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British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

bbc.com

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Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#251

Post by lazide »

pjc50 wrote: post #102
traceroute66 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. "look at China" what ? Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ? Remember what is often said when Mr Trump talks about bringing tech manufacturing back to the US .... Yes great idea Mr Trump. But even with the most generously optimistic figures, due to the lack of available workf…

> Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ? British thinking seems to be that because we won the Opium War we should just expect a country with 20 times our population and a vast land area to be poorer, both per capita and in total, than our island, forever.

It did work for awhile though, eh?

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#252

Post by vablings »

0x3f wrote: post #58
Deukhoofd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food tends to be a lot easier to produce, and many countries do often subsidize their food production, as well as have mercantilistic policies to ensure food production is kept locally. Vaccines is a more interesting one, and would be something that might indeed be of interest to a nation. On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it…

I don't really care for farm subsidies either, but even ignoring that: it's quite a different level of intervention than compulsory purchase. Same with the vaccines. We didn't respond to that crisis by nationalizing AstraZeneca. My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionall…

One big thing about steel is actually traceability, certain industries require very specific steels. One example that always comes to mind is Sheffield Forgemaster's who are one of the few places in the world that can make absolutely gargantuan sized castings for nuclear reactors and marine equipment

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#253

Post by inigyou »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #238
inigyou wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to. Private business has to do at least as well as the government business or it won't make any sales, so quality increases and price decreases even if the government business doesn't sell anything.

You do know it is illegal in most places to sell under cost, right? So why would be legal for a government to sell something below cost but illegal for a company to do the same thing?

By definition the cost of a thing is what it sells for.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#254

Post by illliillll »

fsuts wrote: post #248
GJim wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave. This. Russia is suffering over 400 casualties for every square km (1036 per square mile!) of territory captured in Donetsk, screwing their own economy and turning themselves into a pariah. Russia certainly isn't winning. https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...

Ukraine taking on rounds after rounds of multi billion euro loans also isn’t winning… They need a peace deal but external parties don’t want Ukraine to do this. The same ones lending the money

Neither side needs a peace deal as of right now, that’s completely ridiculous.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#255

Post by timschmidt »

Hikikomori wrote: post #241
timschmidt wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> relatively few domain scientists support that claim I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified. One thing I can say from my d…

What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory? Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?

> What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory?

Enough.

> Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?

People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.

What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#256

Post by illliillll »

RandomLensman wrote: post #71
pydry wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a large war, those countries will prioritize domestic consumption and the UK will immediately stop being able to produce weapons. Domestic steel production is an essential element of being sovereign, as opposed to being the handpuppet of a larger power (like the US).

I don't see how the UK could generally be self-sufficient in any large war.

The UK has nuclear weapons.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#257

Post by somenameforme »

solumunus wrote: post #242
somenameforme wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say that Austria-Hungary choosing to outright invade Serbia because the assassin was a Bosnian Serb who might have had some backing from the government, was reasonable? Or was that a land grab? And when when Russia joins Serbia was it solely an action of obligation or because they thought they might be able to get a piece of Austria-Hungary? And similarly when Germany jumps in seeing they can now shift the…

Ukraine were no where near joining NATO at the time, although as it turns out - if they were their motivation would have been entirely valid. Russia didn’t want Ukraine to join NATO because it would prevent them from annexing Ukraine, that’s simple logic. > within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a h…

Not joining NATO would be an extremely small price to pay relative to what war could, and ultimately did, entail.

There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.

So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#258

Post by Hikikomori »

timschmidt wrote: post #255
Hikikomori wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory? Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?

> What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory? Enough. > Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all? People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the…

>Enough.

So someone with expertise in other non relevant fields is enough? Yet people that have expertise in relevant fields dispute his conclusions and its not relevant somehow?

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#259

Post by t0mpr1c3 »

neilwilson wrote: post #233
Deukhoofd wrote: post #22

It's probably not a bad idea. Steel is one of the things that an industrialized country needs to produce to protect its own sovereignty. Letting it shut down and just hope you'll always be able to import enough steel from other countries is a bad long-term strategy. You'd be left unable to fend for yourself.

Having said that if you have no source of iron ore and no self sufficient energy production you’re stuffed anyway. The UK ran out of both a fair while ago

Britain didn't run out of coal, it's just in deep seams that are uneconomic to extract compared to strip-mined lignite.

Newcastle is proverbially built on top of the stuff.

Although renewable energy sources and electric arc furnaces that consume scrap are preferred these days.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#260

Post by t0mpr1c3 »

lazide wrote: post #245
neilwilson wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having said that if you have no source of iron ore and no self sufficient energy production you’re stuffed anyway. The UK ran out of both a fair while ago

Notably, things like that is why they had their colonies.

In fact, during the age of empire Britain exported coal all over the world. That was one resource it did have.

Cotton was another matter.

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