[HN Gopher] UK's hardware talent is being wasted
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UK's hardware talent is being wasted
Author : sebg
Score : 566 points
Date : 2025-01-19 23:52 UTC (23 hours ago)
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| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Too little, too late. The list of reasons to stay in the UK are
| slim; and there's very little the UK can do about it (other than
| begging people to stay out of national pride). Even the strong
| arguments a decade ago, like the NHS, are cracking.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| What ever happened to GraphCore?
| ajb wrote:
| They made a bad bet on the structure of their designs. They
| were bought by SoftBank last year; they have a new design in
| the works, but might have trouble delivering it as apparently
| there's been a bit of a talent exodus. There are several newer
| companies trying their luck in the area.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| I think d-matrix might succeed.
| zipy124 wrote:
| they didn't transition to transformers and I focussed mainly on
| CNN's, which whilst still popular don't have the same financial
| draw, and weren't easily re-purposable for transformers.
|
| See techtechpotatos (Dr ian cutress, currently imho one of the
| best hardware analysts) videos on it for example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZmakgRZYxU
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Volta.
|
| The hardware is good. It's fairly horrendous to program but
| comparable to other specialised chips and the lowering from XLA
| / onnx etc worked well enough.
|
| The 20x performance lead over Nvidia's Pascal looked great.
| Volta beating Pascal by 10x did unrecoverable damage to
| Graphcore's marketing slides. I think they got the later
| generations running a bit faster but it was never the order of
| magnitude over nvidia they started from.
|
| I'm not sure what they're doing these days. The exit to
| softbank valued the employee shares at $0 so the engineers that
| had already left got burned. Most of the engineers I knew there
| have left but there still seems to be a large headcount.
| atbpaca wrote:
| Similar in France / Paris where some American players can easily
| pay 100K+ euros for SWE. Rest of France salaries are half or even
| less.
| leoedin wrote:
| Contracting rates in Paris seem to be much higher -
| EUR700-EUR1000 a day seems common from what I've seen.
|
| I suspect a big part of it is labour laws. The UK is similar.
| Companies don't want to take on the legal commitment of a high
| salary person, so they take on contractors instead.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| This will depend enormously on the company: a consulting and
| IT services company like Capgemini will employ Moroccan
| university graduates at 32KEUR/year. Apple will recruit the
| best engineers from telecoms companies, arms manufacturers,
| research institutes and intelligence services for
| 120KEUR/year and the same in share, equity.
|
| France knows how to train excellent engineers and give them
| responsibilities in major government bodies, but doesn't know
| how to keep them in France. A glass ceiling is rapidly
| forming for engineers. French companies only value
| management. There's also this constant desire on the part of
| French companies to go low-cost.
|
| The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to a
| good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a
| large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low salary
| but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss or
| American company, profit.
| smartties wrote:
| > The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to
| a good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a
| large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low
| salary but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss
| or American company, profit.
|
| Your comment is on point, though I'd slightly adjust the
| part about French engineers career goal. From my
| experience, many French engineering peers were not even
| aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500)
| could offer six-figure salaries. They also often have never
| heard of leetcode/system design/behavioral interviews. They
| assume their career trajectory depends almost entirely on
| the ranking/prestige of their engineering school (which is
| true for french companies), but in practice, most U.S.
| recruiters/companies don't even know what a French
| engineering school is. A bachelor/master degree and a good
| grind on leetcode is enough for them.
|
| For most students I studied with, the dream is to secure a
| 45K~50k salary right after graduation, and target 80k as an
| end-of-career goal, by following this path:
|
| -Attend a top engineering school.
|
| -Join a CAC40 company as a software engineer.
|
| -Transition into management after 10-15 years.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| > French engineering peers were not even aware that
| companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer
| six-figure salaries.
|
| I know senior engineer at Airbus who don't earn six-
| figure salaries.
|
| French human resources are cowards and hide behind
| diplomas to justify pay scales and recruitment. "Nobody
| gets fired for buying IBM"/"Nobody gets fired for
| recruiting a polytechnicien".
|
| I trained as a mechanical/nuclear engineer. It took
| destroying all the other competitors at my company's
| internal hackathon, Master Dev France and a project
| involving several thousand lines of python, for HR at my
| company to admit that I knew how to code without a
| software dev diploma.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I agree with this call to action. Sadly, I think there are more
| fundamental issues in the UK economy.
|
| For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the UK.
|
| While companies do get funded in the UK and are technically "UK
| domiciled" - in action most of their Engineering and Product
| teams are located in Eastern Europe or India, or are startups
| from those markets (and China) who domiciled in the UK to raise
| from foreign investors.
|
| There just isn't enough liquid capital to invest in the UK
| compared to other investment classes available.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's
| supposedly amazing at financial services.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's because the UK is so good at financial services.
|
| It's fairly easy to deploy capital in the UK in mainland
| Europe, the US, India, China, ASEAN, and Middle East, which
| means there isn't much of an incentive to deploy it within
| the UK in industries that the UK cannot compete directly in.
|
| For example, Dyson has almost entirely shifted operations to
| ASEAN (Phillipines and Malaysia primarily).
|
| And AugustaWestland/Leonardo, Rolls Royce, AstraZeneca, GSK,
| BT Group, JLR, and BAE have largely shifted operations to the
| US and India.
|
| The UK could make it harder to offshore, but then that also
| destroys the UK's entire financial and services industry,
| because most of the capital in the UK exists because it's a
| connector for global markets and would leave if that is
| ended.
|
| They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
| HPsquared wrote:
| On the other hand, the UK has all these cheap engineers. Is
| it just that they're not actually cheap, on the
| international market?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Rent, taxes and industrial regulation plays a big part.
| As does power costs. Then there is political costs, it's
| hard to rely on UK politicians not doing foolish things
| and tanking your company on a whim.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Cheap compared to the US. On-par for most of the Western
| world. Expensive on the international market.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Not really. UK salaries are largely comparable to those
| for a similar caliber of talent in China or India
| ($30-50k mid-career is doable in both markets).
|
| The difference is countries like India, Czechia, Poland,
| Israel, Romania, etc all provide competitive tax
| incentives or subsidizes for R&D work, so you can hire
| competitive talent AND get preferential tax treatment.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| It was always going to be a trap, but it's been so long in
| the making that those who started the UK on that path have
| long since retired wealthy.
| James_K wrote:
| I think "capital" is the wrong word for it. We've got a lot
| of money lying around, but capital implies something
| productive can be done with it. We can't eat money, and we
| can't tax it or else they'll screw off. Perhaps if we
| stopped acting as the worlds fixer for tax dodging we would
| end up being better off. I can't help but view the City as
| a kind of tumour, sucking the life out of the rest of the
| country to enlarge itself.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I think most folks when say Capital they mean "Finance
| Capital" which UK is really good at. Even historically
| speaking UK was at the forefront of financial engineering
| which complimented their physical engineering and enabled
| to spread their empire and colonize so much.
|
| But UK post WW-2 and specifically post Thatcher stopped
| investing in physical engineering and overindexed on
| financial services the results are for all to see now.
|
| But you are right. I think the financial engineering has
| reached its limits and we see China's investment in
| physical engineering over last couple of decades
| beginning to pay off.
| klooney wrote:
| The Chinese strategy of forcibly keeping their financial
| sector depressed seems pretty sensible as a long term
| strategy.
| alecco wrote:
| > I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's
| supposedly amazing at financial services.
|
| Because it's focused on predatory finance: funds cornering
| housing markets, money laundering, debt markets (think public
| debt and CDS), currency/rates speculation, etc.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's not about predatory or non-predatory finance.
|
| In order to become a major financial hub, UK has very
| favorable foreign transaction laws.
|
| A significant amount of British-domiciled capital is
| foreign originated but only parked in the UK because of
| strong contracts law and linkages to just about every major
| investable market.
|
| This is both a boon and a curse, because why would you
| finance a $1M seed in London when you can deploy that same
| capital for a similar sized seed in Tel Aviv or New York
| and get a better return on investment by exiting or funding
| additional rounds.
|
| There is no innovation ecosystem in the UK, and it's too
| late to build one because other markets are just too
| competitive at this point - India, Israel, Czechia, Poland,
| etc provide very competitive tax incentives and subsidizes
| for foreign R&D investment and have done so for decades
| now.
|
| You might assume the answer is to add additional
| roadblocks, but that makes British financial services
| extremely non-competitive, and puts 2.5 million jobs (and
| voters) at risk.
|
| This is the exact same trap that Singapore and Hong Kong
| has fallen into, and both are trying to minimize it by
| becoming the goto financial hubs for target startup scenes
| (China for Hong Kong, India+ASEAN for Singapore) and
| investing in foreign startups (eg. Temasek Holdings in
| Singapore).
|
| The UK needs to do something similar - it needs to give up
| ambitions of being a peer of the "big boys" in innovation,
| and concentrate on becoming competitive in international
| dealmaking, maybe by making a public-private international
| VC fund like Temasek.
|
| Baillie Gifford (HQed in Edinburgh) and Index Ventures
| (HQed in London) are competitive in Tech Growth Equity
| globally (and especially in the Bay). There's no reason
| there can't be more Baillie Giffords or Index Ventures in
| the UK.
| torginus wrote:
| Well my East European perspective is this:
|
| When management decides to launch a new product, they bring in
| an UK-based 'analyst' who usually does a piss poor job of
| gathering requirements/docs/building up the project, so you
| have to step in and 'shadow manage' the whole thing, from
| producing architecture diagrams to talking to customers,
| writing specs, writing Jira tickets, besides actually doing the
| job you're supposed to do.
|
| The only thing they do do is act as an interface layer to upper
| management and giving each other reacharounds.
|
| But when it comes to handshakes and glitzy product announcement
| galas, they're all over the place and you are not even invited,
| the best you can get is having your (usually misspelled) name
| show up in context of 5 other high-ranking ne-er-do-wells, who
| they want to suck up to.
|
| Then they leave for a higher paying position to another UK
| company, and post on linkedin about leadership and inspiring
| teams.
|
| You are forgotten, but not for long, since people actually
| start using the stuff you wrote and support tickets start
| rolling in.
|
| Poor poor UK people having to sit in all those executive
| positions while contributing nothing.
|
| It also doesn't help that for most West Europeans, places like
| Romania is synonimous with the Shadow Realm.
|
| The funny thing is, having them spit in your face like this is
| actually a privileged position, since that means you're usually
| out of the trenches, where you only see the Jira tickets that
| you need to solve.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| > For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the
| UK.
|
| The UK has the 3rd largest tech VC sector worldwide - only
| after the US and China
|
| > in action most of their Engineering and Product teams are
| located in Eastern Europe or India
|
| London also has the largest software sector outside the US,
| after the Bay Area, Boston, and NYC.
| nsteel wrote:
| I think the large software sector here might actually be part
| of the problem. If you're smart, want to stay in London
| (expensive), but don't want to work in finance then it's
| going to be software. There's no interesting hardware jobs
| here (FPGA trading platforms do not qualify). These jobs do
| exist in other European countries so I think the parent was
| correct.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > The UK has the 3rd largest tech VC sector worldwide - only
| after the US and China
|
| And as I mentioned before, most startups tend to only be UK
| domiciled for funding reasons, but majority of their
| operations and leadership are located outside the UK.
|
| Foreign (read: American) VCs tend to conduct transactions in
| a handful of very well regulated markets, so a Chinese,
| Indian, or Romanian startup will often have to make a
| domiciled corporation in a financial hub like the UK or
| Singapore in order to raise.
|
| For example, Revolut has around 16,000 employees, but barely
| 2k in the UK and around 7k in Poland+India - and most of
| these roles are engineering AND strategy roles.
|
| > London also has the largest software sector outside the US,
| after the Bay Area, Boston, and NYC
|
| Source? Boston is nowhere near a top software hub - both
| Seattle and Austin are much larger in the software space than
| Boston.
|
| And I would be shocked if the net amount of SWE roles in
| London is higher than Tel Aviv or Bangalore.
| mapt wrote:
| 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 is and isn't a
| priority and haven't fixed the problem in question; When these
| students grow up and go on to work for those same people, we are
| shocked, shocked that it isn't to do more unprofitable school
| engineering projects.
|
| Instead: Finance industry stuff. What we really need, and by we I
| mean the people in charge who are obsessively keeping score of
| imaginary numbers in an account.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 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 did, but
| they had more and larger exceptions than now, to the point the
| effective rate never exceeded 45% anyway. This is also why the
| massive cut was politically palatable - it was cutting the
| rates to closer reflect the reality. At no point did the US
| ever have anything close, or even half close, to 90% effective
| rates.)
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Combined with the fact that those solutions just listed are
| short term and a surefire way to ensure nobody gets a
| pension.
|
| You also can't act against monopolies when China happily
| won't act against their own state owned monopolies, which
| are in an arm's race trying to surpass us. Falling behind
| to China is a great way to cause a tech investment
| collapse.
| corimaith wrote:
| 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.
| mapt wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| If we're talking about the UK, then London is already as
| dense as it can reasonably be. It went all-in on public
| transit almost 200 years ago.
|
| And of course, it made it all worse. Now you HAVE to work
| in London if you want a high salary.
|
| The only real way to fix the housing is to promote remote
| work and decentralized companies.
| corimaith wrote:
| Yeah.. no. Have you been to Asian cities? It's rows and
| rows of 100 floor apartments, it's urban centers
| consolidated into high density malls and commercial
| centers. We're talking about dozens of high rises where
| every floor contains restaurants and shops. I daresay
| there is more to eat and shop in the 1km Radius around
| Ikebukuro Station then entire borough of Westminster!
|
| Nobody wants to work in some backwater in the middle of
| nowhere either, especially if you are young and want to
| meet new people.
| mapt wrote:
| "Reasonably" is doing a lot of work there. It sounds an
| awful like you're defining the boundaries of
| reasonability at "Exactly what is built right now and
| using the exact borders of current municipalities", which
| is a tautology. Even if we limit ourselves to the current
| municipal boundaries of London, population density is
| ~6000 people per square kilometer. Kowloon Walled City
| survived with 3,000,000 people per square kilometer,
| Manhattan has 75,000, Dhaka 23,000, San Francisco 19,000.
|
| Their system is a much better one than we tend to have in
| the US, but "All-in on public transit" looks more like
| Trantor than London. A majority of the TFL system was
| constructed more than a century ago.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The government is the biggest rentier and monopolist of
| all. It's the elephant in the room.
| greenavocado wrote:
| In the case of the UK the solution in effect since the mid
| 2010s is increase taxation, replace the natives completely
| with someone more desperate, and suppress wages.
| mapt wrote:
| The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most
| foul.
|
| Your question is coupling a matter of our policy preference,
| our tactical planning to arrive at that preference, and a
| hypothetical predictive model. If like some supervillain I
| had come up with a satisfactory answer to all those questions
| I would have enacted it twenty minutes ago.
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| > The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder
| most foul.
|
| I'm ignorant on this topic; do you mind elaborating?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > 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
| mapt wrote:
| The 'Laffer Curve' concept is treated at first glance as
| some kind of complex model created by experts that Explains
| A Lot, at second glance as something a bunch of drunk
| political operatives scrawled on a cocktail napkin in 1974
| that doesn't necessarily have any relation to reality, and
| at third glance as a tautology whose dishonest core is the
| labelling of the x axis.
|
| Academic attempts to identify the optimal maxima of tax
| receipts, which conservative political operatives will
| always implicitly assume is "half whatever the current rate
| is", suggest something on the order of 60%.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > In economics, the Laffer curve illustrates a
| theoretical relationship between rates of taxation and
| the resulting levels of the government's tax revenue.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
|
| I would dispute the premise of the Laffer Curve: that the
| goal of setting a (high) taxation rate is to maximise
| government revenue. I think that reducing wealth
| inequality is a good in and of itself. And _especially_
| under a capitalist system that depends on it 's citizens
| having vaguely equal purchasing power to function
| efficiently.
|
| Assuming that our starting point is our current situation
| where wealth is very unequally distributed, that is. I
| would agree with the suggestion that things being too
| equal, and there being no reward for hard work and/or
| ingenuity also leads to problems.
|
| Optimisation that tries to balance that trade-off would
| interest me greatly.
