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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#691

Post by pjc50 »

Kallocain wrote: post #612
CalRobert wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Ireland for 10 years. It's not the same as the UK but there _is_ cultural overlap. Every time you shared a new idea with _anyone_, even things as simple as "I want to buy a site and build a house on it", the first thing you hear is how that's a bad idea, you will fail, it will never work, and you need to leave it to "professionals". Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" an…

I don't know what the regulations are in the UK, but in many European countries, building a house isn't just about knowing how to build a house, it's also about knowing all the DIN requirements. These are necessary for insurance to pay out if something happens to your house. Let's take a simple example: You're wiring your house. Because of a mistake, the house burns down. Insurance: “Okay sir, who did the electrical…

I suspect that in any of the big cities in America you can't just buy a plot and start building, for exactly the same reasons. See also the complexities of CA fire insurance.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#692

Post by pjc50 »

aa-jv wrote: post #456
r_thambapillai wrote: post #51

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!! -- t…

>There are probably political reasons as well. There are definitely political - and ultimately, military-industrial - reasons for this. The UK is deeply, deeply embedded in the Anglo-centric 5-eyes criminal superstructure, and plays a huge part in the subversion of human rights at immense scale around the world, that this criminal entity commits every second of the day. The spook factor bleeds into every technologica…

> immediately becomes the target for GCHQ embedding/plants.

I'd be interested to hear more about this.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#693

Post by necovek »

As brought up through the thread, it sounds more plausible that the hardware talent is most useful near the factories, and due to globalisation and pay discrepancy, fewer factories are being built in UK.

With compensation catching up in developing economies, it will make less and less sense to move production outside a "wealthy" country, and you'll see resurrection of domestic hardware companies.

Right?

How far away are we from the tipping point is beyond me, though (and there are always "cheaper" countries still, even if it's mostly due to lacking legislation and environment protection rules).

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#694

Post by Earw0rm »

GasVeteran wrote: post #559
Earw0rm wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's conflating a bunch of things. Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it. On the flip side though, the educational/academic landscape for the upper quartile of young adults is hugely more competitive. Nobody is making it to a Ru…

> It's conflating a bunch of things. Not really. I am talking generally about this notion that we need to keep importing people. > Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it. That is often repeated but I don't think that is quite as…

On the cashier jobs - the thing is that they can rely on fewer and more trained/experienced staff. This may not be a bad outcome for those in the jobs, but it means less availability of casual work.

Which is not the same thing as no availability, but there used to be plenty of this kind of work to go around, such that it was the norm that 17/18 year olds could get it without particularly trying. That is not the case now.

Trying to bring skilled labour into the UK, or trying to get residence as an apparently useful and self-sufficient person, is actually quite difficult, so I'm not sure how all the low-skilled labour ends up here, other than large agencies in areas (social care, farm work) with known skill shortages.. being large agencies, the bureaucratic overhead isn't too bad for them, whereas for an individual or small company, it's more trouble than it's worth. There's no way you can just bring a cleaner over from abroad because you want someone to clean your house/office.

As to shouldn't be happening. Yes. But as for so many other things in the UK and its gradual slide towards a low-trust society. So it becomes a case of figuring out which battles to pick, which ones are genuinely impacting peoples' day to day. And I think collectively (not particularly a left vs right thing), the country has forgotten how to prioritise that.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#695

Post by zipy124 »

varjag wrote: post #521
CalRobert wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 6 figures a lot?

The pound is slightly heavier than the dollar and overall UK wages are lower. But truth is in most of the world being a doctor is a good career but not something you can build outstanding wealth on. Hence Europeans are often puzzled with "I want my kid become a doctor" cliche from American media.

That's just not true. Being a doctor still ranks among the top professions by wage in the UK at least, especially since the wage is largely the same regardless of area, and making six figures in an area where you can buy a house for under six figures allows you to live a very very nice life.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#696

Post by pjc50 »

defrost wrote: post #276
makingstuffs wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the non-existent British NHS where getting an appointment to see a doctor is about as likely as meeting the Loch Ness Monster for a spot of tea and crumpets.

It used to be the jewel in the crown of empire though. Thatcher and the more recent 14 years of UK Conservative government seemed to have kicked it bloody and senseless like Alex and his droogs from the Korova Milkbar.

The NHS and the Empire don't really overlap. It was founded right at the end of the war, shortly before the UK started having to divest from its colonies, and of course it was never a thing in any of the non-UK colonies!

I often think the NHS was only founded as a result of the war, as an extension of the military and civilian healthcare needs for injury care. German bombers didn't respect the British class system.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#697

Post by ta1243 »

CalRobert wrote: post #665
zelos wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't tell me the grass isn't really greener in the Netherlands. Moving over there (from SE England) is one of my dreams.

It’s nice here! My kids can bike to school and not be killed. But the health care is… meh.

And yet you pay more per capita than the UK

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#698

Post by Earw0rm »

ta1243 wrote: post #671
Earw0rm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a political issue. There are things the UK is good at - finance, culture/media, software and yes hardware innovation, legal services, tourism. But since the GFC especially, none of these things are considered "right" by the electorate. Instead we romanticise unproductive legacy stuff, and an NHS which, while its staff are in many cases heroic, spends most of its vast budget cleaning up the mess of a population w…

Vast majority of NHS expense is keeping an aging population alive. A lot of the rest of government spending (nearly 80% of my council tax for example) goes on social care for that same aging population. The NHS spends less per capita than the US spends on medicaid. Not less per person covered, less overall.

How do poorer countries manage to avoid getting outright bankrupted by social care? Why is it such a black hole money-pit in the UK particularly?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#700

Post by pjc50 »

Earw0rm wrote: post #184
mhh__ wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good news is that a relatively small amount of aggressive planning reform (namely, firing everyone involved and never calling it "planning" ever again) will fix most of the (fixable...) worst aspects of modern Britain. We banned building stuff in 1947, we can undo it.

The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be. We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places. What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and c…

Like Brexit, there's a huge overhang of misinformed old people who hate change, but have no vested interest in the real economy because their pensions stay the same even if they block growth.

> against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.

Quite. It's time for a campaign of bigging up the second and third cities. Of course, this immediately fell to a victory of Starmer Labour keeping HS2 cuts instead of Burnham Labour (who has done great things for Manchester).

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