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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

construction-physics.com

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Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#491

Post by pas »

spookie wrote: post #407
tim333 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure going into farming is even good for society at the moment. My dad was a farmer for a while and there was mostly a food surplus with the EU paying him to set aside land to control that. You do good for society by providing things it's short off.

You should take a look at the price of food after Russia launched their full scale invasion in Ukraine. A significant increase, 15% at its peak and lowering thereafter to about 5%. Still, it is above pandemic levels. You rise food prices and there's a domino effect on the economy, everything else also increases in price. It is important the EU is able to produce its own food at acceptable prices.

if food security is important then the EU should pay for cost-effectiveness, economic sustainability, ecological resilience, storage capacity, and so on.

AFAIK right now it pays the same for a huge unproductive monoculture of non-edible corn (ie. for bioethanol) as it pays for wheat. (though there's finally talk about some changes to CAP, mostly to stop paying already rich big farms.)

food prices are pretty volatile anyway, and as you see even a war only moved them 15% whereas in Hungary inflation was more than 20%.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#492

Post by pas »

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…

People change their diets to live longer, and in general medicine seems more valuable. People happily pay a lot for more QALYs.

Having food security is important, just as having warm clothes and shelter too, right?

Providing what people need is value, just providing "food" can lead to a lot of negative value (see the obesity epidemic).

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#493

Post by lmm »

mike_hearn wrote: post #440
lmm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. And yet Germany, the great success story of retaining manufacturing in a western developed country, had and has far stronger leftists and far stronger unions than the UK. So evidently this was not the reason at all, although I'm sure getting the public to think it was is very useful t…

> Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity. In the period where the British industries were wiped, that kind of tactic was being used routinely. The German unions were much less aggressively leftist than British unions.

UK labour-management relations were bad in that period, worse than in Germany, resulting in high levels of conflict and escalation. I don't think it's because the UK's unions were more aggressive though.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#494

Post by throwaway290 »

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-...

> most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore.

And you know how much oil is found in the vast lands of Singapore... That stuff floating to Australia is probably Russian oil https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/nov/09/looph...

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#495

Post by eru »

rusk wrote: post #102
eru wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you to decide these priorities for other people? Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?

> Who are you to decide these priorities for other people? A democratically elected, competent government I would imagine.

So it's up to them to decide whether they want to "be able to defend [themselves], without reliance on allies, as a national priority", ain't it?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#496

Post by johnnyanmac »

boplicity wrote: post #445
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

Not every college has crazy tuition. The school I attended in 2000 to 2004 has kept pace with inflation generally. Annual tuition is now around $10k, which is a lot, but not unmanageable for many middle class families. I'm curious how this compares across universities throughout the U.S. Maybe the tuition story has bifurcated somewhat?

Tuition for my college in 2012-2016 was around 6k per year. A quick Google shows me this increased to 11k.

And it's worse than it looks, because this doesn't include cost of materials, the dreaded "other fees", and of course, room and board. Room and board increased 50%.

And this used to be considered a "best value" college. I'm sure it's only worse fr private schools in the state.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#497

Post by johnnyanmac »

nradov wrote: post #468
schmidtleonard wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

If you look at admin's average pay, many would be inclined to disagree. Saying "but they aren't billionaires" isn't very comforting.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#498

Post by johnnyanmac »

dijit wrote: post #375
pjc50 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

just because people don’t wanna do it doesn’t mean it’s not important. It’s interesting that we would care about monetary value more than societal value- that kind of leans into my point don’t you think?

Charity fails when the charitable can't even pay rent. Offer $40/hr to these "essential workers" and suddenly people will be charitable again.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#499

Post by rapsey »

mmooss wrote: post #389
rapsey wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is economic myopia that leads to long term subservience to countries which have maintained manufacturing capability. China can literally bring the rest of the developed world to their knees at will with rare earths.

Actually, the most powerful country in the world by far is the United States, and other than China, other Western countries that have followed this "myopia". > rare earths Rare earths are not a manufacturing product, but a natural resource. That's not an applicable example here. Also, China is more dependent on the rest of the world than vice-versa; China has power, but certainly hasn't brought anyone to their knees…

The reason your original post was downvoted was because the events of the last few years have so thoroughly damaged your neoliberal ideas and of course this follow up just confirms how poorly you are informed.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#500

Post by sefrost »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #247
sefrost wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre. I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples. With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus. The triple lock is a politically motiv…

You touch on the core issue of the UK, but there's both a cultural and policy aspect. 1. As you say, an aging population has placed the entire country into a gridlock - the pensions system as it stands is ridiculous and unsustainable. Unfortunately, it is an almost immediate political suicide to even attempt to reform it. Young people are disillusioned and wield little monetary or political power. The old generation…

> There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.

It can be done over a period of time. Canada moved from a non-funded pension model like the UK currently has, to a partially funded model which currently has over $731 billion in assets.

They began this change in 1999. If they hadn't made that change in direction they'd be in a much worse situation today.

It's possible to change from one system to another, if a government is able to look much further ahead than its own term in government.

With the Canadian model, your payments out at the end are tied to what you put in. Which is not quite the case in the UK, which allows extremely low payments in for just 10 years to get a very high amount out indefinitely.

The British government must take the same path the Canadians took.

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