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| Point 1 tends to fall apart when the government can't
| control its own coffers and after a few decades of
| mismanagement decides that privatisation is the main way to
| reduce their debt burden. So I think this one ebbs and
| flows over time generally.
|
| See South Africa for an example. Power production is slowly
| opening up to market forces as an alleviation to the
| extreme mismanagement and corruption of the last 2-3
| decades.
|
| On the other hand, there are also some alternatives, like
| "devolution" of state services to the provincial or
| municipal level. The local Cape Town government is busy
| trying to gain control over the city's train lines from the
| government org that owns them, to provide better service.
| nicoburns wrote:
| There's no substitute for competence and integrity, but
| private entities are just as capable of being inept and
| corrupt. Look at companies like Enron or Comcast.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and
| all)?
|
| I think this wouldn't be bad.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Government spending is 45% of GDP.
| jltsiren wrote:
| And private spending is something like 200%. GDP is a measure
| of added value, not total spending/revenue.
| James_K wrote:
| Putting more layers of privatisation between the government
| and the service it provides will decrease the quality and
| increase the costs. Sewage is now in our rivers and we pay
| more for water. Trains are obscenely expensive compared to
| Europe. Energy is expensive. All of these things cost
| boatloads because we sold them off and drag the rest of the
| economy down with them. We wouldn't be spending so much today
| if we'd invested more in the past.
| marbro wrote:
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| That's a very marxist view on wages, actually...
|
| Capitalism seeks rent from having capital, so the obvious
| optimization is to squash the ability to demand higher wages
| (original Marxist argument about "ownership of means of
| production" was how big capitalist controlled access to
| machines you needed to the work, thus being able to depress
| the wages)
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I don't think you understand socialism and capitalism.
|
| Suppression of wages is very much a feature of capitalism
| (the company's mission is to acquire capital for
| shareholders; technology that lowers costs by reducing the
| need for labor, or reducing the payment for labor, is a
| goal); whereas socialism holds that those who do the work
| should benefit from their labor (workers should own the means
| of production).
|
| A "socialist" company in the U.S. would be an employee-owned
| company or a co-op (like REI) though they would never call
| themselves that because Americans don't understand what
| socialism is (and have been taught that it's "evil").
| deletedie wrote:
| You've essentially summarised a key Marxist critique of
| Capitalism.
|
| What you've described - the need for people to have autonomy,
| value, and ownership over the work they do - is the core
| tenet of Marxism.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Capitalism is not the problem so much as policies that promote
| trade imbalances and outsourcing of jobs. If there are people
| somewhere willing to work for much less than you are, there are
| far fewer opportunities to do anything. It is not normal to get
| a ton of cheap imports forever, and a reversion to the mean is
| not a sign that capitalism is failing.
|
| Unless the whole world was to demand the same standard of
| living (which is impossible), or global trade is limited, there
| will be nations where the wealth of the average person is on
| the decline.
| HPsquared wrote:
| What we are seeing is a great levelling out of living
| standards across the world. Poor countries are unquestionably
| getting richer, while rich countries are stagnating and
| decaying. It's a period of readjustment, but self-limiting.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| There's no need for the West to stagnate like this. We
| could let the rest of the world develop itself while we
| continue to be self-sufficient. That requires tough
| decisions like choosing to limit imports of foreign goods
| and labor. But that is unfortunately not how it's going.
| Some people have been selling out their own countries for
| decades to make a quick buck, or perhaps to defend some
| economic theory that the plan with the highest cost
| efficiency is always the best.
| refrigerator wrote:
| This is spot on. All the smart and ambitious people I know who
| studied (non-software) Engineering at university in the UK have
| ended up going into software engineering via self-teaching or
| finance/consulting because the only hardware engineering career
| paths seem to be working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere
| with terrible pay, or alternatively working at Jaguar Land Rover
| in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay
| GamerAlias wrote:
| Preach. My friend is a gifted passionate Aerospace engineer
| (top in his specific stream at Cambridge) and basically is
| withering away working for the above 2 firms. The location is
| grim being far from others and generally far from other young
| exciting people. Additionally in his org, there just isn't a
| sense of excitement/ urgency which leaves him with little to
| do. Prioritising career for a career that's not there
|
| Whilst others working in software (myself included) can have a
| far greater quality of life and salary working in London.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Wait what. Quality of life in rural UK is worse than rat race
| of London?
| wbl wrote:
| When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.
| rgmerk wrote:
| Or maybe he's just tired of a specific kind of life which
| might be fun in your early twenties but is less appealing
| when you've got kids and can't enjoy the nightlife and
| culture anyway.
| sebmellen wrote:
| How do you get kids if you can't meet someone your age to
| partner up with?
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Plenty of culture isn't gigs and nightclubs - London
| isn't terribly good, for its population size and economy,
| for those anyway.
|
| Think museums, parks, galleries, theatre, exhibitions.
|
| Granted it's not the only city with those, the problem
| the UK has is that its small, desirable cities are unable
| to grow or reinvent themselves. Cambridge and Bristol
| should be ideal for hardware startups, but the cost of
| both housing and working space is insane for small,
| provincial cities, partly because NIMBYism and partly
| because building infrastructure is absurdly expensive
| when you're constantly having to work around 200 year old
| buildings and 800yo city plans.
| tomcam wrote:
| https://www.samueljohnson.com/tiredlon.html
| dagw wrote:
| _you've got kids and can't enjoy the nightlife and
| culture anyway_
|
| Having kids while living in the centre of a large city is
| great, as there is so much culture that is aimed at
| parents and children. When my kid was small we went to
| museums and concerts and events all the time that were
| aimed at kids. There were also several different parks,
| playgrounds, pools and similar activities to choose from
| all within easy access. Plus once the kids get slightly
| older they can use public transport to get around and you
| don't have to drive them anywhere near as much as if you
| live in the suburbs.
| baud147258 wrote:
| > Having kids while living in the center of a large city
| is great
|
| If you can afford a flat that's big enough for you and
| the kids
| walthamstow wrote:
| We drop the kids off at my parents and go for dinner at
| any one of hundreds of top quality restaurants. Can't do
| that in Kettering.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Or tired of 63% income tax rates in the middle of the
| income bands
| walthamstow wrote:
| Does London have a different tax policy to where Jaguar
| Land Rover is based?
| GasVeteran wrote:
| You have to earn (much) more to have the same standard of
| living as outside of it. Therefore you pay more income
| tax and the cost of living is higher anyway.
| twic wrote:
| Skill issue, just earn a bit more then you're back to
| 47%.
| lmm wrote:
| Absolutely. No public transport, almost no culture, and
| housing anywhere nice is even less available than in
| London. For a young person working at one of these firms,
| where can you live? Where could you meet someone to date?
| What can you even do at the weekend?
| timthorn wrote:
| JLR is based in the metro area of Britain's second city.
| It's not exactly the middle of nowhere. Rolls Royce is in
| Derby, on the edge of the Peak District with much to
| offer. Much cheaper housing with more space available.
| And unlike in London, driving a car isn't hounded by
| terminal congestion.
| porker wrote:
| JLR Gaydon is not in the metro area of Birmingham. It's
| in nice countryside and near a motorway which helps, but
| it's a fair commute out of Birmingham at rush hour to
| there. The nice surrounding towns/villages are expensive,
| and even the shitty ones aren't cheap (hello Banbury) as
| they're on the edge of commuter distance to London.
|
| Derby I haven't lived in but know people who have. It's
| an old manufacturing town and hasn't much to offer
| graduates. Or anyone really. The Peak District is great,
| and if you can live out that way and commute in then do
| it. But again, you won't have similar people for local
| friends.
| UK-AL wrote:
| There's a huge JLR presence in Solihull right next to
| Birmingham.
|
| It's also one of the wealthiest areas outside of London.
| But house prices in the really nice parts of Solihull are
| also high.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Can confirm, I grew up in Derby and it's an absolute
| desolate wasteland for anyone with any ambition,
| intelligence or a need for a modicum of culture.
|
| Saying the peak district is good for young people is like
| saying there's a great lake near Detroit, it's not
| exactly what they're after.
| timthorn wrote:
| Isn't that what everyone says about their hometown? :)
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| > No public transport
|
| When I live in London I didn't drive, which was kinda
| nice but also meant I've only been out of city like once
| a year.
|
| Sitting in traffic sucks of course, but driving rurally
| opens so much.
|
| As for weekends - driving and hiking I guess?
| lmm wrote:
| Sure, but at that point you're having to buy a car (which
| is much harder as a young person - car prices have gone
| up, insurance has gone up faster, the driving test is
| harder than it was and lessons cost more...), you'll need
| somewhere to park it which adds to your housing costs,
| you still can't go drinking, and in general you're cut
| off from a lot of what young people are doing.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| No Uber/Lyft in the UK?
| Symbiote wrote:
| It would be very expensive to take a taxi (of any sort)
| out of London to a scenic place, but it's easy to take a
| train to plenty of them, or hire a car for the day
| through an app.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Even tiny UK towns have excellent walkable mainstreets
| and are small enough to walk from field to field on the
| other end in no time. It is a far cry from the american
| obligatory car experience where it might be a 2 hour walk
| to your nearest grocery store even in a city suburb.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Wherever you live in London, there are commuter (and
| intercity) railway lines that can take you out of it.
|
| For example I lived not far from Putney. Putney to
| Windsor & Eton Riverside takes 39 minutes and costs
| PS6.90.
|
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/51.5330/-0.1146&lay
| ers...
| GasVeteran wrote:
| There is a culture there. I am not sure what people mean
| when they say there isn't a culture outside of the
| London. If you mean things like events, art exhibs etc.
| We have those here. If you mean bars, pubs and
| restaurants we have those here to.
|
| Is it as glitzy as London. No. But saying there is "no
| culture" is just absolutely asinine.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| UK people are so god damned spoiled. Sometimes I will
| pull up street view imagery of a random town in scotland
| or wherever in the UK that I see locals from there on
| reddit make a seething comment about. Then I will look at
| the town center and its basically greenwich village:
| walkable, pubs and shops all over the place, bus network
| goes everywhere, actual regional rail potentially,
| everything the american urbanist dreams about. You know
| where you actually meet people on a date in 2025? On an
| app, which they have users on all over the UK.
| walthamstow wrote:
| The UK is two countries, you can either live in/around the
| prosperous one with high cultural capital, good quality
| public services inc transport, or you can live in the other
| one.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Meh. Having lived in both I much prefer the latter.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "Quality of Life". I literally
| won't go to see friends because that would mean travelling
| to London. I hate the place. It is expensive, hostile,
| dirty and everyone is rude.
|
| I live on the outskirts of the peak district. I can
| walk/cycle less than 30 minutes out of town and be walking
| along the old canals, through old villages and get amazing
| views of the countryside.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| To be fair I live in Zone 2 and I can be on old canals
| and villages (albeit now subsumed into London) in ~20
| minutes walking. I grew up in rural Wales, and as nice an
| upbringing it was, there's a reason I have a single
| family member left, who's trying to move away!
| Symbiote wrote:
| People in London probably live _nearer_ to a canal or
| river, on average, than you do. They 're all maintained
| nicely for walking.
|
| 30-60 minutes would take many Londoners to the
| countryside, the South Downs, Chilterns, etc.
| twic wrote:
| > everyone is rude
|
| I take it you've never been to Yorkshire then?
| GasVeteran wrote:
| It is the combination of what I described is the real
| issue. If it was just "people are a bit rude" I
| personally wouldn't be that worried about it.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| What makes you think QoL in London is bad? I grew up in a
| rural farming town and much prefer London. Housing is
| expensive but that's about it.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Living there for 5 years. Unless you are in finance and
| live in city, it's a shitshow.
| twic wrote:
| I lived there as a graduate student and then as a non-
| finance software engineer for about fifteen years. I
| liked it, as did dozens of my friends. It's absolute
| fantasy to call it a shitshow.
| ctz wrote:
| My impression is that top aerospace people do not now work in
| aerospace, but in Motorsport.
| zipy124 wrote:
| motorsport is similarly low salary, at least specifically
| F1. It is like game-dev in software in that there are far
| more people who want to do it than the number of jobs
| available so they can afford to pay you in the cool
| experience of working on F1 rather than in cash terms.
| nextos wrote:
| To some extent, this also applies to software. Except for
| DeepMind and a few other select places like Altos Labs, getting
| past PS100k is _hard_ , especially outside London. Unless you
| go into finance, of course. But then, you have to stick to
| London. Finance is like a black hole that sucks a big chunk of
| the mathematical, CS and statistical UK talent. They have very
| proactive recruiters trying to e.g. connect with Oxbridge
| students when they are approaching graduation.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| It's shocking. Software engineers in the UK are treated like
| engineers in the US were in the 1960s. Low respect, low pay,
| while city boys strutting around in shiny suits snapping
| their fingers to get anything they want.
| torginus wrote:
| That's a weird statement considering I'd have guess the
| greatest amount of respect and adoration (not necessarily
| money) (non-software) engineers have gotten in the US
| would've been during the Space Race and Cold War years.
|
| It was real respect for the trade as well, not some
| secondhand respect that people who make a lot of money and
| wield a lot of social influence get.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It was respected in the sense that there was a need then
| in american manufacturing for engineering. But the
| compensation was nowhere near other professional class
| jobs. So really the respect seemed a bit false: to get
| people into the door pigeonholed so they can't leave for
| higher compensation. Then when manufacturing was
| outsourced after the 1960s, many of these jobs
| disappeared. Now people in Guanzhou are designing the
| factories and process controls.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| This isn't my experience at all, and I've been in London
| tech for 8 years now. I'm not entirely sure what "low
| respect" means here, but anywhere I've worked the company
| is pretty wary of knarking of their developers because we
| can just up and find another job basically immediately. We
| get paid a fair bit too - not sure compared to finance, but
| not hard to hit the 95th percentile or so.
| retrac98 wrote:
| I know plenty of engineers (web application developers)
| making over PS100-PS150k outside of London, usually in fairly
| low-stress remote jobs.
|
| The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn't
| say it was massively hard for them to get where they are.
| They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are
| otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees,
| but maybe that's rare!
| GasVeteran wrote:
| They are almost always contractors. If you work permanent
| it tops out max at about PS75,000-90,000.
| retrac98 wrote:
| They're not, they're full time employees.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| Then they are very few and far between. Generally the
| absolute limit is PS90k. I've never seen any role for
| more than 90K unless it was a company in London and those
| are typically hybrid and not remote.
| jonatron wrote:
| The jobs above 90k generally don't specify a salary on
| the job posting. Just two examples: Goldman Sachs and
| Meta.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| So like I said originally these jobs are few and far
| between. The point is that in the UK the salaries are
| much lower than those in the US and this is across all
| experience ranges.
| zipy124 wrote:
| I only have the figures for end of 2018[1], but meta
| employed around 2300 people in the UK, if we assume the
| same distribution of jobs as elsewhere in the world about
| half will be engineers, so 1150 engineers. There aren't
| that many of these jobs. At goldman its a lot higher,
| aboutn 10,000[2] globally, but they only have around
| 3,300 employees in the Uk so if its the same ratio as
| global (25% tech), then that means around 800 developers.
| Again you'll note this is a very small number compared to
| the number of top graduates a year, with class sizes of
| 100-200 per university.
|
| [1]: https://engineering.fb.com/2018/11/16/production-
| engineering...
|
| [2]: https://brainstation.io/magazine/goldman-sachs-
| digital-team-...
|
| [3]: https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/goldman-sachs-
| internationa...
| esskay wrote:
| They're in the extreme minority. Most software dev roles
| in the UK top out between PS40 and PS50k, PS60k if you're
| lucky.
| UK-AL wrote:
| I am not a top software engineer( (otherwise I'd be
| working fang tbh) and I earn 85k up north. Hybrid role
| that's local as well.
|
| I know people that earn a lot more than me.
|
| It's just the recruiters are a joke and advertise silly
| salaries from local companies that are out touch. You
| have to know what companies are serious or not, and just
| apply direct or via recommendations.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| I used to work at bet365. They don't even offer that to
| the permies (65K for Senior), if you stay there a bunch
| of years maybe 85k is doable.
|
| 365 are probably the best playing place outside of
| Manchester in the NW. So I find this rather hard to
| believe.
| UK-AL wrote:
| Took me about 5 seconds
|
| https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cgi
| ?SI...
|
| https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cgi
| ?SI...
|
| Those are government, so probably have even better
| pensions than private sector.
|
| And there was job advertised for lead software engineer
| by computer futures(probably an agency) for 80k
|
| I didn't even look deep. I know there are even better
| jobs.
|
| There are jobs that pay more than 65k. Just have to know
| where to look.
|
| If you're working for undercapitalized local private
| companies, then yeah not going pay very much.
|
| I'd also recommend looking at remote jobs. My really
| smart friends who can beat the competition got 100k+ jobs
| working remote that are officially based in London but
| they work up north. Then come down for meeting once or
| twice every few months.
|
| A lot of the fintechs allow for fully remote and pay
| well.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| We are comparing salaries of Software Engineers between
| the US and the UK. A Senior Developer position won't pay
| more than 90K in the UK outside of London. In the US I
| see well over that for a Senior Developer position.
|
| Even in your examples (which are higher position than
| what was being discussed) they didn't top out past 90K
| (just like I said). Whereas in the US you can earn much
| more quite easily.
| UK-AL wrote:
| You've moved the goal posts. You said 60k if your lucky.
|
| I just found multiple jobs that pay more than that
| easily.
|
| 85k job up north is a comparable lifestyle than 100k+ job
| in London.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| > You've moved the goal posts. You said 60k if your
| lucky.
|
| No I didn't. I suggest you re-read the thread. I said
| 75K-90K max.
|
| > I just found multiple jobs that pay more than that
| easily.
|
| There are always certainly outliers. However most of
| those places usually have a bunch of iffy things going on
| e.g. you have to live at your workstation/laptop, or they
| are in the middle of no where. Enforced pair programming
| (fuck that btw), or have a stupid interview process (no I
| won't go through the humiliation rituals anymore).
|
| However the vast majority of positions are paying max
| 65-70K for a Senior Dev.
|
| I am glad that _you_ managed to find something. But the
| rest of us haven 't been as lucky.
| UK-AL wrote:
| "Most software dev roles in the UK top out between PS40
| and PS50k, PS60k if you're lucky" was the comment I was
| replying to.
|
| But I agree we don't compete with the USA. Even London
| struggles with that.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| Yeh I figured that. No worries.
| zipy124 wrote:
| That is indeed very rare. A simple sanity check you can
| look at how many people earn about 100k in the UK, we know
| the figure for above 125k is 500,000 [1]. We can subtract
| the number of other jobs that we know for sure pay above
| this for example lawyers at magic circle firms which start
| on >150k for newly qualified lawyers, consultants in the
| NHS, directors of large corportaions, and we end up with a
| very small amount of people in other industries that earn
| these figures. Even before that we know the median is about
| PS50k, and I can tell you from experience you can hire very
| very good software people on those wages, even in London.
|
| From personal experience, I also know of software guys
| making that, but I also know far far more people earning
| below that, and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL
| grads....
|
| [1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-
| incomes-st...
| Macha wrote:
| > and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads.
|
| There are many bad things we can say about software
| hiring, but one of the good things is that (outside the
| US at least), it's much more concerned with what you can
| do than the name recognition of the institution where you
| studied.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The US isn't that focused on elite schools. It's only in
| the VC/startup bubble where bias exists. Most tech grads
| don't go to those schools.
| twic wrote:
| Just want to echo the other replies and say i think this is
| rare. It happens, but it's rare. I have >15 years
| experience, and currently work in finance making plenty. A
| while ago, i spoke to a recruiter about opportunities
| outside finance; everything he had topped out at ~90k for
| engineers, a bit higher for team leads.
|
| But then, i also have friends working at a few non-finance
| companies on 100-150k. Small places, willing to pay for
| quality. Seems to be unusual though!
| syntaxing wrote:
| Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I'm a SWE. Even
| here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don't get me
| wrong, you can make enough to be "comfortable". But
| anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid
| handsomely to be in tech and are "Product Designers". Even
| then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly
| software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute
| their product. Admittedly, it's really hard to do hardware in
| this economy when one country has 60% of the global
| manufacturing output and can copy your design, make it cheaper,
| and make it better. Ironically, the biggest dividing line that
| makes a hardware product better is good software.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| That's what happens when there is not much manufacturing in
| the country anymore, and everyone is encouraged to go to
| college. I don't know why the software industry hasn't
| suffered more along the same lines. Maybe the profit margins
| for software are higher.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
|
| This is easily confirmed by checking public financials of
| publicly listed companies. The profit margins are much
| higher, and the liability is much lower. The only exception
| is for those hardware manufacturers at the cutting edge
| whose products cannot be commodified, such as TSMC and ASML
| and the ilk.
| Brybry wrote:
| The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the
| world by a large margin [1][2]
|
| Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been
| decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is
| flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a _lot_ of
| stuff.
|
| [1] https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-
| office/manufacturi...
|
| [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/manufactu...
