How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry • Hacker News Board

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#471

Post by mr_toad » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

diego_moita wrote: post #263

giorgioz wrote: post #172

Italy 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…

I don’t think that modern Turkey thinks of itself as an empire. They overthrew the Sultanate themselves, seems they were glad to be rid of it.

I doubt any sensible modern country wants a physical empire, they’re much too much trouble to maintain. You basically get the same benefits with outsourcing and cheap imports, without having to maintain garrisons.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#472

Post by mrguyorama » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:28 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #362

gausswho wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Except the Tories got their opportunity to demonstrate how unions held them back for most of 40 years and did nothing to improve the situation.

You don't get to blame Unionist culture on failures after Thatcher takes control. Unions were stronger during the times most western nations were doing better.

The government treated people like Derek as hostile foreign spies and enemies of the state, going so far as to sic national security agencies on them.

Derek had no power after he was ousted in 1979, and the workers at British Leyland voted against a retaliatory strike 14000 to 600.

If you want to suggest this is still "cultural" because the Tories were part of the "class" blaming and scapegoating laborers, 1) I agree but 2) Calling that a "two cultures" problem or ascribing blame to the laborer "class" for trying to fight off the Reaganisation of their country is absurd.

Guess what, the unions lost in most of the Anglophone world in 1980, are we really better off without them? Are we really doing better now that we don't let workers offset the power of Capital holders? To me it seems like all we have accomplished is to take a loan out from our futures to enrich the Capital holding class.

Surely if the unions were the problem, we would have clear evidence of improvement since they were thoroughly destroyed in the 80s?

Meanwhile, here in the US, we are still feeling the painful effects of killing the air traffic control union. Turns out people don't want to do an extremely stressful, extremely skill based job for dirt cheap, and the people who can do that job are fine at doing jobs that pay way better, and no amount of removing their collective bargaining power can offset individuals choosing not to get underpaid for a serious job.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#473

Post by scott_w » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:31 PM UTC

potato3732842 wrote: post #429

scott_w wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation I don't see what regulation has to do with (effectively) nationalising the entire shipbuilding industry. When I say "cost" I literally mean the financial cost to the Exchequer.

Regulation was just one example. Could be any sort of TPS report or other overhead type crap.

I’m not talking about TPS reports, overheads, etc. I’m talking, quite literally, about the actual line item costs that appear on the ledger of the Exchequer. I don’t see why this is hard for you to understand without and why you’re waffling about unrelated things.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#474

Post by bluGill » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC

bootsmann wrote: post #443

bluGill wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is open evidente that Russia invested in keeping their nukes working. They gave more control over the military to leaders of the nuke program after the Soviet union fell. There are US - Russia nuke inspection treaties (only reciently are they ending) - while the results are classified those with access to them are behaving as if they think they are still working.

They still haven’t managed a successful launch of their new silo missile. If you were the US inspector, would you tell Russia if you thought their nukes don’t work?

They have plenty of old missiles. And we never know when they are not launching because they want to hide something, or when they launched something to test how a failure happens.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#475

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:49 PM UTC

ReptileMan wrote: post #417

csomar wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 chin…

>It didn't stop Brazil from creating a rather very good aerospace company. That uses prat and whitney and GE engines

[deleted]

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

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Post by bgnn » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

agobineau wrote: post #88

jacquesm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a country that is an Island you'd think that the question of whether or not it is 'national-strategic' would have been answered in the affirmative.

australia has almost no fuel refining capacity most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore. in the XXIer century some australia cities have run out of gasoline for half a day, an afternoon, a few days https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/singapore-bound-duel-...

That's unbelievable. A lot of 3rd world countries have their own refineries.. Wow.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#477

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #455

pfdietz wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from hydrogen and nitrogen. The hydrogen is currently derived from fossil fuels, but there is no requirement that it be so. Saying "ammonia is produced from fossil fuels, and so must always be" is like saying "cars run on fossil fuels, and so always must". A non sequitur. Phosphates are derived from large phosphate deposits in various places, such as Florida. Phosphorus will ultimat…

This can't be replaced at a volume that can feed the world nor in a way the world can afford. Lots of things can be done in alternative ways if you remove half the requirements (in this case volume and affordability).

It can be replaced at volume that can feed the world. After all, the total energy involved is small compared to what would have to be produced to power the entirety of industrial civilization. Agriculture uses < 2% of total US energy consumption.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#478

Post by greycol » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #352

loglog wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conclusions of the FT article are completely wrong. With fewer rich people around, chances are that legislation would be less frequently bought to benefit them at the cost of the country's overall prosperity.

If you insist on only focusing on the negatives of their existence, then sure, eliminating wealthy people sounds like a good idea.

Out of interest what are the positives? Other than cultural, in flagrant displays of excess, I can't think of anything they couldn't accomplish by them existing as poorer business leaders and having competent national wealth funds empowered to lend/give grants.

What I'm saying is you may be defending billionaires when you mean to be defending a system you believe is optimal but still has the negative outcome of billionaires (not to imply the billionaires themselves are intrinsically bad as people but the concentration of wealth in their hands is).

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#479

Post by dijit » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:21 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #424

dijit wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sustainable due to the fossil-fuel laden garbage we feed to bovine stock. Not sustainable because it causes major health issues which stress the healthcare system and limits quality of life - especially the affordable stuff that people tend to think is “normal value”

As I said, all the fossil fuel inputs could be replaced with renewables. In particular: farm machinery can be run on non-fossil energy, nitrogen fertilizer can be made with green hydrogen, and pesticides can be synthesized with feedstocks derived from non-fossil sources like biomass. The second sentence doesn't make any sense. None of that makes something unsustainable, just regrettable.

Sure, so we're agreeing I think.

It's possible, but we're not doing it because we believe it makes more economic sense to ignore those issues.

When economic sense no longer makes sense sense then we're going to be having issues. And going back to my primary point, everything should really be serving the primary sector, not the other way around really.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#480

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:40 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #479

pfdietz wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, all the fossil fuel inputs could be replaced with renewables. In particular: farm machinery can be run on non-fossil energy, nitrogen fertilizer can be made with green hydrogen, and pesticides can be synthesized with feedstocks derived from non-fossil sources like biomass. The second sentence doesn't make any sense. None of that makes something unsustainable, just regrettable.

Sure, so we're agreeing I think. It's possible, but we're not doing it because we believe it makes more economic sense to ignore those issues. When economic sense no longer makes sense sense then we're going to be having issues. And going back to my primary point, everything should really be serving the primary sector, not the other way around really.

The base issue is that fossil fuels are not being charged the cost of their externalities. All the problems stem from this. Do that, and all these subsidiary problems melt away.