential equations in the first year of a 2-year degree, and then spend the second year figuring out how to ask the computer to solve those problems…

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#370

Post by MichaelZuo »

Tade0 wrote: post #324
MichaelZuo wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well after 45 years isn’t that just reflecting what the median voter actually cares about (or doesn’t care about)? If voters were genuinely willing to expend their political capital, time, attention, energy, etc., to a significant degree on this issue, year and year for 45 years… there’s no amount of party intrigues that could have blocked it.

Don't underestimate the power of divide and conquer. Over here we had miners, farmers, steelmill and shipyard workers protesting due to similar reasons and for the majority the takeaway wasn't that those industries were in danger, but that the protesters demanded too much, because that's what people with influence said.

Of course there will always be various motivated factions looking to divide and conquer… that’s the baseline background noise in any ruling or opposition party.

And the minimum expectation, to advance any policy at all, is to be able to resist that and have leftover political capital, energy, time, etc., above and beyond.

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