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| I don't think we make a lot of stuff but we do make some
| of the most expensive stuff. So a lot of stats really
| don't reflect how unbalanced our trade is in real terms.
| marsRoverDev wrote:
| I've been told that acceptable software margins are around
| 75%. Hardware focused yields closer to 20%-40%. Hence why
| there is such a strong push towards software-only.
| nine_k wrote:
| Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million
| copies of a software product has a trivial cost. There are
| no assembly line workers in software (and the very word
| "assembly" means a different thing). A software engineer
| very often brings in revenue many times their salary.
|
| Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual
| manufacturing. Production of each physical item costs you.
| Production of every physical item has a chance to go wrong.
| Production of each physical item requires a number of
| humans (often a large number) to do repetitive, high-
| precision, high-skill work, as fast as practical. You can
| augment or replace some of them with robots but it also
| costs you, and you can't replace all the humans with
| satisfactory results.
|
| So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major
| role, while with software it does much less. To produce
| physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-
| off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their
| financial and social standing. A "developing country", with
| huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better
| city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally
| you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the
| country of production.
|
| Of course there can be situations where the workers are
| highly paid, and produce very valuable things through their
| skilled work. Ford in 1950s famously paid the assembly line
| workers very well, so that they could buy the cars they
| produce, and valued their employment. But this does not
| always occur; people doing work that does not add a lot of
| resale value also want to live well, especially if the
| society does not want a flood of immigrants who are willing
| to work for much less. Check out how much the work of a
| plumber costs in Switzerland. So only high-precision, high-
| margin, low-volume manufacturing remains in Switzerland,
| such as precision optics, precision industrial and medical
| equipment, or premium mechanical Swiss watches. The US is
| in a somehow similar situation.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a
| million copies of a software product has a trivial cost.
|
| > Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual
| manufacturing
|
| Totally. And if you think deployment errors are bad, wait
| until you see how many production errors exist and how
| many items out of your line come out working and within
| spec
| nine_k wrote:
| Indeed. You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part
| or a PCB.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| You can and people do.
|
| It's just a lot more expensive and labor intensive to
| apply.
| moregrist wrote:
| For a PCB it's called a rework, and it's very common for
| first spins of boards to have to do one.
|
| Also common is to patch around issues, when possible, in
| firmware. This is often lower cost/effort, but can't fix
| everything.
|
| There are similar kinds of fixes for purely mechanical
| parts. Depending on the part and problem, mechanical can
| be easier than a PCB rework (eg: modify a part in CAD and
| 3D print or get your local machine shop to do a run).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You just release a new version. How many xbox 360s did
| they actually release? I think its close to a dozen
| iterations.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part
|
| In NATO, this is frequent and normal. Many, many
| "recalls" are issued by military manfacturers, then local
| support staff spend X hours to replace the defective
| part. It is not _so_ different from automobile recalls.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Correct. Also the economics of a mechanical patch are
| favourable for something in the M$ range with a fix
| costing in the 10k$ to 100k$ range
| torginus wrote:
| Yeah I remember one of my friends working for a German
| auto company during the 2008 financial crisis and having
| insane stuff routinely happen like an auto manufacturer
| having to buy truckloads of sensors from a subcontractor
| that had nowhere to go as car manufacturing lines were
| stopped.
|
| Failing to do so would have meant these manufacturers
| would go under, (along with their own subcontractors) and
| once demand shot back up, cars would be literally
| impossible to manufacture as key suppliers went out of
| business.
| foobazgt wrote:
| This all resonates very strongly with me. We have tons of
| automation - the proverbial "economies of scale", but we
| haven't managed to solve the last mile.
|
| Auto assembly seems like a poster child. There's wild
| automation going on, but the typical plant still requires
| thousands of employees doing things by hand. Musk tried
| to automate a lot more of this away with newer/better
| robotics, but failed. (Tesla has still achieved a lot
| here, but it's been more towards creating designs that
| are more amenable to the current state of robotics).
|
| IMO, this problem should be solvable _now_. I.E. we don
| 't need "new physics" to reach another step-function in
| automation. We need more investment. We're still largely
| in the mindset of "special-purpose" automation.
| imtringued wrote:
| I disagree very slightly. Mostly with this part:
|
| >So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a
| major role, while with software it does much less. To
| produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are
| not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of
| their financial and social standing. A "developing
| country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural
| life for a better city life and factory work, is best in
| this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer
| folks, maybe outside the country of production.
|
| You don't need a lot of people who are not well-off. You
| can automate the entire process. The problem with
| automation and labor saving technology is that it is
| capital intensive. The higher the capital investment per
| job (higher capital intensity), the bigger the chunk of
| money that flows to capital rather than labor.
|
| This means that the cost of the workforce in a software
| company plays a bigger role than in a hardware company,
| where financing costs to pay for labor saving technology
| play a bigger role.
|
| There are mining companies in Africa, who have nothing
| but an army of people equipped with shovels digging a
| small scale open pit mine. There is no way the labor cost
| here is the biggest constraint. An excavator and wheel
| loader could accomplish more with less people, but it
| would mean getting a USD loan to import foreign equipment
| and then selling for export to pay the foreign debts,
| rather than local production.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Interesting that you say that, my understand of the data is
| that manufacturing output has never been higher - ignoring
| lingering Covid shocks -
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMANSICS
|
| But because productivity is higher
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0100CUSM070NNBR - which
| doesn't mean the workers are working harder: a man with a
| shovel can work as hard as he likes, but he's never going
| to compete with the business owner who invested in
| productivity and gave his worker an excavator.
|
| Therefore employment in the sector is down due to increased
| productivity, not decreased output.
|
| But increased productivity is a radically different thing
| from decreased output. A claim that manufacturing should
| employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That's
| a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours
| in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| Nice charts, but M0100CUSM070NNBR is from 1948 to 1963 :)
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Eh, well, this is a bit embarrassing! On mobile, I can't
| local a chart that covers the post war until now, best I
| can find is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
| which shows late 80s onwards BUT shows a drop at 2008
| onwards which goes against my argument (notwithstanding
| the big gap between both charts)
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| The nominal value of highly automated processes has never
| been higher. Meanwhile, ordinary people are not able to
| find as many good jobs as they once did. Wages in almost
| every industry are stagnant at best, at least when
| adjusted for inflation.
|
| >A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the
| face of increased productivity, That's a claim that
| manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the
| economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
|
| It is a complex claim but I'll make it really simple. We
| import most of the things we rely on. Everything from
| plastic toys to car parts to critical medicines are all
| imported. Letting yourself become totally dependent on
| other countries while our STEM grads are underemployed,
| and would-be manufacturing line workers are forced to do
| bullshit like driving for Uber, is no way to run a
| country. It is going to backfire one day unless there is
| a major reversal in the trend.
| bluGill wrote:
| Engineers are not ordinary jobs though and so the plite
| of the 'common man' is irrelavent.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| You can't have so many engineer jobs unless you have
| manufacturing, and if you did have manufacturing then
| there would be "common man" manufacturing jobs too. It's
| all connected. Every job market that is really critical
| for national security is depressed by this outsourcing
| and importation of cheaper goods and labor.
| bluGill wrote:
| because of automation there is often a lot more
| engineering jobs. one 'man' with a laser cutter can do
| the work of 50 with saws.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Sure, but when you don't even have the automated process
| within your country then there are approximately zero
| jobs created of any kind. The Chinese own their own
| factories and make much of their own manufacturing
| equipment, even exporting some of it. We should be
| producing more of our own stuff and creating meaningful
| jobs for our citizens. Working on an assembly line or as
| a maintenance worker in a factory might strike some
| people as menial, but the alternatives for people with
| the same level of education are mostly worse.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered
| more along the same lines
|
| Growth of the software industry isn't constrained by the
| cost of capital
| linhns wrote:
| In the end, it's a results business. Software just get higher
| pay earlier in the career so people will have to go for it.
| thijson wrote:
| It seems like the salaries quoted here haven't changed much in
| the past couple of decades. It's a shame. I know in the past
| there was a brain drain of talent from the UK to Canada due to
| the salary disparity. Here's an example:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Matthews
|
| And in general engineering jobs in Canada don't even pay as
| well as in the USA.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Been there, done that. I still frequently get sent Linkedin
| specs for companies where the hardware team lead is earning
| junior SWE money. _UK_ junior SWE money.
| coastermug wrote:
| I am a former Mech Eng who trod this path. Started at JLR,
| moved by self teaching into software. Engineering in the UK
| felt like it moved at a glacial pace that only made sense in
| the days of final salary pension schemes. Senior management
| really struggled to get their heads around why young people
| were so impatient, but we were not competing for the same
| rewards.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Coventry is hardly the middle of nowhere
| eastabrooka wrote:
| Yeah but then you have to be in Coventry
| twic wrote:
| Coventry is the capital of nowhere.
| youngtaff wrote:
| 60 mins from central London, 20 mins from central
| Birmingham
| zipy124 wrote:
| I even know a decent amount of people who did engineering at
| the top unis in the UK, only to go into audit at the big 4....
| esskay wrote:
| Hey now you could also go and work for Airbus...but it does
| mean having to go to Stevenage, as well as getting terrible
| pay.
| kitd wrote:
| Double whammy lol
| rjsw wrote:
| A friend works for Airbus Germany but at Warton, lives in a
| nice bit of Bolton.
| louthy wrote:
| > Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere
|
| 100 miles north of London. 1 hour on the train.
|
| > Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere
|
| 100 miles north of London. 1 hour on the train.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Bit of a distance to go for a pint in the evening.
|
| Isn't JLR in Solihull? That's two hours from London.
| louthy wrote:
| > Isn't JLR in Solihull? That's two hours from London.
|
| Not 100% sure, I'm from the middle of nowhere, sorry, Derby
| - where Rolls Royce is primarily based. I know there's
| peak-time, non-stop, trains between London/Derby that take
| about an hour. I know this because when I got my first job
| in London, I still hadn't found a place to stay, so I was
| commuting from Derby to London every day. And when I
| finally moved to London it took me almost as long to get to
| work even though I was living in the city!
|
| I just assumed with JLR being around Birmingham that travel
| to/from London would be about the same (because Birmingham
| is very close to Derby).
|
| EDIT: Just checked with trainline.com, there's several
| morning trains from London Euston to Birmingham (New
| Street) that take 1hr 17mins.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It's 89 minutes minimum from Derby to London. The fastest
| trains stop once, in Leicester.
|
| It's also PS135 off-peak return, so a night out in
| Birmingham might be more appealing.
| twic wrote:
| Pints are about a quarter the price too!
| rwmj wrote:
| Fully agree on all except this point:
|
| _> "UK's small market limits growth."_
|
| (followed by a list of companies founded before we put up trade
| barriers with our largest and closest single market)
| Discordian93 wrote:
| Not that I disagree that Brexit was an awful idea, but this was
| a problem even before Brexit. The reach of European companies
| just isn't what it used to be in the face of American and
| Chinese giants, and the EU is failing to be a truly single
| market where companies can grow to that scale.
| marbro wrote:
| Why don't all British hardware engineers move to the United
| States? What keeps them in Britain?
| david-gpu wrote:
| Family and friends.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Visas are not a pleasant thing to deal with.
| rwmj wrote:
| It's practically very difficult to move to the US. Getting a
| visa is hard even in the best case (with a helpful sponsor).
| And if you're in any way settled in the UK (partner, house,
| possessions, etc) then you've got multiple other problems to
| solve.
| jebarker wrote:
| > partner, house, possessions, etc) - then you've got
| multiple other problems to solve
|
| I get the intent, but this made me laugh
| corimaith wrote:
| Immigrating to USA is hard, probably one of the hardest because
| competition is so high. Tbh I'd recommend going someplace like
| Hong Kong whose government is starved for talent and pays
| similar when balancing for tax but similar social services.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Aside from non-economic reasons why one may wish to remain in
| one's home country, it is not easy to get a work visa for the
| US.
| Discordian93 wrote:
| It's not that easy to get a work permit in the US unless you're
| truly exceptional or marry an American.
| zdragnar wrote:
| My cousin (an American living and working in France) married
| a guy originally from Morocco. After eventually realizing
| that they might want to move to the US, they couldn't,
| because he couldn't get a visa.
|
| It would have taken quite a bit of time- my cousin would have
| had to move back to the US first, established residence, and
| gotten a job and some other requirements. Only then could
| they have qualified to apply, and the wait time for the
| application to be approved would be in the 9-14 months range.
|
| Once they applied, he could have moved here with her, but not
| gotten a job, I think, until the application for the visa was
| approved.
|
| Ultimately, they opted to go a different route.
| cyberax wrote:
| > It would have taken quite a bit of time- my cousin would
| have had to move back to the US first, established
| residence, and gotten a job and some other requirements.
|
| That's strange. A spouse green card doesn't require the
| residence and there is no wait time for the spouses of US
| Citizens. However, the processing time (especially via
| consular processing) is ridiculous, around 2 years now.
| blopp99 wrote:
| Don't they suffer from the same H1B restrictions?
| aylmao wrote:
| Some people don't focus primarily on the money. When that's the
| case, many things (love, pride, comfort, dreams, fears, etc)
| might keep someone from moving.
| wenc wrote:
| Ironically, other countries (former British colonies) have more
| access to US "specialty occupation" working visas than the UK
| does -- none of these are H1-B.
|
| Canadians and Mexicans have TN, Australians have E3, Singapore
| and Chile have H-1B1 (a subcategory of H1-B but with its own
| quotas).
|
| https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
|
| Most foreign engineers in the US (outside of H-1Bs) are
| actually Canadians.
|
| But there are no easy visas for the UK.
| akomtu wrote:
| It's not surprising in the light what the US celebrates on
| the 4th of July.
| wenc wrote:
| I have to correct myself slightly -- the Brit engineers I
| do meet in the US often come here on an L1A/L1B intra-
| company transfer from a British subsidiary. So that's one
| path.
|
| But yes, the visa path for UK citizen to accept a direct
| job offer is much more limited.
| jameshart wrote:
| It's not obvious that the US is necessarily a better place to
| 'do hardware' than the UK for them anyway.
|
| Plus if you're a UK-based person with a STEM background, the
| fintech industry will pay you a lot of money if you're willing
| to do their dirty work.
| gazchop wrote:
| Hardware engineer here, from a qualification perspective. I
| worked for a large American defence company and was invited to
| work in the US. I declined.
|
| The work culture, social and economic stability are terrible.
| Education is expensive or poor. Regulation and standards are
| poor. Not a good place to bring up a family.
| IneffablePigeon wrote:
| Not wanting to live in the United States, I would venture.
| nsteel wrote:
| I'm a British-American hardware engineer, I've lived in the UK
| nearly all my life. I've a home, and a family with kids here,
| I'm very settled. I've had plenty opportunity to move to the
| US, even before I had a family (with my current employer or
| under my own steam as a citizen) and I've no interest. I visit
| the US every few years and by the end of the trip I'm very much
| done with it all. Other than the much larger job market, I
| don't think there's a single US thing I want. Everything we
| have here is either better, or I'm sufficiently used to it.
| American is an unappealing place to live for many social
| reasons, I'd much rather move to France or Germany if I had to
| leave (and wasn't worried about the language barriers).
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I'm under the impression that tech people working in the US on
| visas are exploited. The end of year review / firing round
| which is so popular in the US means you can lose your job,
| which means you lose your visa, and you get something like 4
| weeks to land a replacement or have to move out of the country.
|
| At 20? Sure, who cares. If you've got a house, kids in a local
| school? The level of stress about being abruptly thrown out of
| the country seems untenable.
|
| I would expect that dynamic to suppress wages for immigrants
| (as you have fear to keep them in line instead). Healthcare
| seems to be similarly set up to frighten people into staying in
| their current employment.
|
| This perspective might not be accurate, but it's why this
| British engineer is unwilling to move to the US.
| wenc wrote:
| You're not wrong, but immigrants from other places are
| willing to take that risk with their families. This
| insecurity, for better or for worse, selects for a type of
| hungry immigrant who are also risk-takers, for whom the push
| of their own country overrides the risks.
|
| (Don't get me wrong -- I'm not condoning it -- US immigration
| is really wanting. I'm just remarking on its 2nd order
| effects).
|
| If you grew up with European norms, it might feel like
| exploitation. But for others seeking opportunity or fleeing
| poverty, it's a good trade off.
|
| I've been studying the history of early emigration lately.
| Seems to me that outside of those who didn't have the means
| to leave, the Brits who were more upper class stayed home
| because they were happy enough with the status quo. It's the
| more blue collar Brits who had less to lose that went over to
| the new world. And America was built by the latter group.
|
| (Canada OTOH was initially populated by the Brits who went
| over to the new world, but were happy with the status quo of
| being Brits i.e. the United Empire Loyalists. That's why
| Canadians today are just a little more risk-averse than
| Americans. Source: I'm Canadian).
| blibble wrote:
| you can do worse than creating credit reports
|
| they could be figuring out how to get people to click on ads
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Ads only work because there are useful products to buy. They're
| a sadly necessary indicator of a productive economy.
| idhegeu wrote:
| The fact that ads work doesn't mean that they're beneficial
| to the economy.
|
| I disagree with the premise that non-human entities are
| entitled to my attention.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I disagree with the premise that non-human entities are
| entitled to my attention.
|
| I tried that but the cop said it was still speeding even if
| I refused to acknowledge the speed limit sign.
| idhegeu wrote:
| Fair enough, I'll add some nuance. The government that I
| am a citizen of is a special case of a non-human entity,
| they do have entitlement to my property (which includes
| my attention).
|
| Traffic signs put up by my government are different than
| billboards put up by a company. The former is to protect
| me, the latter is to exploit me.
| poisonwomb wrote:
| 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 around of
| gumming up the system with endless bureaucracy.
|
| This trend is exhibited in many of the 'developed' economies but
| it is particularly strong in the UK, a country fooling itself
| with delusions of grandeur while, like Wilde's picture, its
| foundations gnarl and ossify and crumble, like dust into the
| dustpan of history. Next...
