151–160 of 279 posts
Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US, I do understand they just want access to the most capital, but I find a shame LSE is not competitive for this kind of thing.
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Is there more global access to the US market? Does capital flow with less friction to it? What about indexes? If they qualify for NASDAQ or some other major index, there's some "mandatory" investment that gets triggered by a bunch of funds that do index tracking. I would presume where you choose to list is kind of a flag of convenience, like it is in maritime. It's probably not as irrelevant as to where things actual…
> Is there more global access to the US market? Does capital flow with less friction to it? Yes, and yes. > What about indexes? If they qualify for NASDAQ or some other major index, there's some "mandatory" investment that gets triggered by a bunch of funds that do index tracking. NASDAQ is an exchange, not an index. The most prominent index on NASDAQ is the QQQ, the top 100 stocks,market cap weighted. But this is th…
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Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.
They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. He is also working for a US company who could pay him more if they really wanted to. US salaries are high because the US has a glut of engineering jobs and is also a difficult place to immigrate to (generally requires you to have family ties or a job offer which is not easy to obtain when you might not be granted a work visa and won't realistically be able…
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I would be surprised if many Brits know of ARM as a British success story. Ditto for Raspberry Pi or Deepmind. These things are just not celebrated, it seems.
If you ask people in the street to name a famous living British technologist, they might come up with Tim Berners-Lee or James Dyson, but they are never going to name Sophie Wilson. (I wonder what answers you would get?)
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> want rentier incomes with low risk. I don't know if I buy your point about inherited wealth but there is what I'd describe as a stifling culture of rentseeking that, if not actively encouraged is certainly tolerated and overlooked, at many levels of society, and across both businesses and public organisations. And once you become aware of it you start to realise how obnoxious and oppressive it is. We certainly don'…
You don't buy the point about a country with royal family that owns vast swathes of land?
Incidentally, the Royal Family themselves privately own 1/250th of the UK's land, and it is mostly not particularly valuable. Only about £15bn.
As a proportion this is only four times what the richest private landowner (the Emmersons) in the USA owns of the USA. And the Emmersons have come by their share pretty quickly by comparison, wouldn't you say?
The Duke of Westminster (not a member of the royal family) has a physically much smaller (private) estate that is worth more than half of the royal estate.
What the royal family own privately should not be confused with what the "Crown" owns. The Crown estate is basically owned and operated by the state.
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As much as I like the NHS, it’s pretty shit compared to the healthcare a Facebook employee would get in the US. Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor. Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less…
The one case where your argument fails is very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US you will end up with worse care. And let's hope the NHS problems are temporary. When I worked in London and the US ten years ago, I always preferred the NHS because the waiting times were shorter and the quality of care was much higher. I used the NHS a few weeks ago. It wasn't horrible and I got good quality…
I guess it looks more grim for the "lower end of the spectrum" in the U.S.
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> you know who's NOT on this list? Anyone to do with ARM. Even Hermann Hauser appears to have only £150m net worth) I wonder if ARM's success, or rather, popularity and market dominanance, is because they (intentionally or otherwise) devalued themselves enough.
Indeed. You can see in some of the comments here the American mentality simply could not have made ARM successful because they would have been too busy competing with their own customers. For ARM to take off and be trusted they had to knowingly leave valuable profit margins around for their customers to be able to take advantage of. The defining question is if the world is better off by having people play that game o…
It's a longer game, so hopefully ARM employees still own some equity.
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Thatcher was replaced by a guy called Blair who saw the internet as the future worth investing in. Sadly he found another cause to throw money at. The mistake Thatcher made was to open up the telecoms market to competition at a time when the legacy provider (BT) were starting to build a high speed internet highway/backbone. In hindsight, this could indeed be considered an error but looking how BT have fared since, pe…
A lot more mistakes made by Thatcher than that. We're now in the absurd situation where 4 out of 6 power generating companies are foreign owned and the Japanese own our chip manufacturer. All because of her policies that originally envisioned that the share holding would be by the British public, not foreigners. And the latest scandal is that our water companies are dumping ridiculous amounts of sewage into our water…
This is the most charitable interpretation of events (no sarcasm intended[1]), and one I would like to believe, but greed is very powerful and leads people to evil, so I can well imagine various lobbying groups would have seen the easy mid-term money to be made from such sales.
[1] "Never attribute to malice that which may be adequately be explained by incompetence."
Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US, I do understand they just want access to the most capital, but I find a shame LSE is not competitive for this kind of thing.
Sadly the UK has a long history of sending its own tech industry abroad... It begun with the invention of the computer as we know it... - Charles Babbage,"Father of the computer", British - Alan Turing, "Father of modern computer science", British Then there was Margret Thatcher who decided the internet was a fad and wasn't worth investing in internet infrastructure in the country. Where did the multi billion (if not…
This seems unbelievable now, but the relevant reference is https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...