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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

josef.cn

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#51

Post by r_thambapillai »

As a Brit, when I was raising the seed round for my startup, UK and European VCs would consistently try to haggle you down on price while the American VC's were exclusively focussed on trying to figure out whether this could be a billion dollar business or not (in the end we raised a $5m seed led by Spark, and have done extremely well and raised more since).

The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.

There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#52

Post by LarsDu88 »

Ad services, once it was monopolized by Google and Facebook really warped the value of the software engineering profession over other areas.

Software is incredibly valuable, but there are other technology areas that are much harder and equally as valuable (if not more so when augmented with good software).

A lot of software engineers who only know the last 20 years have inflated egos as results.

How many technology experts suddenly became public health experts overnight when COVID-19 hit? And how many of these same people continue to parrot the same bullshit after over 1 million American deaths?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#53

Post by marbro »

mapt wrote: post #12

A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct. All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what…

Socialism isn't the solution, it's the problem. People deserve to be paid for work and the better the work that they do, the more they deserve to be paid, even though that can be much more than the average person earns.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#54

Post by mapt »

corimaith wrote: post #46
rwmj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cracking down on monopolies and rentierism would be a good start. Followed by tying pension rises to worker's salaries. None of that is actually going to happen because of who votes combined with a government that's scared of its own shadow.

Well everytime somebody wants to build high density housing or really anything to alleviate the housing crisis we get the usual NIMBY screaming similar to OP about evil corporations coming to destroy the character of their local neighborhood.

OP is a YIMBY for the record.

Returning by right development to the UK is very possibly the single largest policy measure that might enable a way forward, not because it's so intimately tied to the financialization of the economy, but because it's such an enormous capital concentration that its limitations overshadow a lot of other issues.

It may be hard to see it from where we're standing, but the current housing situation is one extreme of a catastrophic ongoing crisis.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#56

Post by LarsDu88 »

poisonwomb wrote: post #36

The UK as a society doesn’t care about anything related to industrial production because it is ideologically opposed to anything resembling an industrial working class. Skilled jobs are anathema to the ethos of the people in charge of the UK’s industrial policy - who have never held a skilled job in their life - as they would prefer everyone to be a backbiting, striving social climber like them, either moving money a…

I don't think the UK is allergic to industry, it just got worse and worse at manufacturing relative to other countries after WW2.

Just look at the UK's automobile industry... terrible quality.. terrible reliability, particularly in electrical components until the whole thing collapsed.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#57

Post by jltsiren »

HPsquared wrote: post #35
mapt wrote: post #12

A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct. All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what…

Government spending is 45% of GDP.

And private spending is something like 200%. GDP is a measure of added value, not total spending/revenue.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#58

Post by [deleted] »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #14
mapt wrote: post #12

A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct. All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what…

Yeah, yeah, the meme copy-paste problem diagnosis, but what’s the solution? Rebuild into socialism? Rebuild into communism? Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)? How do you know that those systems won’t also have their own late stage failure? Case in point, the NHS right now. (Edit, posting too fast: To the person below who suggested 90% tax rates; the US never had those rates. On paper they…

[deleted]

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#59

Post by pydry »

corimaith wrote: post #46
rwmj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cracking down on monopolies and rentierism would be a good start. Followed by tying pension rises to worker's salaries. None of that is actually going to happen because of who votes combined with a government that's scared of its own shadow.

Well everytime somebody wants to build high density housing or really anything to alleviate the housing crisis we get the usual NIMBY screaming similar to OP about evil corporations coming to destroy the character of their local neighborhood.

Affordable high density housing used to comprise about half of all housing built in the UK. Then almost all constuction of it was halted.

The private sector never built any of it. NIMBYs didnt stop this construction. Ideologues whinging about the % of GDP spent by the public sector did.

NIMBYs are just a side effect of the world neoliberals created.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#60

Post by nicoburns »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #14
mapt wrote: post #12

A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct. All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what…

Yeah, yeah, the meme copy-paste problem diagnosis, but what’s the solution? Rebuild into socialism? Rebuild into communism? Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)? How do you know that those systems won’t also have their own late stage failure? Case in point, the NHS right now. (Edit, posting too fast: To the person below who suggested 90% tax rates; the US never had those rates. On paper they…

> but what’s the solution?

I strongly suspect it's a variant on capitalism that:

1. Recognises that some industries (utilities, healthcare, etc) are not well suited to market provision and are state funded. i.e. the sort social provisions that many of the nordic countries have.

2. Recognises that extreme wealth inequalities invalidate the key principle that capitalist economics is premised on (that the market value of a good or service closely approximates it's societal value) and therefore imposes much stronger progressive taxes on very high earners to effective cap how much wealth a single individual can control.

> early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)

High tax rates (90% in some cases) and all

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