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| 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.
| hyperold wrote:
| The general attitude that manufacturing is only for people
| who suck at school is the driving force behind this decline.
| You are indeed left with mostly not-that-bright guys who
| don't even consider themselves skilled workers, and
| definitely don't go the extra mile to produce quality stuff.
| A guy half-assing his work earns just as much as the guy who
| puts his heart to it, that's the harsh reality of modern
| industrial work. If anything the guy who cares too much is
| ridiculed and considered weird.
|
| The exceptional craftsmen still exist but they mostly work
| for themselves, for obvious reasons. They really don't want
| to be "managed" and bossed around like cattle.
| jacknews wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with the tone of this, but imho it's
| definitely true that British culture views STEM people as just
| a bunch of nerds ('boffins') to be told what to do, and not
| really trusted, wheras the 'important' serious people are all
| 'media' types; politics, sales and marketing, people-people.
|
| Probably true to some extent the world over, but especially
| malignant in UK, as you say. It wouldn't be so bad if the UK's
| executives had a track record of excellence, but they are
| generally abysmal.
| justin66 wrote:
| Aren't hardware salaries outside California basically shit even
| in the US?
| trollbridge wrote:
| Not that bad. Engineers in "flyover country" where I am seem to
| easily exceed six figures.
|
| My town has, ironically, a formerly British-owned firm (since
| bought out Berkshire Hathaway) that not only has six-figure
| engineering jobs, but shop floor jobs that are union and
| starting pay is $25/hr for unskilled - electrician and so on
| start higher, $30/hr, and only go up from there. The UK
| operations are still going, but engineering has largely moved
| to the U.S. (which is a bit of a puzzle, since apparently
| engineers in the UK can be had much more cheaply).
| xxpor wrote:
| >Engineers in "flyover country" where I am seem to easily
| exceed six figures.
|
| So do brand new software grads
| justin66 wrote:
| New "software" grads? Easily? Today? In flyover country?
| I'm not seeing it. Salaries got a nice bump over the last
| few years, but hiring has slowed down and new grads are the
| first to suffer. (and some of what you see when people on
| forums like this one talk about what they're paid is
| bullshit, for some reason)
| rcbdev wrote:
| You seem to overestimate the engineering supply in Des
| Moines.
| justin66 wrote:
| Maybe? If you're in the area - would it be fair to
| characterize entry level software development jobs in Des
| Moines as "easily exceeding six figures?" I took a quick
| and lazy peek at a job site and I didn't feel like there
| were enough jobs to even make a judgment. (my filter
| brought up some Epic Systems jobs with no salary listings
| and some other stuff that is well below six figures)
| r_thambapillai wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Unfortunately the UK has not been...
|
| 20 years, or 112 years?
|
| Consider just _how_ far the UK 's place in the world fell
| between 1911 (George V ascended to the throne of _the_ global
| superpower; his Royal Navy was launching 2 to 4 new capital
| ships _per year_ ) and 1948 (3 years after "winning" WWII - and
| basics such as food, clothing, and gasoline were _still_
| strictly rationed).
| r_thambapillai wrote:
| Very true, although I suppose a significant fraction of the
| decline at that time might be a result of the end of the
| Empire, which given that there are simply no such successful
| Empires anywhere in the world anymore was almost certainly
| inevitable.
|
| By comparison, the performance of the UK in the last 20 years
| vs the US or the Nordics is a singular tragedy.
| roenxi wrote:
| > there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in
| the world anymore
|
| There is the US not-an-Empire [0] though, that'll probably
| count when the history books reflect on the present era.
| WWI/II can very easily be interpreted as a transition of
| power away from incompetent British leadership (indeed,
| European monarchies - the change pre- post- WWI is
| striking) towards more capable US-based leadership.
|
| It isn't clear UK public ever really grappled how
| insufficient their leadership theory is. Their acceptance
| of poor performers over the last 20+ years has been
| striking although it is mirrored by low standards in the
| US.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military
| _inst...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I think it was more about economics than competency.
|
| By the end of WW2 the UK was bankrupt and completely
| ruined economically, while the US had become the
| industrial powerhouse of the world thanks to abundant
| resources, manpower, and the fact that the war largely
| took place far from its borders (a few tiny islands
| notwithstanding). By the end of WW2 the US owned nearly
| all the gold that Europe previously owned which led to
| the US Dollar the worldwide reserve currency.
| roenxi wrote:
| If the UK wants to pretend that WW2 (or, indeed, WW1)
| happened like a shock storm, unforseen and unforseeable,
| with no involvement from them they are welcome to do
| that. The result of that attitude was that the UK
| parliament was only allowed to govern a small and
| increasingly irrelevant island with lousy weather and
| steadily worsening economic prospects instead of a global
| empire.
|
| There is a lesson for people governing global empires
| here - don't allow major wars to blow up on your borders.
| Or, ideally, anywhere. Maybe spend some time promoting
| peace and prosperity. Train the diplomats in diplomacy.
|
| You'll notice that the US solution at the end of WWII was
| completely different to the European settlement at the
| end of WWI. And the US approach to warring was a lot more
| staid than the UK's. These are basic matters of
| competence.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Indeed. Choose peace if possible instead of rushing into
| war. Nothing that happened in the Balkans was important
| to the UK.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Nothing important Sudetenland, nothing important in
| Austria, nothing important in Poland. They tried your
| strategy in the 30s and it was not a success.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Are the Sudetenland, Austria, and Poland in the Balkans?
| nine_k wrote:
| Possibly Balkans themselves were not important. The trade
| routes in Mediterranean likely were.
|
| Also, there was a complex web of international treaties
| and alliances that eventually pulled the UK into the war.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| This was back in the day when alliances, particularly
| European ones, meant something.
| nine_k wrote:
| Also, family ties. European monarchs were a really tight
| bunch. For instance, the tzar of Russia and the king of
| the British Empire at the time of WWI were brothers.
| sofixa wrote:
| > For instance, the tzar of Russia and the king of the
| British Empire at the time of WWI were brothers.
|
| They were first cousins, along with the German Kaiser
| they went to war with.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Some fair points, but remember that the US had the
| benefit of knowing that post-WW1 settlement was a
| failure. Of course, Wilson did object to the conditions
| of the Treaty of Versailles, so it's fair to say the US
| had a better perspective from the start -- though one can
| argue that the US' own failure to ratify the League of
| Nations was a contributing factor to WW2.
|
| Another key factor is that the US had no empire to hold
| together, and, to its credit, wisely did not seek to
| expand its territory after WW2 in order to create one
| (which it could have easily done, and which the UK had
| done many times before).
| bluGill wrote:
| The us wants at the end of wwi were similar to what we
| got with wwii.
| switch007 wrote:
| How do you get the land for your empire to begin with,
| with peace and diplomacy? I guess war is a hard habit to
| break
| timthorn wrote:
| British weather is great. Enough rain to keep the land
| green and pleasant, temperatures that don't get too hot
| nor too cold - the very definition of temperate.
| switch007 wrote:
| We aren't without our annoying and extreme weather
| though. Eg in the north of England last week it was -10c
| for a few nights and a week of 0/1c daytime temperatures
| with a biting wind chill. Before that was heavy snow and
| ice.
|
| Heat waves up to 35-38c aren't unheard of. Our houses
| aren't built for this so a heatwave is quite
| uncomfortable as houses stay 20-25c overnight
|
| Plenty of flooding in various parts
|
| This autumn and winter has seen a lot of storms
|
| The south fares much better of course and without as much
| flooding
| CapeTheory wrote:
| I have a solid sheet of grey clouds over my head for what
| feels like 300 days of the year - would happily take some
| of that variability!
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| It's interesting that incompetence ... Fabians started in
| 1884 and a lot of insanely destructive ideas seem to
| defend from those circles. We don't have the great leap
| forward it's slower but something as bad on a longer
| timescale
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Yep. UK had post-war rationing longer than Germany did!
| Fabians were largely to blame for this state of affairs.
| UK caught back up, just about, in the 1980s, but the
| Conservatives went to seed at the start of the 90s and
| never really got fixed. It's the oldest political party
| in the world so it took a long time for people to give up
| on them but that's now finally happening.
|
| Unfortunately the smear tactics against Farage over the
| years have been quite successful especially against the
| older generation that relies more heavily on TV for news.
| UK might face another election where the right splits
| their vote and Labour walk in again. Many decades of
| decline would be compounded at that point, putting the UK
| into more of a second world position.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| > Their acceptance of poor performers over the last 20+
| years has been striking
|
| How many PMs has the UK been though in that time? _Way_
| more than the average Western country. We don't accept
| poor oerformers more than anywhere else, we kick them out
| of office - but the talent pipeline is abysmal so the
| next one is usually awful too.
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'd say ruin - in great part from the costs of two World
| Wars - came before the end of the Empire. Wikipedia notes
| of WWII - "Britain was left essentially bankrupt, with
| insolvency only averted in 1946 after the negotiation of a
| US$3.75 billion loan from the United States". Vs. the
| Partition and dissolution of the British Raj were in 1947.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Most of the world's gold was in the US by the end of the
| war.
|
| The flow of gold into the US starting in 1933 is thought
| to be why the Great Depression was moderating so much
| there and then: the money supply was inflating.
| graemep wrote:
| Not greatly different from Germany or Nordic countries, or
| EU average, and better than France or Japan.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-
| worldbank?...
|
| Its a Europe wide problem.
| blitzar wrote:
| Switching to % change - EU beats US.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-
| worldbank?...
| graemep wrote:
| That is a better graph, but the conclusion I would draw
| is much the same.
|
| The EU gets a boost from the inclusion of Eastern
| European economies that have been fast growing from a
| lower base.
|
| If you compare the US and the UK to the four biggest EU
| economies, the US is doing best by far, and the UK is
| doing better than three and worse than one:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-
| worldbank?...
| marcinzm wrote:
| If that's adjusted for cost of living and inflation then
| isn't that hiding the actual economic changes? If GDP
| falls then cost of living would likely go down and vice
| versa.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| They spent the wealth of empire fighting a war and achieved
| what exactly? They would have been better off losing. Crazy
| when you think about it.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _They would have been better off losing. Crazy when you
| think about it._
|
| Better if they had let the Nazis won and ruled the UK? WTF?
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| That was never going to happen. And the Nazis didn't
| exist in 1914.
| twixfel wrote:
| Nah the Germans were militaristic arseholes in 1914 too.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Just so everyone is clear, the Nazi plan for what to do
| with an occupied Britain was to enslave large parts of
| population, to completely erase Britain as a country, and
| they also considered mass deportations of the native
| population. "Better off losing" is not really supportable
| under any reading of the historical evidence.
| hackandthink wrote:
| Hitler admired the British Empire.
|
| https://www.quora.com/What-was-Hitlers-opinion-of-the-
| Britis...
| adityamwagh wrote:
| UK also had a lot of colonies that contributed to their
| growth.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| It's thought that most European colonies actually stymied
| growth in their home countries.
| nine_k wrote:
| Yes, "winning" as in not being completely destroyed,
| occupied, and maybe even enslaved. Check out what Poland
| looked like in 1940 when it lost, or what Germany looked like
| in 1945, or, well, 1949.
|
| USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership
| was not highly competent either; I'd say both parameters were
| much worse than UK's. But it managed to remain a large empire
| with a high economic potential, and UK could not.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| >USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its
| leadership was not highly competent either
|
| The USSR moved all its industry eastward, as the German
| army advanced, waiting for the very last moment to do so.
| Quite an incredible feat that allowed them to beat Germany
| at industrial efficiency and secure victory.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_in_the_Soviet_Unio
| n
|
| Here's an analysis of the mechanisms underpinning this kind
| of achievement according to a Russian mathematician:
|
| >One of the fathers of synergetics, G. Haken, in his
| article [9], recalls the following story from the Ancient
| Testament: "It was the custom in a certain community for
| the guests to bring their own wine to weddings, and all the
| wines were mixed before drinking. Then one guest thought
| that if all the other guests would bring wine, he would not
| notice when drinking if he brought water instead. Then the
| other guests did the same, and as the result they all drank
| water."
|
| >In this example, two situations are possible. In the
| first, everyone contributes his share, giving his equal
| part, and everyone will equally profit. In the second, each
| strives for the most advantageous conditions for himself.
| And this can lead to the kind of result mentioned in the
| story.
|
| >Two different arithmetics correspond to these two
| situations. One arithmetic is the usual one, the one
| accepted in society, ensuring "equal rights," and based on
| the principle "the same for everyone," for instance in the
| social utopia described by Owen. In a more paradoxal form,
| this principle is expressed in M. Bulgakov's Master and
| Margarita by Sharikov: "Grab everything and divide it up."
|
| >The aspiration to this arithmetic is quite natural for
| mankind, but if society is numerous and non-homogeneous,
| then it can hardly be ruled according to this principle.
| The ideology of complete equality and equal rights, which
| unites people and inspires to perform heroic deeds, can
| effectively work only in extremal situations and for short
| periods of time. During these periods such an organization
| of society can be very effective. An example is our own
| country, which, after the destructions and huge losses of
| World War II, rapidly became stronger than before the war.
|
| >One of the authors personally witnessed such an atmosphere
| of psychological unity when he was working on the
| construction of the sarcophagus after the catastrophe of
| the Chernobyl nuclear facility. The forces of the
| scientists involved were so strongly polarized 2 that the
| output of each of them was increased tenfold as compared to
| that in normal times. During that period it was not unusual
| for us to call each other in the middle of the night.
|
| >Nevertheless such heroism, self-denial, and altruism, when
| each wants to give (and not to take) as much as possible,
| is an extremal situation, a system that can function only
| for short intervals of time. Here the psychological aspect
| is crucial, everyone is possessed by the same idea -- to
| save whatever may be saved at any cost. But the psychology
| of the masses, which was studied by the outstanding Russian
| emigr'e sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, is presently studied
| only outside of Russia.
|
| Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.4164
|
| Now the question is: to which extent and in which ways does
| this apply to the subject we're discussing.
| samastur wrote:
| This is a myth they tell themselves. USSR won by
| incredible amounts of American supplied material.
| __alexs wrote:
| A truck without a driver has no value in a war. Lend
| lease was important but the ambition and drive to defeat
| Germany required huge sacrifices on all sides that are
| impossible without shared cultural ideals.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Those "shared cultural ideals" amounted to very little
| beyond "conquer the Nazis, before they conquer us" - as
| late-war and post-war relations between the USSR and the
| Western Allies showed. Or, as pre-'39 Western policies
| showed. The '30's saw the Nazis as an evil...but a
| _useful_ and "not too" evil, that would (mostly, in
| effect) protect the West from the greater evil of Soviet
| Communism.
| cpursley wrote:
| You've watched too many Hollywood movies. Yes, Lend-Lease
| was very helpful - but only about 5% of Soviet GDP. For
| example, the Soviets produced more tanks than all other
| allies combined, and that was while under massive active
| attack and invasion - even moved entire factories.
|
| The real myth is that the Soviets just threw meat waves
| and would have lost without Uncle Sam. Most of that was
| anti communist propaganda and any serious (ie non-
| narrative driven) historian knows the truth about the
| industrial and military achievements of the Soviets in
| that war.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| I think he's right though, the 5% figure isn't accurate.
| Perplexity answer below:
|
| https://anonpaste.pw/v/6f99bf00-ab49-48fc-978a-27f656a37c
| 02#...
|
| Nonetheless, the _production hell_ people working at
| those factories went through shouldn 't be downplayed.
|
| Documentary (2024):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjGYMFVMeYo
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "the Soviets produced more tanks than all other allies
| combined"
|
| For such feats, factory equipment mattered. So did
| trucks. Studebakers were relatively cheap and probably
| wouldn't move the needle on your GDP-based meter, but
| they were very important to Soviet logistics.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The USSR also gained de facto control over relatively
| developed places like the Baltics, Czechoslovakia and
| East Germany, and exploited them.
|
| Czechoslovak industry in the early 1950s was producing a
| shitton of products sold under their real price to the
| Soviets, or bargained for cheap agricultural products.
| edm0nd wrote:
| Exactly this. Great Britain colonized huge parts of the globe
| and had an empire. They were kings of trade and the world.
| Now they are just a surveillance nanny state and hollow shell
| of their former self.
| vixen99 wrote:
| I regularly see opinion pieces in the British Press
| advising young Brits to get out. In 2022 one writer wrote
| 'Britain is fed up, bitter, and practically broke - and
| it's all going to get worse' and indeed it still is and
| getting worse. One basic problem: an unsustainable welfare
| and health system and overwrought bureaucracy. Today I
| learn that one major bank is considering leaving the UK in
| view of excessive 'red tape'.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| The welfare state is horrid. Democracy is largely dead.
| The judiciary and bank of England are unaccountable and
| unassailable. The Fabians have won.
