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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

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Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#461

Post by schmidtleonard »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #454
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is. The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations

> Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is. There is a perfect reason, though I might sympathize if you say there is no excuse. If one wanted to engineer some incredible Rube Goldberg machine to cause prices to spiral out of control beyond all lunacy, one could hardly do better than what we have in the United States right now. Young people were told that without college/university they were doomed…

Right, and it's worse when you remember that the people who voted for this knew exactly what they were doing because it's how they made their money in the real estate market: obtain property rights over inelastic supply, pump cheap debt into the counterparties, price spiral, laugh all the way to the bank.

We really are a society of ponzi schemes.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#462

Post by schmidtleonard »

nradov wrote: post #378
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is. The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations

There's no class warfare grand conspiracy going on. Like any businesses, colleges charge more because they can . Customers have been willing to pay, and the availability of government subsidized student loans made those customers relatively price insensitive. That model is finally starting to break. To be fair to colleges, their costs have also increased somewhat. Baumol’s Cost Disease means that it's impossible to a…

"It's not a war because side X won" is truly one of the arguments of all time.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#463

Post by eszed »

mrguyorama wrote: post #437
guywithahat wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I love how often people who are probably in the bay area say this as the unionized members of Hollywood next door have no problem rejecting truly mediocre laborers and paying "10xers" millions of dollars per performance. Do you know who were literal members of that union? Both Reagan (twice president of the union) and Trump. Despite having a stranglehold style, where union members are not allowed to work on non-union…

I agree with you about the way that the entertainment unions work. They have their quirks, but they are generally excellent.

Just to offer some nuance, "union members are not allowed to work on non-union projects" is not strictly true. Union members can apply for waivers to work on non-union shows, and smaller theatres operate under letters of agreement with SAG-AFTRA which require only X-number of union contracts per show or per season. Also, union members - no matter their usual wage level - are free to sign contracts to work for "scale" (minimum wage for union members) on projects about which they're passionate; this happens all the time.

Incidentally, the "minimum wage" scale is also different for theatres of different sizes and business models. It's an attempt to balance workers' rights with the exigencies and economics of a fundamentally unstable industry. Some shows won't (necessarily - there are always surprises!) be commercial enough to be produced at certain theatres, and some actors may be prevented from working on some projects, but the system itself won't ever prevent anything from being done at all.

Another advantage to keep in mind if you consider importing this model to another sector: operating under a LOA provides a huge measure of protection to non-union employees, as well. At a certain point in my theatre career I stopped wanting to work on any non-affiliated project - unlimited rehearsal hours with no required notice period were unappealing, for instance, and (even as a non-union actor) pay was usually better in affiliated companies. There was a line to walk, though: once you accumulate a certain number of affiliated weeks in a rolling period you'll be required to join the union, which can limit employability: it's important to make sure your career / skills / network are sufficiently developed to support that level-up.

Anyway, I think that general model would be a good fit for tech workers, and I'd like to see it tried.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#464

Post by eszed »

orochimaaru wrote: post #360
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…

Maybe the decline of manufacturing in the UK correlates with freedom of its colonies? There is loss of access to cheap raw material as well as a dumping ground for finished products.

Close enough, but it's the decline of the (ex-colonies) Commonwealth as a trading bloc. That was probably always inevitable, but it long out-lasted the end of direct colonial rule.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#465

Post by mr_toad »

lb1lf wrote: post #336
jack_tripper wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Submarine fleets will torpedo your blockade. No need to fire nukes.

A blockade need not be enforced in situ. Say, with satellite coverage to find out where any blockade runners are and a lot of cruise missiles you could enforce a blockade from a thousand miles away.

That would be extremely difficult to defend against unless you have enough ships to defend every single convoy. WWII showed how helpless big surface ships were against u-boats in defending shipping.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#466

Post by [deleted] »

giorgioz wrote: post #398
hexbin010 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. If you want others to cheer you on when you do great you should do the same to others (when they deserve it). Human behaviour is mostly imitation.

[deleted]

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#467

Post by [deleted] »

giorgioz wrote: post #398
hexbin010 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. If you want others to cheer you on when you do great you should do the same to others (when they deserve it). Human behaviour is mostly imitation.

[deleted]

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#468

Post by nradov »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #462
nradov wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no class warfare grand conspiracy going on. Like any businesses, colleges charge more because they can . Customers have been willing to pay, and the availability of government subsidized student loans made those customers relatively price insensitive. That model is finally starting to break. To be fair to colleges, their costs have also increased somewhat. Baumol’s Cost Disease means that it's impossible to a…

"It's not a war because side X won" is truly one of the arguments of all time.

You're really missing the point. The college administrators who make those decisions are well paid but generally not wealthy or true members of the upper class.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#469

Post by ErroneousBosh »

justincormack wrote: post #307
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #303

Not a single mention of the Thatcher government in the 1970s, that sold off public-owed industries like British Coal and British Steel, and then set about acquiring and breaking up the shipyards themselves for scrap. All of it was worth more smashed up and sold for scrap, for the little quick "fix" that the Money Junkies in the Conservative government wanted. Unemployment and poverty rose steadily except for the bank…

Thatcher was elected in 1979 so was not involved in the 1979s when there was a Labour government.

Do you notice that the graph in that article heads rapidly south in 1979/1980?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#470

Post by kranke155 »

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?

The class system in England is quite entrenched. You have to remember this is a country with an 1000 year old monarchy and noble families who still own a substantial amount of the land. England is both very modernist, quite progressive, and remarkably traditionalist in its makeup.

It’s hard to explain when you’re not there. When people say “the working class” that has a very specific connotation in England - it means you aren’t a noble or a peer or someone like that. Of course the boundaries are blurred, but they are not that blurry yet in England.

So walking around there you get the feeling that there is absolutely a two tier system, some people go to Eton and Oxfridge some people do not. Of course they have allowed a lot of foreign millionaire and billionaires into the system.

But the overall feeling is very much us vs them sometimes and it certainly feels like both sides can despise each other. The working class, as famously depicted by Gillian Anderson as Thatcher in The Crown thinks the nobles “don’t do anything” and the nobles etc because of their Etonian and Oxford education think the lower classes are low IQ.

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