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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

#971

Post by winter_blue »

pikrzyszto wrote: post #932
winter_blue wrote: post #916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy. They could do this is one fell swoop with a single bill by the Parliament that dissolves these local councils, and land owners the right (and freedom) to build whatever they want on land they own. Building safety codes would still apply; but zoning permitting could be erased…

zoning is still necessary, you don't want a pig farm (or anything equally stinky) next to people's houses.

I wouldn’t mind an indoor farm, if they come up with some system to control the smell.

I don’t think there should be any restriction on what people can build.

You could have a rule on bad smell, that applies to equally to everyone, so a farm would be legal, if they can control the smell.

Egg-laying chicken farm in between two multi-family units would be perfectly legal. I see this as a good thing.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#972

Post by potatosurfer »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #101
smartties wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the case for most European countries, particularly here in France. We’re experiencing stagnation, or perhaps even a decline. Launching a product in Europe is significantly more challenging due to the market’s high fragmentation. I don’t have much hope for the future of tech companies in Europe.

If it makes you feel better, I'm having a hard time to think of a single country with more than 10M people that doesn't have the same problem.

Spain and other EU countries are growing but not really from technological development. https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/10/31/why-is-spains-e...

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#973

Post by turbojerry »

mrtksn wrote: post #556
turbojerry wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU drone regulations ban autonomous drones from being flown. This made me stop work on them, this is not a mindset problem. It's actually a corruption problem as Google wanted to sell their software to coordinate drone flights and the EU people were "persuaded" to enact regulations to make this happen.

This is interesting, can you give a bit more details maybe? Which regulations are not allowing you to do what? I wasn’t able to find the ban, is it maybe more about safety and privacy requirements rather than outright ban?

It's a case of what is not explicitly allowed is banned, that is the difference between European continental law and English law where things are allowed unless explicitly banned. Here is a quote from the email I had from the CAA -

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"At present the CAA do not allow for these types of flights as there has to be some degree of collision avoidance in that the aircraft must be kept in visual line of sight at all times to avoid a collision.

The CAA does not regulate the use of drones indoors and there is a short section on indoor use at the following web page, about ½ way down the page.

https://www.caa.co.uk/Consumers/Unmanned-aircraft/Recreation..."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As if a search and rescue, or crop monitoring drone would be useful inside a building, complete madness.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#974

Post by ben_w »

GasVeteran wrote: post #953
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually around 750,000, mostly third world, and around half of those are students. Importing cheap foreign labour from the third world was always one of the goals of Brexit. This game gets played over and over - import cheap labour to keep wages down, lament about how the country is being invaded, and then blame immigrants for lack of investment, corporate profiteering, and other structural policy problems.

Whether it is part of the "goals of brexit" or not, is kinda irrelevant. The point is that we cannot build more homes easily, even if we could that has issues with other infrastructure and utilities. The easiest way is to at least maybe try to decrease demand and reducing immigration would be an obvious way to help with that.

Given whose muscle actually builds the houses (before I left the UK, the meme was all the builders were Polish), and what happened to the exchange rate (initially; it's harder to separate the increasing number of influences the more time passes), the UK could have build a lot more homes more easily in the EU than it can now it's out of the EU.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#975

Post by ChoGGi »

winter_blue wrote: post #971
pikrzyszto wrote: post #932

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zoning is still necessary, you don't want a pig farm (or anything equally stinky) next to people's houses.

I wouldn’t mind an indoor farm, if they come up with some system to control the smell. I don’t think there should be any restriction on what people can build. You could have a rule on bad smell, that applies to equally to everyone, so a farm would be legal, if they can control the smell. Egg-laying chicken farm in between two multi-family units would be perfectly legal. I see this as a good thing.

>Egg-laying chicken farm in between two multi-family units would be perfectly legal. I see this as a good thing.

Noise pollution? Chickens don't have much of a reputation for being quiet.

Also various farming can have quite different hours compared to residential living.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#976

Post by ben_w »

GasVeteran wrote: post #940
bombcar wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be better than not having them. Major problems are rarely solved with one fell swoop, but instead thousands and thousands of small improvements.

It would be better if we just change the immigration policy. Last time I checked there was 400,000 leaving the country each year and somewhere between a million and 1.4 million entering. I live in the countryside (I live in a small flat btw so I don't care about property prices) and I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want…

> I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want to live in a concrete jungle that is fine, I and many others don't. I moved out of Manchester because I hated it there.

Scale issue here: if "everywhere in the country" were build up to the population density of Manchester city, the UK would house 1.2 billion people.

I'm fairly confident there are not 1.2 billion people who currently want to live in the UK.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#977

Post by jackoregankenny »

hbrav wrote: post #968
jackoregankenny wrote: post #961

Finding it tough in Ireland too. Though salaries are higher, access to machines, tools, etc. is significantly harder. We have the talent, but capex is just too tough for startups. I tried to help solve this with saltharbour.org but it flopped during fundraising (who knew making no money isn't appealing, still going for sponsorship though). That said, setting up a new thing in Cambridge, offering £40k starting salary…

I'd be interested in what you set up in Cambridge, if you're happy to share?

Sure! Ping me an email jackoregankenny@gmail.com it's somewhat hush atm

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#978

Post by hintymad »

ajb wrote: post #914
wcfrobert wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US outsourced its manufacturing to China in the name of comparative advantage. Bob bakes bread, Alice grow apples. Everyone is better off because of specialization. In Thomas Friedman's latest nyt column, he refers to China's manufacturing dominance as a play to de-industrializing other countries. It may just be globalization is incompatible with political realities.

Ironically to UK probably make that mistake first. A lot of manufacturing moved to Hong Kong, which was a British Territory until 1997. During the reform of the Chinese economy, Hong Kong invested in factories on the mainland. Then of course it was handed back to their jurisdiction.

UK probably made that mistake first by moving lots of manufacturing to their colonies, like North America and later the US. The UK said the same thing the western world said about China: they built low-level low-quality stuff, and we focused on the high-value manufacturing. But guess what? Smart people are everywhere, and ambitious people will not build "low-quality stuff" forever. Sooner or later, those who sweat on factory floors will have more know-how than those who enjoy draw boxes in a cushy office. Indeed, those who know only how to draw boxes will soon find that even their boxes, no matter how pretty, will not be relevant.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#979

Post by dash2 »

yurishimo wrote: post #941
dash2 wrote: post #934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely even prime agricultural land is vastly (thousands of times?) less valuable than lab space for engineering companies.

Only if you place no value on the land simply existing as it does now and providing aesthetic value. Most people privileged enough to sit on a planning council coincidentally also trend towards valuing peace and quiet and are hesitant to approve projects that may disrupt their assumed way of life. From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is…

> Only if you place no value on the land simply existing as it does now and providing aesthetic value.

A lot of Cambridgeshire is frankly flat, ugly monoculture.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#980

Post by BonoboIO »

ren_engineer wrote: post #883
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What statistic are you citing for your claim that "Germany is now de-industrializing" ?

their energy policy has essentially crippled their economy

You mean not getting gas from Russia?
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