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| > Today I learn that one major bank is considering
| leaving the UK in view of excessive 'red tape
|
| Or failure to compete with startup banks...
| _hao wrote:
| The UK has no shortage of good banks. Santander can fuck
| off for being worse than their competition.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Yes, it's difficult to overstate quite how bad their
| customer service is. They actually lost a big cheque I
| deposited.
| tomcam wrote:
| Sugar was rationed in England until 1953, and meat until
| 1954. Pretty rugged times.
| jampekka wrote:
| Interestingly people, especially poor people, were better
| nourished during the WW 2 rationing than before the war. Also
| e.g. universal healthcare was establised post-war.
|
| Is number of war ships, or billionaires, a good measure for a
| country?
|
| https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/food-thought-
| rationing-...
| graemep wrote:
| I have not drilled down into the data, but I think it
| highly likely poor people did not benefit.
|
| I have read that the Empire was a fiscal net negative. That
| was offset by it being a free market area with policies
| that favoured the UK, the benefits from that went primarily
| to a small minority.
| eru wrote:
| > The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to
| Google.
|
| Deepmind is still in the UK. And more, including foreign,
| bidders driving up prices for acquisitions and investments,
| will lead to more people making the jump.
| chii wrote:
| > Deepmind is still in the UK
|
| they dont mean location, they mean ownership of the equity.
| eru wrote:
| Yes, but what does it matter? Google has equity owners all
| over the world, but we still treat them as an American
| company, too.
| chii wrote:
| i think you will find the majority owner of google are
| american.
|
| And i'm not saying it matters - i'm saying that the OP is
| lamenting that the UK is no longer owning innovative
| companies.
| porker wrote:
| Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and
| rich UK people to invest in new UK companies. It's the
| same problem with many of our companies being sold to
| foreign investors: profits are taken outside the country
| (as we did to other countries in the 19th century and
| earlier) so our labour enriches other countries while our
| country gets poorer.
| chii wrote:
| > labour enriches other countries while our country gets
| poorer.
|
| in reality, the UK isn't poorer than before. It is about
| the same - no growth. It is only poorer when compared to
| the US's growth.
|
| One's labour, when being paid market rates, does not make
| one's country poorer. And those profits from said labour
| was paid for by the acquitition of the capital - money
| was invested.
|
| So in essense, the "poorness" that the UK feels right now
| is not a result of these companies getting foreign
| ownership, but the UK gov't lack of industrial policy and
| investment. Brexit is the last straw probably.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| If the profits move out, the opportunity cost is that
| this money isn't spent in the UK which hits GDP which is
| how growth is calculated.
| eru wrote:
| Remember: Google paid for Deepmind. Presumably the
| sellers aren't idiots.
| uncletammy wrote:
| It is far poorer after you account for the brain drain
| and the opportunity cost of the brains that choose to
| remain.
| eru wrote:
| > [...] but the UK gov't lack of industrial policy and
| investment.
|
| That's a weird conclusion to draw.
|
| Governments aren't generally known for their ability to
| pick winners ahead of time. How about instead of trying
| industrial policy (again), the UK could try to remove
| roadblocks that keep them from having successful
| companies?
|
| They could also try to leave more money in the hands of
| taxpayers, so they can invest.
| eru wrote:
| > Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and
| rich UK people to invest in new UK companies.
|
| Rich foreigners are happy to invest in the UK. See eg
| Deepmind itself, which was bought by Google.
|
| > [...] so our labour enriches other countries while our
| country gets poorer.
|
| Foreign investment is usually seen as a good thing.
| Especially foreign direct investment.
|
| And: why do you care so much what passports these rich
| people hold?
| maeil wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the
| outlier.
| itake wrote:
| Even internally in the USA, you will see the full spectrum of
| EU-like VCs to Sand Hill-like VCs.
| maeil wrote:
| Correct, but the tail of VC being fat is unique to the US.
| Pretty much the rest of the world is like the UK in all but
| a miniscule percentage preferring stability rather than
| moonshots.
| itake wrote:
| My point is that the VCs located in a few specific zip
| codes prefer moonshots. The vast majority of VCs in the
| remainder of the USA prefer stability.
|
| You don't hear about the small capital firms investing in
| boring slow growing companies, because they are boring
| and slow growing.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| WOrth ponting out the UK is 3rd worldwide in VC tech
| investment. The US is the outlier, but if you think the
| UK is bad you haven't seen shit.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Yeah but if it's not a moonshot SaaS factory they don't
| want to hear the reality.
|
| For example, Ireland's state VC - Enterprise Ireland -
| ranked first in the world of venture capital investors by
| deal count in 2020 by Pitchbook. The average size of the
| deal compared to a Series A was laughable in context, but
| the ethos is there.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| False. Even good jobs with American companies and what not
| are subject to ridiculous tax problems in the UK. You give
| you employees equity but then they have to raise vast sums of
| capital just to hold on to it to afford their taxes when
| there is virtually no real liquidity pre IPO.
|
| It's anti success. And there is garbage everywhere, people
| keep voting for antisocial housing and bad cultures. It's a
| failing state.
| maeil wrote:
| You didn't read what I quoted and replied to. Please do so
| before responding with "false".
| mrtksn wrote:
| Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or
| anything like that - it is a mindset issue. It is one of things
| that europeans can learn from Americans.
|
| My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and
| class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse
| because all they care is preserving their wealth and the
| working class don't believe and can't even imagine that more is
| possible.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Well it's not necessarily a good thing. In Europe we are
| traditionalists and we retain a lot of spirit (Geist) by not
| striving for pure progress
| mrtksn wrote:
| Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well functioning
| systems that don't have disruptors and we indeed benefit of
| it as having good lives but unfortunately this can't last
| as those who go hard on progress and tear down everything
| and rebuilding again will eventually get ahead on
| everything and won't let us just be as we now see with US
| billionaires having impact over Europe.
|
| Americans feel more pain but are also rewarded, Europe has
| no option but to become progressive - otherwise tere will
| be no more Europe and the Americans and Chinese will make
| us adopt their ways.
|
| Oh, BTW, America is also struggling. The latest political
| developments are an attempt to change course - they are
| trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and
| class based politics holding roots. They say they are anti-
| regulation anti-discrimination(of whites specifically) but
| the core MAGA movement is all about putting barriers and
| preserving old ways for the benefit of a subset of people.
| Americans are too in soul searching. Their MAGA literally
| means fixing what is no longer great but their demands are
| actually quite conservative and they already begin falling
| off with their accelerations partners.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well
| functioning systems_
|
| Current EU is definitely not a stable and well
| functioning system. Look at economic conditions,
| political outcomes, illegal immigration, wealth
| inequality, societal and political trust, homelessness
| rates, birth rates, free speech suppression, welfare
| austerity, etc Everything has been going downhill since
| the 2008 crash. It's a powder keg.
|
| _> they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with
| the race and class based politics holding roots._
|
| What are you on about? Europe doesn't have much race
| based politics, that's a thing America keeps pushing.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Yeah right, Reform AFD Rassemblement national Fratelli
| d'Italia and other risings stars have nothing to do with
| race and even if they do it's Americans behind it.
|
| Everyone knows that Europeans are much more racist than
| Americans, it's just that we are much less explicit about
| it and its issues are different than the issues in the
| USA.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| You might want to look more at why people are against the
| waves of illegal immigration and less on the color of
| their skin.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Illegal immigration is a BS term, make immigration legal
| if you don't want illegal immigrants. It's not like
| people choose the hard, dangerous and expensive ways
| instead of buying a Ryanair ticket. When the illegal
| immigrants BS doesn't hold they all start complaining
| about legal immigrants as with the UK and their core
| Brexit reason.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Immigration is legal though, in most countries.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > make immigration legal if you don't want illegal
| immigrants
|
| As a philosophy of law point, aren't laws passed to make
| things illegal if they aren't wanted? Rather than legal?
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's the point, illegal immigration is just a veil so
| some people can feel better for them selves.
|
| "it's not that I don't like them - I am not like that,
| its just that I don't want illegal immigration"
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I can understand this might make sense if race (or
| ethnicity) were the only factor in the world to consider,
| but since it's not, is there value in thinking as though
| it is?
| mrtksn wrote:
| What makes me think that it's about race(loosely
| speaking. IMHO it's more about xenophobia and feeling
| like losing privilege o identity as a nation etc) is that
| once you make the immigration legal they start
| complaining about numbers like in Britain.
|
| BTW I don't disagree with the people who don't want
| everyone be welcome, I just think that their solution
| ideas and demands are misguided. My observation is that
| people from various ethnicities can function in cohesion
| and are about the same when they are from a similar
| educational background and rarely have ethnical or racial
| issues among themselves and IMHO all the problems will be
| resolved if you let people naturally find their
| appropriate group they belong to instead of having BS
| like country borders and visas and DEI or race based
| positive discrimination etc.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Thanks for your reply. I think I agree with at least some
| of it, but it is still solely talking about race.
|
| The worries people have, especially in somewhere like
| Britain, is it's a country with a relatively small
| population compared to the level of immigration, and
| housing is an enormous problem. One outcome that I think
| can be to a considerable extent[0] attributed to high net
| immigration is that housing has become smaller (many
| houses divided into flats), and housing has become much
| more expensive. So anyone who already owned a house is
| sitting fairly pretty, as they get bouyed up by the
| housing market, but anyone looking to buy for the first
| time, or buy into a new market for the first time (e.g.
| moving to near schools for kids) is going to have a
| massive problem, as the competitive pressure has up-
| bidded housing and made it worthwhile to subdivide and
| sell/rent smaller dwellings.
|
| This could be all white people doing it (somewhere like
| Cornwall in the UK is mostly annoyed because other Brits
| buy holiday homes there, driving up prices for locals and
| their kids who are coming up) - it doesn't matter. The
| housing costs are what matter. And they, a bit like fuel,
| drive up everything else: NHS workers need higher
| salaries to just be able to live in many places, which
| drives up taxes.
|
| This isn't to avoid actual race/ethnicity-related
| tensions. But there's a giant clump of people who are
| just fed up with their money going far less far than
| their parents' and grandparents' money did when it comes
| to one of the fundamentals of life: housing yourself and
| your family. And their parents and grandparents are
| equally upset that their kids/grandkids have in a major
| sense a harder life than they did.
|
| [0] definitely not fully; there are multiple factors. But
| if you net import the equivalent of the population of
| Liverpool each year, and you aren't building a Liverpool
| each your to house them, it's obvious that prices will
| start shooting up.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Well no, its not. Specifically in relation to Asylum
| Seekers contravening the EU Dublin Regulation and tearing
| up their passports on an intra-EU flight so they can
| claim Asylum and the associated social welfare in Ireland
| rather than France or Germany due to our much higher
| rates.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation
|
| Basically economic migrants - predominately young men
| from the middle east - disguising themselves as Refugees
| and taking social supports away from the families fleeing
| warzones.
| mrtksn wrote:
| That is one subset of immigration crime that is rightly
| frown upon and can be completely avoided abolition of the
| country borders concept that was introduced in the last
| 100 years or less. Want to help people in need? Instead
| of confining them into areas and then impose restriction
| on those and give some of them some money, help those in
| need. Or don't help, but at least don't pretend that you
| are bringing justice to the world without addressing the
| core problems.
|
| In other words, this is actually welfare fraud that
| happens to have a travel component.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> can be completely avoided abolition of the country
| borders_
|
| Home break-ins can be avoided by abolishing locks on your
| front door and leaving them open for the public. You go
| first please.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I won't reply to this strawman argument.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| It's the same champaign socialist argumentation you are
| using, just that it's not affecting you, but when it does
| affect you, you have no argument.
|
| The question was simple, why do you support illegal
| immigration in a country's borders as being OK, but not
| crossing in the borders of your house?
|
| It's easy to be virtuous and generous with other people's
| money/resources.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't support illegal immigration, I say that people
| traveling and seeking better lives should not be illegal.
|
| I think we are done here since I don't feel spending time
| for positions I never claimed. I despise this type of
| argumentation, its a known fallacy and its useless.
|
| You can count yourself as won an arguments if you feel
| like that.
| rangestransform wrote:
| It should be illegal based on the wishes of the people in
| the destination country alone, even if only to hoard the
| pie for themselves
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| That's a ridiculous way of thinking about it. Anyone who
| says they don't want illegal immigrants isn't objecting
| simply because of the legal status, they think the
| process should be upheld which prevented those people
| from immigrating legally.
|
| It's the same reason we don't seek to improve crime rates
| by legalising theft. Sure, there'd be fewer people
| labelled as "criminal", but the original problem would
| remain (and in all probability would become worse).
| mrtksn wrote:
| And why the process of immigrating legally is more than
| buying a ticket and a security check at the border?
|
| Obviously, it is the reason that matters and the reason
| is not benign.
|
| People want other people to like people in certain way
| they and then castrate Alan Turing for illegal love.
| People want to have slaves then they have illegally free
| slaves problem.
|
| Why pretend that this is about upholding the law?
| rangestransform wrote:
| It is within the right of every nation to determine who
| comes in and who doesn't, by lethal force if necessary
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Even legal migration is bad now.
|
| The governments of Europe no longer hold a monopoly of
| violence. Terror groups and MENAPT groups have brought a
| diverse range of violent threats to people.
|
| Building a robot army to solve this is one viable
| solution that is hardware and software based.
| coldpepper wrote:
| Building a robot army is a ridiculous idea.
|
| The efficient & practical way is to stop renewing
| residence and work visas, making acquisition of visas
| harder through complex demands of high language
| proficiency, and a high amount of money as proof-of-
| funds, perhaps requiring a local referral too. It's what
| countries that don't want immigrants but don't want to
| say it out loud do.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| They add job requirements (aka skilled migration) and
| lottery system on top too !
| piltdownman wrote:
| That's quite the conservative talk-radio shopping list.
|
| Illegal immigration is a metric of the EUs economic
| success and social stability compared with North Africa,
| Eastern European Accession States, and the war-torn
| middle east. If America shared land borders and direct
| migration routes with Islamic caliphates and the like,
| they'd know all about it.
|
| Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty
| sane and tolerable for all but a select group of
| (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You
| have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather
| than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People
| are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and
| Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention
| the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality
| 400% higher on the US side.
|
| Societal and Political trust is still quite high -
| despite much fearmongering, the far-right are _not_
| gaining the political capital necessary to instigate
| significant change outside of Hungary.
|
| Homelessness rates are a factor of illegal migration -
| and are laughably low compared to the US on a per capita
| basis; ditto whatever warped contention you have
| regarding 'welfare austerity'. We just call it social
| security. During Covid and in the period afterwards it
| was hugely ramped up across Europe - and not in a
| giveaway budget with a check personally signed by an
| Oligarch.
|
| Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what
| you're aiming at. The current cultural friction regarding
| things like gender-identification and pronoun usage are
| uniquely american exports. On basically all other counts
| other than venue-shopping defamation cases, it's a moot
| point for any normal person.
|
| Finally re birth rates - they tend to go down in wealthy
| and advanced societies outside of select religious
| groupings (looking at you Salt Lake City) so I'm not sure
| what your point is there.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| It isn't a "conservative talk-radio shopping list". It is
| reality in quite a few areas in Europe and the UK.
|
| > Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty
| sane and tolerable for all but a select group of
| (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You
| have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather
| than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People
| are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and
| Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention
| the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality
| 400% higher on the US side.
|
| This isn't true. I know many people that have moved from
| Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where politically
| fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right or centre-
| left. I speak to people from all over Europe regularly
| and many of them do not feel the way that you are
| describing.
|
| > Societal and Political trust is still quite high -
| despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining
| the political capital necessary to instigate significant
| change outside of Hungary.
|
| That isn't true. I know many areas of Europe where the
| electorate keep on voting for further right parties. The
| same is happening in the UK. Labour only won because the
| Conservatives lost and the Reform party did extremely
| well for what is a relatively new party. I know the same
| is happening in Belgium (I speak regularly with Belgian
| nationals). Areas of Spain that are most affected by
| immigration have voted for further right parties. So I
| know this isn't true.
|
| > Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what
| you're aiming at.
|
| Just look up the hate speech laws enacted throughout
| Europe and in the UK and some of the cases that have been
| prosecuted. We do not have a right to the free speech in
| the UK and the majority of Europe doesn't either.
| piltdownman wrote:
| >>This isn't true. I know many people that have moved
| from Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where
| politically fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right
| or centre-left. I speak to people from all over Europe
| regularly and many of them do not feel the way that you
| are describing.
|
| The plural of anecdotes is not data, nor does your select
| social circle represent a cogent sample group.
|
| Orbans stated position is to pivot Hungary from a
| democracy into an illiberal state, modeled after Putin's
| Russia. At the EU summit in mid-December, for example, he
| refused to agree to the extension of the Russia sanctions
| that expire at the end of January.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/02/europe/hungary-
| election-v...
|
| Hungary are on the brink of being kicked out of the
| Schengen Zone, have about 12 billion in EU funds frozen
| because of their stupidity, and are now getting loans off
| China like some sort of tinpot African dictatorship in
| order to bridge funding gaps.
|
| The next biggest right-wing rise is - surprise surprise -
| bordering them and the ex-Soviet Bloc in Poland. That
| waned so quickly with the escalation of War in Ukraine
| that, even if they joined forces, Konfederacja + PiS
| could still not form a majority coalition for seat of the
| Polish Government.
|
| >>That isn't true. I know many areas of Europe where the
| electorate keep on voting for further right parties. The
| same is happening in the UK.
|
| You missed my key qualifier 'necessary to instigate
| significant change'. The Overton window shifts when
| society is impacted by War and mass refugee immigration,
| particularly in a period of high-taxes following high
| social spend (lockdown).
|
| >> Just look up the hate speech laws enacted throughout
| Europe and in the UK and some of the cases that have been
| prosecuted.
|
| Citations needed.
|
| >> We do not have a right to the free speech in the UK
| and the majority of Europe doesn't either.
|
| Well no, not explicitly, as they have a different legal
| and basis for law as the US - e.g. they don't have a
| codified constitution either as they came from a common
| law system based on the French Courts. Instead they hold
| the same proportional right as a negative right to
| freedom of expression under the common law.
|
| Its a moot point anyway as since 1998, freedom of
| expression is guaranteed according to Article 10 of the
| European Convention on Human Rights across Europe.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_
| Con...
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Freedom o expression does not guarantee you freedom of
| consequence in Europe. If you make fun of a politicians
| they or the state can come back after you for it.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Ehm... what?
|
| Political satire is one of the oldest and grandest
| cultural traditions in Europe. Hell, most European
| countries even have some variant of a political satire
| show like Spitting Image:
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01439685.202
| 4.2...
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Boy, you have no idea do you? And you're talking about
| satire, not reality. Our reality is worse than satire.
|
| https://reason.com/2019/10/03/the-e-u-orders-global-
| censorsh...
|
| https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/03/german-businessman-
| cleared...
| GasVeteran wrote:
| > The plural of anecdotes is not data, nor does your
| select social circle represent a cogent sample group.
|
| When something isn't easily quantifiable there is no
| data. OK sure then, but there wouldn't be anyway.
|
| The fact is that people are talking about moving either
| out of Western Europe / UK to somewhere else and it is a
| common sentiment amongst many professionals.
|
| > Orbans stated position is to pivot Hungary from a
| democracy into an illiberal state, modeled after Putin's
| Russia. At the EU summit in mid-December, for example, he
| refused to agree to the extension of the Russia sanctions
| that expire at the end of January.
|
| Can you point me to a translated policy document or a
| more credible news source from like Hungary that I can
| translate? I don't take American news sources seriously
| for European issues as they frequently get basic things
| incorrect.
|
| > Citations needed.
|
| You can look up the laws yourself and the cases. They can
| easily be found. They are numerous. The law around speech
| is quite easy to find on the .gov websites.
|
| > Well no, not explicitly, as they have a different legal
| and basis for law as the US - e.g. they don't have a
| codified constitution either as they came from a common
| law system based on the French Courts. Instead they hold
| the same proportional right as a negative right to
| freedom of expression under the common law.
|
| In the UK we literally don't have the right to free
| speech. I have actually read the law on this issue
| several years ago. Only in Parliament are you allowed to
| speak freely. There is nowhere where it says we have
| these rights, there are no cases that have decided that
| has ruled we have these rights. This is neither
| explicitly or implicitly.
|
| > Its a moot point anyway as since 1998, freedom of
| expression is guaranteed according to Article 10 of the
| European Convention on Human Rights across Europe.
|
| Freedom of expression != Free speech. They are not the
| same thing and that is why hate speech laws exist in the
| majority of EU countries and in the UK. Time and time
| again people erroneously equate free-speech with free-
| expression. The UK government have themselves come out
| and said something to the effect of "You have the right
| to free expression, but not saying things we don't like"
| essentially.
|
| You either are being wilfully ignorant or you are
| horrendously naive. Go and read the law yourself if you
| don't believe me.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on
| progress and tear down everything and rebuilding again
|
| A notion of "bare progress" is the elephant in the room.
| Progress is a vector. It has magnitude and direction.
| People talk of moving "forward or back", but science also
| has a steering wheel.
|
| > and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their
| ways.
|
| This very notion of "progress" as a totalitarian force is
| also dangerous. The boot is on the other foot from 80
| years ago. When Europe was starting a 1000 year
| technological master-race, more measured minds had to
| extinguish that fire. I see many similarities today -
| people seeing "progress" simply as dominance.
|
| I liked the brain-dump in TFA, but I think it's over-
| complex and too tied to a contemporary interpretation of
| capital investment.
|
| We've been spooging away our talent for generations here.
| Look at how we treated Turing. We mismanage or sell-off
| everything cool we invent.
|
| What Britain still suffers from is class disloyalty. We
| still have a strong but invisible class system which is
| now international financiers. Those sorts "float above"
| the ordinary economy, they are disconnected from UK
| interests and don't give a toss about engineering,
| science, knowledge, education...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological
| master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that
| fire
|
| A lot of the measured minds were saying eugenics was a
| good idea. It took the horror of seeing experiments and
| concentration camps to make it so deeply unfashionable
| the idea couldn't even survive in academia.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I believe you're right. Edwin Black's "IBM and the
| Holocaust" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day"
| both played their part in revising my naive ideas about
| simple narratives of WW2.
|
| But look at this post made here a couple of days ago [0].
| It's absolutely back in fashion. I think technofascism
| really is a thing now - you can feel certain people
| getting quite giddy with thoughts of power.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735539
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Power's always in fashion. Academics seem to love
| socialism, because it (in practice) centralises decision-
| making nationally to a group of smart people (and the
| academics might imagine themselves to be these insanely
| powerful people).
|
| Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of
| thinking, if I remember correctly.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > academics might imagine themselves to be these insanely
| powerful people
|
| It long ago escaped academia. Everyone wants to imagine
| themselves "insanely powerful people" now. It's part of
| the sell.
|
| But based on experience I'm with Chomsky, that the
| majority of academics are abject cowards (if we weren't
| we'd take back the universities)
|
| > Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of
| thinking.
|
| Again I think you're right, painful as the truth is. I
| met many oh-so humane "Humanists" eager to stop the
| suffering of those poor untermensch.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Everyone wants to imagine themselves "insanely powerful
| people" now. It's part of the sell.
|
| I'm not sure this is true. Socialism does have a
| surprising foothold, but I think that's largely due to
| the larger number of people flowing through academia.
| ttoinou wrote:
| What is this spirit we retain that US looses ?
| geraldhh wrote:
| humanism
| bowsamic wrote:
| Leisure, that is, truly retaining time to encourage and
| develop the spirit that is not just work
|
| > There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the
| Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive
| after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work - the
| characteristic vice of the New World - already begins to
| infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading
| over it a strange loss of spirit (Geistlosigkeit). One is
| now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes
| remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-
| watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the
| financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually
| "afraid of letting opportunities slip." "Better do
| anything whatever, than nothing" - this principle also is
| a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may
| be strangled. And just as all form obviously disappears
| in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself,
| the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also
| disappear.
|
| Nietzsche, The Gay Science, SS329
| jajko wrote:
| Quality of life, if you define an actual proper life as
| something happening outside of work hours and sleep.
|
| We don't worry whether my insurance will cover the next
| health issue that will happen to me, be it broken leg or
| lifelong costly treatment. I don't have to desperately
| try to save maybe 1.5 million $ to put my kids through
| decent university, if they desire to do so. I am not
| brutally tossed on the sidewalk when I am fired, both
| employer and state gives a LOT of support to not fall off
| the societal cliff and end up as typical US homeless
| person. We have way more resting time to recharge via
| holidays (this fellow from 1.1. is running on 90%
| corporate work contract and thus sporting 50 vacations
| days per year - now _thats_ QOL improvement, I 've
| already planned 6 week+ vacations for this year). We have
| on average simply healthier lifestyles and it shows
| literally massively.
|
| I could go on for a long time. But you can ignore that -
| compare usage of mental health medication, from what I've
| seen its much more massive in US, manifesting the
| additional stress that US population is cca exposed to.
|
| Its a balance - you add more money, you remove more
| 'humanity', and the additional stress is there and very
| real. Everybody has different ideal spot, and this also
| changes a lot during life. Isn't it better to have 2
| systems next to each other, and everybody can pick how
| they want to live your life? Focus purely on money is
| stupid, their added value in life quickly diminishes once
| a person is not poor, then other aspects of life become
| much more important. The complete opposite is same, 0
| progress. Something in between, as always, is the best
| road for most.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| You also get your defence and healthcare advancements
| mostly paid for by Americans, either as taxes or
| healthcare costs that funnel into R&D spend. It's easy to
| give things away when you mostly only have maintenance
| costs to bear, and not very much risk.
|
| (Not an American.)
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> thus sporting 50 vacations days per year _
|
| Where and how do you get 50 vacation days/year.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| In Germany, you can typically finance the first 1-3 years of
| your start-up through government gifts like "EXIST". That's
| why you don't need early seed investors.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Do you know any equivalent for the Netherlands by any
| chance? Everything I see is tiny amounts.
| sofixa wrote:
| Idk about the Netherlands, but in France you can take
| your unemployment benefits for 3 years upfront as a
| capital investment in a new business. And there are
| various grants and aid you can apply for.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Can you get unemployment if you quit?
|
| Annoyingly, in 20 years of working I've never been fired
| or laid off.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I think recently there's been a change which says that
| you can if you start a new company right away. But do
| check with an accountant for the inevitable pitfalls.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| In CAC40 company, It is possible to take unpaid leave
| with the possibility of returning to the company to set
| up a new business. The idea is that if the project fails,
| the original company recovers an employee who has learned
| a lot (free MBA).
|
| If you're already unemployed, it's possible to keep your
| allowance longer for a business start-up or takeover.
|
| It's also possible to sign a "rupture conventionee",
| which entitles you to unemployment benefits.
|
| But no, if the employee resigns, he or she is not
| entitled to unemployment benefits, nor to business start-
| up assistance.
|
| the French system is generous, but not as generous.
| sofixa wrote:
| > In CAC40 company, It is possible to take unpaid leave
| with the possibility of returning to the company to set
| up a new business
|
| It's not only CAC40, it's part of some collective
| bargaining agreements which apply to whole sectors (e.g.
| SYNTEC which applies to all consulting and most IT
| companies).
| psini wrote:
| I see this misconception a lot for resigning France.
|
| First, there are some "protected classes" of resigning
| that allow you to be eligible for unemployment right
| after you resign, for example: moving to follow your
| spouse, resigning less than 3 months after having been
| laid off, going back to study or... creating a
| company!![1] :).
|
| Second, you are entitled to unemployment benefits even if
| you resign without "a good reason". The issue is that you
| can only request your benefits 4 months after having
| resigned. This leads to many people believing that you
| just do not get anything if you resign; because who wants
| to eat the 4 months of no income?
|
| This 4 months waiting period is not advertised at all,
| and my complotist self believes it might be on purpose;
| if you don't know about it and don't request it, that's
| less money for the government to spend :^).
|
| [1] Conditions apply (having worked uninterrupted for the
| last 5 years)
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| It's more complicated than that [0]. The fact that you
| have the right to claim unemployment benefit does not
| mean that it will be accepted, that it will be accepted
| quickly or that the benefit will correspond to what you
| would have had if you had been laid off.
|
| [0] https://www.service-
| public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F34991/...
| sandermvanvliet wrote:
| There is the SeedCapital route:
| https://english.rvo.nl/subsidies-financing/seed-capital
| CalRobert wrote:
| Thanks!
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| Isnt this just a private loan?
| kleiba wrote:
| EXIST in particular targets universities, though, so not
| every founder is eligible.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Correct, that was meant as an example. There's also
| "Existenzgrundungszuschuss" for the unemployed and
| various other EU funds for craftsmen and others:
|
| https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-
| business/start...
| Aldipower wrote:
| Your sentence is not true as you present it. There are _a
| lot_ of constraints. Time wise, topic wise, biased wise. No
| typicality start-up will ever get the EXIST "gift".
| menaerus wrote:
| "The grant covers personal living, material, and coaching
| expenses over 12 months, allowing founders to focus on
| developing their founding idea. While graduates receive
| personal funding of 2.500EUR, students can receive 1.000EUR
| a month, additionally up to 30.000EUR material and 5.000EUR
| coaching budget that can be used to develop the founding
| project further."
|
| So, 30k EUR (gross) with a maximum funding period of one
| year? Laughable. Also probably a little bit tragicomic.
|
| Early seed rounds are usually measured in couple of USD
| millions. I wonder how these brilliant minds in the EU
| think they will attract the industry talent to leave their
| ~5x salary (outside FAANG) for such a pocket money.
| HotHotLava wrote:
| EXIST is very narrowly tailored to technology start-ups
| founded by graduates based on their research.
|
| Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of
| the latest YC 24 Winter batch at
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the
| requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST
| if they lived in Germany.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Great that the German government makes some of the most
| start up unfriendly employment laws _and_ funds these
| doomed start ups at the same time.
|
| This is really ridiculously and needs to stop.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > don't believe and can't even imagine that more is possible.
|
| And/or don't think that more is better/desirable. I wouldn't
| consider myself working class, but I was definitely raised
| with the idea that making obscene amounts of money is
| actually pretty selfish/immoral and not something one ought
| to strive for. That doesn't preclude going into business. But
| it is pretty antithetical to the VC funding model and the
| creation of billion dollar businesses.
|
| In general, it seems that the culture in America is that
| wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that
| at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen
| as shameful (consider that variants on socialism are still
| mainstream political ideologies in Europe).
| mrtksn wrote:
| > it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is
| virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at
| least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen
| as shameful
|
| Isn't this due to different types of Christian traditions?
| AFAIK In some, it is considered that the wealth is given by
| the God to the virtuous ones and they are merely guardians
| of it and responsible to use use the wealth in a virtuous
| ways and therefore getting rich is encouraged and the rich
| are treated with respect?
|
| There's something similar among some Muslim sects too, in
| Muslim majority countries it is not uncommon to believe
| that the God chose someone to be rich and there's more to
| that person that the eye can see therefore must be
| respected. Some religious communities even get so obscenely
| rich and you can see poor servants having a religious
| experience when their leader arrives with an a luxury car.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| The way I see it, at least in France, it's not really a
| question of religion. "The rich" are thought to have
| acquired their wealth doing dubious things, mostly by
| "exploiting the poor".
|
| There's also a very strongly egalitarian way of thinking,
| as in pretty much everybody is interchangeable. So, if
| someone does better than somebody else, it's likely
| because of something "unfair" (or luck) and not thanks to
| being more competent.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > "The rich" are thought to have acquired their wealth
| doing dubious things, mostly by "exploiting the poor".
|
| To be fair, that's probably true in the vast majority of
| cases.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I've never personally known any "very rich" people so I
| can't comment on them.
|
| But the perception I'm talking about applies even to
| "reasonably confortable" people. Think your random
| engineer making 100k a year (which is a "good" salary in
| these parts). Basically, someone with some form of STEM
| degree.
|
| I doubt most of these people are doing anything shady.
| Plus, this kind of income doesn't really give them any
| kind of financial independence: they wouldn't be able to
| afford not having a job.
| teamonkey wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I doubt most of these people [random engineer making
| 100k a year] are doing anything shady.
|
| I guess it depends what your level of "shady" is - I know
| a bunch of people in that kind of range who were all
| about "optimising their tax" (which I would consider to
| be "tax evasion" - morally wrong even if it is legal at
| the time.)
| vladms wrote:
| You know "optimizing" means different things for
| different people.
|
| For example: France offers specific saving deposits with
| guaranteed interest rate and non-taxed. If a normal
| saving deposit would be taxed and has similar interest
| rate, "optimizing their tax" means just using the that
| specific deposit.
|
| There are many other schemes that I can't believe they
| exist (example: in France if you create an investment
| account, after 5 years of the account existence you are
| not taxed on the gains! So what you can do is "create
| account with 100 euro", "wait 5 years", "invest more /
| potentially do gains" - and you will not be taxed!!!)
|
| You will tell me "that is morally wrong!". I could agree
| with you, but I see nobody demanding better
| laws/regulations, probably because they don't know/care
| about details.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > You will tell me "that is morally wrong!"
|
| No, I think the investment account with no tax on gains
| is fine. I'm talking about things like "create a company,
| take a salary that's just over the lowest tax threshold,
| get 0% infinite term company loans from yourself" -
| things that your average person wouldn't be doing (unlike
| the free-gains-account.)
| vladms wrote:
| You mean something like described in this page:
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/loan-schemes-
| and-... ? This one seems illegal at least in UK. Do you
| know if it is different in other countries?
| CalRobert wrote:
| But we're not talking about obscene amounts of money. Just
| making enough to have some savings so you can do things
| like a career break or retire early is discouraged (and
| mostly impossible). Europe wants you to work, and keep
| working, forever.
| vladms wrote:
| Considering the differences in living prices in major
| capitals and other cities, I would claim you can do that
| (career break/retire early) even today in multiple
| countries in Europe.
|
| But that would mostly mean changing places. If you go and
| work 10-15 years in an expensive/high pay city, you could
| retire in a less expensive city.
|
| On the other hand if you expect that everything will be
| as when you were working (place, expenses, etc.), I am
| not sure it is the case even in the US for early
| retirements ...
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Exactly. Half the population are saboteurs and vote to
| suppress success
| ktallett wrote:
| Success is viewed differently by some. Being educated,
| having healthy lives, having access to many public
| servicesnare seen as a successful healthy life by many.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is
| virtuous
|
| I don't think I've ever seen this claimed anywhere except
| as a criticism.
| foldr wrote:
| It's not something that Americans in general explicitly
| believe, but you can see it in their attitudes and
| behavior towards the rich and successful. For example, HN
| (being somewhat weighted towards American cultural norms)
| collectively believes that people who have made lots of
| money are especially wise and hard working, and therefore
| have special insights to offer to the rest of us. True or
| not, this is a culturally specific belief.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think this is just a bias. I've not seen much that
| makes me think Americans think rich people are more
| virtuous, at all. Certainly not enough to create a
| stereotype out of, even if I thought stereotypes were a
| good idea.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Yeah, I was raised with that idea. I did make some nice
| businesses, but I don't care for growing because of
| growing. If I catch a few 100k a year for everyone in the
| company (yep, it is the reason I like tiny companies: we
| can just decide to all make the same), I don't really care
| about the rest. Doing that for 10 years (even shorter but
| he) is enough for anyone to live out their life in comfort
| out of the (etfs etc) interest here. I keep on doing making
| new things as I like it, but need no more money, so that
| helps.
| coastermug wrote:
| People need examples of success in their network. Most people
| have frankly never met or heard of anyone who founded a
| successful startup- and therefore would never think of taking
| on such a risk. I agree that in some places there is a sense
| of malaise, but if we are to believe founders are a 1-2%
| outlier of the population, I don't see why America's 1-2%
| should be so much more ambitious than the UKs. I think it's
| more a cycle induced by lack of funding.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations
| or anything like that - it is a mindset issue. _
|
| You can change mindsets with regulations that reward taking
| risks in new businesses/innovations, and punish rent seeking
| and sitting on inherited real estate for example.
|
| But as long as EUrope is focused on maintaining the status
| quo of boomers and gentrified dynasties of billionaires that
| you probably played against in Assassins' Creed, nothing will
| change.
| cladopa wrote:
| Let's make simple calculations. In California, near the start
| of the 20th century there were more than 34 million native
| Americans living in what was their land. Now there are in
| California 300-700.000 native Americans.
|
| They were exterminated and replaced by a very small European
| population. Like sterilising a Petri dish and letting
| bacteria grow, the opportunities that population experienced
| were the biggest any population in the world ever had. Just
| look at a graph of the population growth of US OR California
| in the last century and compare it to others.
|
| Now there is in California a population of near 40 million
| people.
|
| That is not a "mindset", this is real growth that they could
| experience and the rest of the world could not.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| These numbers are at least two orders of magnitude higher
| than typical estimates. What are you talking about? It's
| even higher than the typical all time max which is on the
| order of 10 million.
| xcv123 wrote:
| California is only 34% European/white
| https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-population/
| bagels wrote:
| Do you have a source for 34 million Native Americans?
| tirant wrote:
| Regulations often stem from a particular mindset. However,
| they also serve to perpetuate that mindset.
|
| As a member of the working class, I find there's little
| incentive to build something new or innovate because the
| effort required to navigate through all the burdensome
| regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional
| income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives
| to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people
| like me, the effort simply isn't worth it. Instead, we focus
| our energy on other pursuits, such as family, sports, or
| friendships.
|
| This shift in focus isn't inherently bad--a life balanced
| between family, friends, work, and leisure is often a recipe
| for happiness. However, societal progress relies heavily on
| the efforts of a small minority of individuals who are bold
| (or perhaps crazy) enough to pursue their ideas. When 90% of
| those individuals are discouraged from taking entrepreneurial
| risks, society's capacity for innovation is severely stifled.
|
| In short, it's clear that excessive regulations and high
| taxes are holding Europe back from achieving its full
| potential for growth and innovation.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Which regulations exactly you find burdensome or
| overwhelming and stopping you from attempting the become
| wealthy, change your life and the world maybe?
|
| Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you
| could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest?
| Up until 1960's rich Americans payed %91 tax, and yet they
| kept their entrepreneurial spirit - why you can't do the
| same at the stated %50?
|
| When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| The highest marginal tax brackets tend to kick in very,
| very early in Europe. That makes a huge difference.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Does it? How many people skipped getting rich because
| they could have been richer? Any factual examples?
|
| BTW, rich don't actually pay much taxes. The luxury life
| they live is usually not taxed, most of the things they
| do is considered business expense.
|
| When a worker flies to Ibiza they first pay social
| security and income taxes, then they pay consumption
| taxes like VAT.
|
| When a businessman flies to Ibiza they deduct whatever
| they can as an expense so they don't pay income tax and
| VAT. For whatever they can't claim that it is a business
| expense they will pay with a cheap loan against their
| assets and avoid paying income taxes. Since they still
| have those assents, they pay just the interest later when
| the assents increase in value. If their business fails
| those assets fail, the bank takes the assets and no
| taxation happens.
| paganel wrote:
| What the OP is trying to say is that to grow from 50k
| euros earned per year to 1 million euros earned per year
| is very, very cumbersome and, yes, mentally challenging
| and very stressful, and that a lot of people actively
| choose to stay/remain at the 50k euros per year level and
| they'll not take the risks of trying to get to more than
| 1 million per year.
|
| Once you're at more than 1 million per year there are
| other challenges and you can probably afford to hire
| someone to take part of that burden off your shoulders,
| but until you get to that point you're on your own and
| it's very damn stressful (and by stressful I mean that
| that includes the possible inflated but all to real fear
| of getting to prison because of that tax-thingie that you
| didn't fill the 100% correct way or because some work
| your company did broke some municipal regulations or
| whatever and now you're on the hook for damages and, yes,
| personal liability).
|
| Actually your VAT-skimming thing at the end is a very
| good example of that mentality, i.e. the innovators here
| having to have the Tax man front and center in their
| minds, before innovation and trying to build something
| useful off the ground, because if you don't know how to
| play the Tax man (at the limit of legality, as your
| example is) then you're toast. That "playing the Tax-man"
| thing consumes a lot of people's energy in the early
| stages, energy that would have been way better spent
| trying to actually make something new and innovative.
|
| [the 50k and 1 million figures are just used as examples,
| maybe it's not 50k but 70k or 80k and maybe it's not 1
| million but 5 to 10 million, but the idea stays the same]
| brewdad wrote:
| Those problems are universal. Or do you honestly think
| that American startups don't need to hire an accountant
| and consult with lawyers? You either find the risk/reward
| proposition worthwhile or you don't. There's nothing
| wrong with not pursuing the riskier avenue but don't
| pretend the US makes it easy.
| paganel wrote:
| There are levels and levels of enforcement, and, yes,
| from the across the pond it does look like the IRS is not
| breathing as menacingly each and every time you may want
| to do something different.
|
| For example a company like Uber could have never taken
| off here in Europe because the tax authorities (and not
| only) would have never let that happened, i.e. Uber (the
| company) playing the "they're not real employees" game
| with the authorities. Yes, Uber eventually made it into
| Europe, but only because by that time it already was a
| big and established company in the States so it had lots
| of money to spend on lobby activities.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| For a married couple in Germany, they reach 40% in
| effective tax rate somewhere above 600,000EUR in combined
| annual income.
|
| My take would be that once people have 100kEUR in net
| annual income per person, they just do other things and
| work less because it brings them more happiness than the
| additional money would.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Nominal tax rates were 70 or 90 per cent, but no one
| really paid them. The tax code was full of loopholes for
| that purpose.
|
| You can't rely on such paper figures to determine real
| tax burden in the past.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Which is still the case. No one is skipping getting rich
| because of taxes, they end up paying very little anyway.
| hdougie wrote:
| What makes you think anything has changed here? Certainly
| in the UK, there are plenty of "loopholes". Outside of
| PAYE, there are plenty of ways to legally lower your tax
| burden, and plenty of wealthy business owners and
| shareholders make full use of those loopholes.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is true and I believe it doesn't make sense to
| compare tax burdens of the people who are already
| wealthy.
|
| It makes sense to compare tax burdens of well-paid
| employees, a favorite cash cow of most governments. These
| are the people who sometimes start new businesses, and
| use their savings to do so.
|
| And there is a meaningful difference to the volume of
| their savings if their top tax bracket is 30 per cent or
| 55 per cent.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because
| you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the
| rest?
|
| No one's making that choice. Most businesses fail, even
| in somewhere entrepreneur-friendly like America. Why not
| just work for someone else, given the rewards are capped
| even at relatively low level of success? Why take the
| risk, when taxation has failed to price risk into reward?
| flask_manager wrote:
| We have global commerce; you are not only working on the
| creation part of something new, but also competing with
| similarly skilled people working with different more
| advantageous start conditions.
|
| Nobody is talking about the difference between 1 and 2
| billion, they are talking about the difference between 50
| and 100 thousand, while competing.
| cdnthrownawy39 wrote:
| Canadian here.
|
| It's not so much any single regulation, as it is there's
| so many little ones that seem reasonable on the face of
| it. But it's also that what makes the ruling Canadian
| class so is the authority to bypass those regulations.
|
| I can give one personal example; I was able to secure
| some public funding application for a non profit I'm
| affiliated with. But the only reason I was able to do
| that was because my parents were university classmates of
| the elected official that was able to pressure the staff
| that was handling the paperwork to prioritize and approve
| our application ahead of probably the hundreds in front
| of us. The official's going to get a nice thank you
| dinner out of it, but I also had to offer some
| information that the official could financially benefit
| from for him to even consider it, and a promise of some
| future favors.
|
| For better or worst that's how a lot of Canadian system
| works. Grant applications, personal tax work, personal
| and business banking, etc. Anyone can get through it
| _eventually_ for anything. But if you want it done
| quickly and in a way probably won 't get tied up in the
| system itself, you better know someone that owes you a
| favor.
| mrtksn wrote:
| This is very interesting anecdote because it resonates
| with something that a friend of mine said when I
| pressured him to explain which regulations exactly are
| causing him problems in EU.
|
| As it turns out, he also complained about excessive
| documentation he needs to get public funds for his
| project.
|
| So both of you are actually complaining about accessing
| public funds and not actually doing private investment or
| starting a private company with private funds.
|
| this is not what most of the Americans do and this is not
| what they mean by startups or business. Mostly.
| marcinzm wrote:
| You've fallen into the classic trap of thinking about the
| very very very tiny of people who are billionaires. Very
| few people are billionaires. Very few startup founders
| will ever be even if they succeed.
|
| Life changing money is going from $50k/year to $1m/year.
| Not from $1b to $2b.
|
| The vast majority of tax burden and complexity hits the
| middle class.
|
| > When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.
|
| It was 35% on capital gains.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In Europe the capital gain tax ranges from %37 in Norway,
| %34 in France, %26 in Germany and Italy, %10 in Bulgaria
| and %0 with conditions in many other places. Tax heavens
| are a European invention anyway.
|
| And no, millionaire or billionaire doesn't matter much.
| Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires. Europe is
| full of small businesses and by small I mean millions in
| profits and revenues.
|
| In Europe %99 of the companies are small or medium sized
| enterprises, which is not different than the USA. In USA
| however, large companies have slightly higher number of
| employees which is an indicative of concentration of
| power and that's how you get your "USA has 5 unicorns in
| top 10 but EU has only 1" lists.
|
| Contrary to the narrative, Europe has much more small and
| medium sized enterprises per capita:
| https://www.nationmaster.com/country-
| info/stats/Economy/Micr...
| marcinzm wrote:
| > Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires.
|
| It lacks both.
|
| The US has 8.5% millionaires. Germany has 4.1. France has
| 5.6. Norway has 5.9. The UK has 5.8. Once you include the
| rest of the EU it goes even lower.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number
| _of...
|
| edit: And in the US there's no need to start a business
| to be a millionaire. You can become one by just working a
| regular job. Sales, consulting, tech, finance, etc. jobs
| can even pay you $1m per year.
| mrtksn wrote:
| With enough inflation the millionaires supply will
| increase, but that's not the point. Toplists and
| arbitrary round numbers doesn't mean anything. Let's
| stick with stuff that matter, like concentration of
| wealth.
| marcinzm wrote:
| > but that's not the point
|
| You made it a point, not me. If you're going to try
| changing the goal post when proven wrong then there's no
| point in talking further.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Having less is different than lacking of. Europe lacks
| billionaires that can make large scale investments at
| whim like Elon Musk does. A more equal society has its
| positives but negatives too.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Thats not an entirely fair comparison because GDP/capita
| is different, and the base assumption would be that
| millionaires/capita increases with GDP.
|
| That assumption appears to hold in general (Luxembourg
| and Switzerland have higher GDP and significantly higher
| millionaire percentages than the US), but there are a LOT
| of exceptions, like Ireland/Norway (way less millionaires
| than you would expect from GDP).
|
| This is very interesting, I would not have expected to
| see such significant differences between countries...
| marcinzm wrote:
| From what I can tell the millionaire discrepancy existed
| in 2010 as well when the per capita GDPs between
| Germany/France/UK and the US were fairly close. The gini
| index for the US is much higher so it's not surprising
| that there's more millionaires per capita. And a lot more
| poor people per capita as well (once you account for the
| US's weaker standard for what constitutes poverty).
| brewdad wrote:
| EU has pensions. US has 401k plans. There may be more
| millionaires in the US but that, in and of itself,
| doesn't prove anyone is better off there.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I never said people were better off in one or the other
| nor is this a discussion about that. This is a discussion
| of the societal differences driving startups and risky
| investments.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The US has a pension, it is called Social Security, and
| it is relatively generous among developed countries. 401k
| is in addition to, not a replacement for.
| wertqgd wrote:
| The 50% tax being a roadblock is exactly what the lack of
| ambition is about. There's an implicit assumption you're
| only ever achieve just over the tax limit rather than
| hundreds of thousands or milllions over with share options
| etc.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| I think this is a combination of a lack of supportive
| environment and a risk averse mindset. Employers will
| likely scoff at a CV with one or more entrepreneurial
| stints. The way I see it is this: if the prohibition era
| was implemented in the UK, people would still acquire
| alcohol against any and all barriers. The same drive
| doesn't exist for entrepreneurial goals. Regulations make
| things difficult but the critical problem is that the
| entrepreneurial mindset is not there
| vladms wrote:
| > As a member of the working class, I find there's little
| incentive to build something new or innovate because the
| effort required to navigate through all the burdensome
| regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional
| income I might generate from bringing my ideas or
| initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For
| many people like me, the effort simply isn't worth it.
|
| I find it ironic you mention "classes" (regarding "as a
| member of the working class"). There are problems
| everywhere (either as an employee or as an entrepreneur).
| Feeling overwhelmed is just a feeling, does not say
| anything about how much you can do or if you get a
| reasonable workload.
|
| I think what is holding Europe back is the people not
| trying and understanding various things without having lots
| of fears (of being overwhelmed, of large tax, of what
| people will say, etc.).
|
| A balance must be stricken also between what you can do
| (leisure, family) and how many resource you
| produce/consume. The purpose should be for more of
| leisure/family but that is ONLY IF we (I am also European)
| produce/consume enough. Too many smart and capable people
| want to "just be an employee", which results in gaps in
| other places (entrepreneurs, politicians, etc.).
| ahoka wrote:
| Should individuals routinely risk their own livelihood to
| benefit a select few capitalist? Does this improve the life
| of the average American? Seeing how they vote it seems
| generally it does not?
| cylemons wrote:
| Havent FAANG companies improved the lives of the average
| American? They definitely did, and all these companies were
| created by ambitious individuals with a bold vision and
| prospect of making lots of money!
|
| By taking big risks, one might ascend to this capitalist
| class if they succeed.
| o11c wrote:
| "FAANG improved average lives" is by no means a safe
| assumption. It needs to be very carefully demonstrated
| for each individual company, with consideration of the
| worsenings as well. The forgotten sixth, Microsoft, is
| probably easier to make a case for.
| turbojerry wrote:
| 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.
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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?
| bboygravity wrote:
| Isn't it also an income issue?
|
| I'm from EU and would be totally open to move to UK if there
| was an opportunity to make more there while working on
| something cool. But there simply isn't?
|
| Then there are US startups where I could likely make 2 or 3x
| what I make in EU or UK.
|
| So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to build a
| startup in 2025 anyway?
| bowsamic wrote:
| Also even the safe job wage in the UK is perhaps only 2/3 of
| in Germany for example
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| What do you mean by that?
| zipy124 wrote:
| He means a safe wage job pays a third less in the UK than
| Germany.
|
| Not sure if it's true so let's look at some stats:
| Germany median for software engineer: EUR66,000 United
| kingdom median: EUR58,000
|
| Note depending on source, these numbers both vary broadly
| within the same range, but with Germany salaries being
| about 10-15% higher on most sources, so nowhere near the
| figure claimed.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 10-15% is not hugely far from 1/3 ;)
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| You said that UK's salaries are 2/3 of the Germany ones,
| but this doesn't mean that the Germany ones are 1/3 more,
| they are 1/2 (or 50%) more. That's pretty far from
| 10-15%.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Oh sorry, then I didn't maths properly. I always forget
| about the asymmetry of fractions
|
| EDIT: Please don't downvote me for admitting a mistake
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| No problem, it's a pretty common math/statistics trap
| that gets way more people than it should.
| zipy124 wrote:
| 10-15% in the opposite direction. That is I stated they
| earn 10-15% more.
|
| 33% less equates to them earning roughly 50% more. The
| difference between 10-15% and 50% is huge!
|
| (trivial example, if someone is earning PS100,000, then
| someone earning 33% less makes PS66,666. But Someone
| earning PS100,000 makes 50% more than someone making
| PS66,666)
| itake wrote:
| > So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to
| build a startup in 2025 anyway?
|
| A lot of people choose to start businesses near their friends
| or families.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Right, but that would mean not moving.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Some people live in the UK already.
| varispeed wrote:
| Something not talked about - you probably won't be able to
| lease suitable property if you are doing anything other than
| apps.
|
| Doing soldering of prototypes? Good luck finding a landlord
| that would let you do it. The moment they hear "fumes" is a
| nope, fire hazard, safety risk and won't let you...
| varispeed wrote:
| Why downvotes? This is my real world experience.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Why not hire US consultants to get from starting to mid-sized?
|
| I'm curious, if you think the issue is cultural.
| kdmtctl wrote:
| Yep. Bring Musk aboard. /s
| CalRobert wrote:
| 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" and should be sneered at.
|
| Edit: To compare -
|
| Me: "I want to build a house"
|
| Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work,
| you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."
|
| California/Oregon friends: "Fuck yeah I'll bring a nailgun"
| porker wrote:
| (UK resident, born and bread) Yes this drives me absolutely
| mad. I'm a poor risk taker and can come up with all those
| reasons something's a bad idea, but when I've made up my mind
| to take the risk I want supportive people around not people
| who would rather you never tried anything outside their
| "comfort zone".
|
| And the problem runs in families. This is not therapy but
| every time I talked to my parents about an idea it would be
| dammed with faint praise or I'd be told I'm wasting my time.
| It's taken 20 years to work out that the more they dissed an
| idea is the better it actually was.
| CalRobert wrote:
| What nobody tells you is that doing nothing is also very
| risky.
| _hao wrote:
| You could argue that doing nothing is actually more
| risky! Nothing stays static in nature! You move/change or
| you die!
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >"That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go
| bankrupt and it will kill you..."
|
| There is an element of truth to that, self build projects
| seem to go about was well as the typical software project.
| CalRobert wrote:
| We got ours built for what it's worth. Beautiful house,
| though we ended up leaving.
| Kallocain wrote:
| 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 wiring? you:
| "Me". Insurance: "Are you a professional? you: "No"
| Insurance: "Have you had your work certified by a third
| party?" you: "Do my buddies count?" insurance: "Have a good
| day sir"
|
| There may never be a problem and you may have figured out
| everything that's required to get your butt covered (good for
| you in this case), but the fact is that a lot of people don't
| know about these things, do their own thing and get royally
| screwed if there's a problem and, God forbid, someone gets
| hurt.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| True, it's more common in rural areas. (I wasn't doing
| this in the middle of Dublin)
| Guthur wrote:
| Circa 80% of world trade is done in USD, and the US literally
| creates it out of thin air, and it will all bleed into the
| economy somehow, someway.
|
| Without sovereign protection you just can not compete with
| that, ever. It's really that simple.
|
| Simply look at China they may export loads of goods but it's
| predominantly priced in USD, and what do they do with all that
| excise USD, the only thing they can do, buy US debt. It's truly
| perverse.
|
| Or look at every UK company that was bought up with those very
| same magic dollars.
| gazchop wrote:
| Quite frankly, it's cultural and the thing I hear a lot is
| simply: fuck that for a job!
|
| I could quite happily get on fine at one of those big American
| style startups but I don't get excited about hype, I don't have
| the work culture it demands and I don't have a price on my
| soul. I'd rather earn a lot less, have extreme stability, have
| better family time and balance. On top of that there's
| something tasteless and unethical about a lot of the big
| startups. Do they really bring good things to society? Do I
| really want to be part of that?
|
| If I can walk away with half the money, live a modest life and
| stand with my principles intact, I will take that over twice
| the money.
|
| I don't think this is political at all. It's not a race either
| and we have no innate responsibility to build things like this.
| secondcoming wrote:
| The part about that plan that worries me is the ageism in
| software. I'm mid-forties and it's something I think about a
| lot for when I have to get a new job.
|
| Anyone young should go make as much money as possible, as
| early as possible, so they can have the same outlook you do
| in later life.
| gazchop wrote:
| Not really had any problems with that and I'm older than
| you are. And quite frankly I didn't have any money really
| until I hit about 35. I just lived within my means.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Same. I grew up in Canada and my country didn't fund my dreams.
| The US did. It is a shame and the amount of loss that Canada
| has every single year because the dumb VCs who exist in Canada
| cannot look at that big picture.
|
| For example, right now there is not a single VC in Canada who
| does large pre seed / seed investments based on an idea and the
| founding team.
|
| In the US you can get a 1 million cheque within a week.
|
| That is the real reason Canada is failing on a macro scale.
|
| @dang hopefully I have kept this well balanced.
| baxtr wrote:
| I agree. But I wonder what's the underlying cause?
|
| Europe wasn't like this for centuries. What is the cause of
| this mindset?
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Taxation. Socialism.
| fmajid wrote:
| In the UK's case, feudalism is alive and well. The entire tax
| system is designed so parasites descended from thugs like the
| Duke of Westminster or Charles of Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg und
| Gotha never have to pay property taxes on their extensive
| land holdings.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| That was _worse_ in the 18th and 19th century, and yet
| people were willing to ground new corporations back then.
|
| I think the answer is something the left won't like - we
| (Europe) are killing ourselves with bureaucracy, often
| environmental bureaucracy. A road to hell paved with good
| intentions.
|
| The documentation to the Lower Thames Crossing, a planned
| highway tunnel, already exceeds 360 000 pages. This is just
| crazy.
|
| https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/lower-thames-
| crossin...
| baxtr wrote:
| I think you're right that was way worse before.
|
| But on the bureaucracy: I don't think that's the real
| cause it's rather a symptome.
|
| The cause must be something related to expected rewards
| and opportunity costs.
| blitzar wrote:
| The people who claim they didn't do something because of
| "bureaucracy" or "regulation" were never going to do
| anything anyway.
|
| It is a generic handwavey excuse for losers who never
| tried.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is often accomplished enterpreneurs who complain of
| bureaucracy.
|
| I remember reading a German enterpreneur's complaint that
| he was unable to build an extra electric connection
| between his two industrial buildings in Germany in less
| than a year, due to endless rounds of permiting for that
| single cable.
|
| He contrasted the situation to Poland, where his
| application on a similar site was processed in two weeks
| and it took two more weeks to actually build the
| connection.
|
| If you think complaints of bureacracy have no merit,
| maybe you never faced any. It now takes about 10 years to
| get all permits for a regular block of flats in Prague,
| Czechia. It used to be 3 years or so back in 2000, and it
| takes only about 9 months in Denmark.
|
| These are experienced developers, and they are still
| stuck.
| fmajid wrote:
| Since Europe is to the left of the US, whatever the US is
| doing right (pun intended) is bound to be something the
| Left won't like.
|
| The US also has plenty of bureaucracy, and what's worse,
| a lot of it stems from Common Law and capricious courts
| that interpret it, which is partly why large civil
| engineering projects like upgrading the NYC subway cost
| 4x more than the equivalents in Western Europe (minus the
| UK) or Japan.
|
| I think the biggest factor is the sheer size of the
| unified US market and its economies of scale, and a
| second one the fact the US Social Security is limited
| compared to European retirement systems, and thus people
| have to save in their pension funds, freeing up a huge
| amount of capital for investment, while at the same time
| creating enough competition that they don't have the
| sense of entitlement that British feudals or continental
| bankers have, leaving entrepreneurs with crumbs.
|
| Source: I'm from France but I moved to San Francisco to
| found my two startups, because I'm not a glutton for
| punishment. Then again I moved to the UK (for family
| reasons), so I guess I am a masochist after all.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yeah, when you think of it, the US economies of scale are
| huge.
|
| In the European single market, you still don't have, for
| example, an affordable parcel service. For a Czech e-shop
| to send a package to France, as I did a few days ago, is
| something around 12 eur postage fee. It would be 4 eur
| within Czechia.
|
| American e-shops can send packages from Florida to Alaska
| for peanuts, and they don't have to bother with
| translations into 20 languages.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| That's because risk-aversion and laziness are the smart
| things to do. Yes, it would be cool to come up with the next
| Facebook, but most financial advisors will tell you that the
| actually best thing you can do is some form of "SP500 and
| hold 20 years" because from the perspective of an individual,
| the safe option provides the best expected outcome.
|
| Similarly, why work yourself to the bone for a miniscule
| chance of success, if you can... just chill instead? I used
| to be a highly-motivated go-getter, but then I realized, this
| shit ain't bringing happiness, and I turned into a work-
| avoider who spends time in the office mostly talking to
| coworkers and playing games in the toilet. My overall life
| satisfaction skyrocketed.
|
| Yes, the society at large does need people to do the needful,
| but this ain't gonna be me.
| baxtr wrote:
| I definitely agree! But why is this different in the US?
| bluGill wrote:
| The us generally would do 95% in the safe s&p500 and the
| other 5% in high risk things. The exact numbers varry of
| course but that is a good rule of thumb for good future
| growth.
| baxtr wrote:
| Ok makes sense. But that feels like a strategy Europe
| could do as well. It doesn't sound absurd or too risky.
|
| How come we don't do it?
| bluGill wrote:
| That is a great question. Also ask why you don't even if
| nobody else does.
|
| i have some ideas but my insight to europe is limited so
| I'm at least half wrong.
| graemep wrote:
| > 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 (
|
| Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the
| US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into
| choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
|
| I do not know the truth of it, but clearly its not obvious.
|
| > Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years
| or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been
| abysmal.
|
| I commented on this earlier. The UK's economic outcomes have
| been similar to comparable European economies (like Germany)
| and better than some (like France). Whatever the problem is,
| its not unique to the UK:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766107
|
| I do not think the UK is well run, but I think the west in
| general is badly run. Poorly thought out regulation, short
| termism in both politics and business, a focus on metrics
| subject to Goodhart's and Campbell's laws, and a poor
| understanding of the rest of the work (leading to bad foreign
| policy).
| PakistaniDenzel wrote:
| > The UK's economic outcomes have been similar to comparable
| European economies (like Germany) and better than some (like
| France)
|
| Who says those countries were well governed though? IMO they
| are all run by idealogical morons
| graemep wrote:
| I agree they were also badly governed - that is my point.
| paganel wrote:
| For the last 20 or 25 years the UK has been coasting on the
| North Sea oil&gas money, I'd say that worked up until the
| early 2010s, and then on the almost complete financialization
| of its economy and on selling out whatever pieces of the
| economy could still be sold out (that includes part of their
| beloved NHS).
|
| But that can only work for so long and is beneficial in the
| medium to long-term for a very limited number of people
| (basically the owners of said financial capital), at some
| point you have to produce some real wealth, wealth produced
| from real stuff via resources of the Earth + human ingenuity
| and, yes, + human work.
| graemep wrote:
| I agree, but my point is that the France, Germany, and
| other comparable European economies have the same or
| similar problems. The UK is not some exception, it is a
| typical western economy. The US is an outlier (doing
| better).
|
| > that includes part of their beloved NHS
|
| A more severe problem is that the NHS was debt funded
| (mostly through off balance sheet debt) in the 2000s. The
| government kept their promise not to increase national debt
| by disguising running up disguised debt in the NHS
|
| Its also worth noting that a large chuck of NHS services,
| GP services in particular, were always subcontracted to
| private providers.
| paganel wrote:
| Germany was quite fine until a couple of years ago,
| mostly thanks to very cheap Russian gas. About France I
| agree, they have the same problems as the Brits do, maybe
| because they lost access to cheap African mineral
| resources as a result of Francafrique [1] ending? I
| couldn't tell, to be honest.
|
| But at the end of the day the point remains that if you
| want to have a world-beating economy you need to have
| access to relatively cheap inputs (which includes
| energy), in large enough amounts, otherwise your economy
| will just not make it. The Americans have that (people
| forget how much of an economic boom gas fracking brought
| with it), the Chinese have that (thanks to its very large
| population and access to natural resources that is
| reasonable enough, they're no 1930s Japan), India has
| that (thanks to its very large and young population),
| even Russia has that (thanks to its natural resources),
| meanwhile Europe has almost no demographic advantage and
| almost no natural resources left to exploit. "Innovation"
| (which is also lacking) and financialization alone can
| get you only so far.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7afrique
| constantcrying wrote:
| Germany's number one economic problem is energy costs.
| Blaming the increase on Russian gas hits only a tiny
| slice of the problem.
|
| The real problem is a completely botched "energy
| transition", which deprecated very important energy
| sectors, which were still absolutely needed.
|
| To be clear, I am in favor of renewables. One benefit is
| that they create independence from the whims of the US
| and Russia. Nevertheless the transition has been
| completely botched, driving up energy costs and making
| certain industries essentially non-viable.
|
| The government focused on two things, increasing
| renewable peak production and deprecating nuclear. What
| they completely neglected is how to actually have a
| sustainable grid, which can cheaply deliver energy even
| with little sunshine and little wind. What was needed was
| easily regulated power (e.g. nuclear) and sufficient
| storage. Nuclear was completely abandoned and most
| government incentives were focused on increasing peak
| production, neglecting the storage of energy.
|
| This is obviously harmful to the German industry, which
| is electricity heavy. This problem has also been
| consistently ignored and actively made worse in recent
| years, by continuing to shut down nuclear plants, even if
| it was clear that more energy production was needed.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| While legislation restricting innovation is a problem,
| Germany, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, all have
| the same bigger problem of expecting smaller and smaller
| working populations to support bigger and bigger non
| working populations.
|
| In the long term, the level of wealth transfer in these
| countries is not sustainable, and each year it
| incentivizes those who produce to seek greener pastures
| where they get more rewards.
|
| Look at these population histograms:
|
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-kingdom/2024/
|
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2024/
|
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/france/2024/
|
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2024/
|
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/spain/2024/
| constantcrying wrote:
| You could outgrow the problem, by increasing individual
| productivity or you can stop the wealth transfer. It will
| stop sooner or later anyway.
|
| I made some comments elsewhere about the long term. It is
| delusional to think that it is possible to continually
| have jobs that pay significantly more than identical jobs
| elsewhere in the world.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, but the two are related because increasing earned
| income tax and other taxes to fund non workers on people
| who do work sap the incentive to work in a manner that
| increases productivity (either via working more hours or
| working on hard problems).
| constantcrying wrote:
| Absolutely, definitely those two problems can only be
| solved together. Although right now I see very little
| effort going in that direction. If anything social
| benefits and taxes are increasing.
|
| Germany's progressive tax system also directly
| incentivizes working fewer hours, as the more you work
| the smaller your hourly wage becomes.
| turbojerry wrote:
| It's not a surprise that EU countries perform similarly
| as they have to abide by the same laws and therefore are
| all restricted in the same ways. For example EU drone
| regulations prohibit the flying of autonomous drones
| therefore killing innovation in that area.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful
| the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses
| into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
|
| HN has a very wide range of economic opinions, and some
| people are extremely uninformed about what it takes to do
| hard things that can't be grown organically, and what it
| takes to maintain a business running when it's done the hard
| thing in the face of competition.
| ktallett wrote:
| Most of the issues here relate to scale and actual quality
| of the idea/business in the first place. Hard things can
| really be split into, challenging but a problem to solve,
| or this never should have become a business. The former
| will work well with the right sort of investors. The latter
| will eventually sink, the investors simply provide money
| and poor ideas such as trying to incorporate AI into every
| business model.
| Marazan wrote:
| It's because post GFC the USA stimulated and the EU went all
| in on austerity.
|
| It is fairly clear what was the best option.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Under-rated comment. This is basically the whole
| explanation. 2008 did a _huge_ amount of damage, not just
| immediately but to long-term mindsets. Ironically I think
| it 's even entrenched the meme that the only real way to
| make money in the UK is property. We're all Georgists now.
|
| (this includes property as an export industry! Leaving
| increasing areas of the UK owned by overseas absentee
| landlords.)
| graemep wrote:
| The problem is that people think property is a risk free
| way of making money - even if they borrow heavily to
| invest. Maybe what we need is a property price crash.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not sure a property price crash would achieve this
| goal.
|
| You will have to decide for yourself if I'm speaking from
| experience or have motivated reasoning, as I'm saying
| this as an overseas absentee landlord who bought a UK
| apartment around the tail end of the previous price
| crash, initially as a place to live in until I decided
| the UK wasn't for me any more, and was rich enough to do
| so without a mortgage.
|
| (I left the UK in 2018 due to a mix of Brexit and
| technological incompetence in the form of the
| Investigatory Powers Act. Would have left UK sooner but
| for parent with Alzheimer's).
|
| Reason being: the income from housing doesn't have to
| come from reselling houses (which a price crash would
| impact) -- I'm collecting rent, not flipping property.
| Forecasts future increases to rental rates suggests it
| won't keep getting worse (relative to general inflation)
| than it already is for renters, but it's already
| obviously quite bad.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| In the UK it more or less is a risk free way to make
| money. The government's hand is always seen when a danger
| to the property market prices hoves into sight.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Nearest we came was ... 2008, with all that implies. I
| don't think we can have a property price crash until the
| population starts net-declining.
| rjsw wrote:
| We could start applying capital gains tax to a primary
| residence.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Maybe what we need is a property price crash.
|
| What is needed is a steady decrease in demand or an
| increase in supply.
|
| The cost of living crisis is directly caused by the huge
| bureaucracy needed to build new housing. And speculators
| are benefiting from that. As long as governments are
| unwilling to let go of regulations housing costs will
| only increase.
| brewdad wrote:
| There is no appetite for increasing supply anywhere in
| the West. Maybe Trump will get us into WWIII and we can
| shift the demand curve.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >There is no appetite for increasing supply anywhere in
| the West.
|
| Every single person who currently is looking to rent or
| buy a house has appetite for increasing market supply.
| vkou wrote:
| None of those people have enough political power.
| constantcrying wrote:
| In Germany it is somewhere around 55% of the population.
| graemep wrote:
| The UK did not choose austerity:
|
| https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-
| briefings/sn06...
|
| but still has worse growth than the US.
| robbie-c wrote:
| Can you explain how your link supports your argument?
|
| The conservatives ran austerity-based policies for the
| last 14 years. Is your argument that they did not have a
| choice?
| UK-AL wrote:
| Have you seen the national debt under the conservatives?
| It's massively increased.
| nd wrote:
| The UK government did, for all intents and purposes,
| choose austerity after the pandemic: https://en.m.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_au....
| jahnu wrote:
| They most certainly did
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_a
| ust...
|
| What they didn't do, unlike PIGS, was also tough reforms
| which are paying back now
|
| https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/flying-piigs-
| nations-s...
| HPsquared wrote:
| The Conservative party used austerity rhetoric as a way
| to win votes, but they did not cut spending other than
| reversion to the mean after the high spending around
| 2008.
|
| See here for international comparison of government
| spending as % of GDP (the second figure showing trends
| over time), UK is not an outlier:
|
| https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/GBR/C
| ZE/...
| marcinzm wrote:
| > Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful
| the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses
| into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
|
| Most of those are people complaining about a business having
| to make changes because it took $50+m in funding and now
| needs to justify it. The business was only "good" because it
| got $50m and didn't need to do things like charge enough
| money. If it hadn't gotten that $50m then those people
| wouldn't consider it such a good business or even know about
| it.
| zipy124 wrote:
| The safe job earns much much more unless you are the founder.
| Equity pay for start-ups in the UK for devs is very poor, or
| non-existent, and the base salary also very poor (and not even
| guaranteed to be paid if they go under). You can instead work
| for a company like nvidia, google or meta and get a huge base,
| and nice equity on top.
|
| If UK startups paid equity to their devs, I would work a lot
| harder when I've worked at them, but startups require working
| hard and long hours and if I've got no skin in the game, what
| incetive do I have to make sure the company is successful.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| I've been shocked in my career in the UK by just how much
| founders will rip people off on equity
|
| In basically every UK startup I've worked at they've done 1
| or all of the below:
|
| 1. Offered options in numbers with no valuation/percentage of
| ownership. "We offer you 40000 stock options!". When asked to
| clarify numbers, they delay and never tell you. Inevitably
| they have a value of a few pence each
|
| 2. Withdraw options unilaterally when you leave the company
| with no option to exercise
|
| 3. Never get round to filling in the paperwork so you never
| actually receive them
|
| I was _shocked_ when i worked for my first US startup and
| they just...gave me the options. And I could exercise them
| whenever I wanted. And they expired 10 years after I left the
| company
| troupo wrote:
| > The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to
| Google.
|
| You're focusing on one success story out of thousands.
|
| 90%, or more, of US startups only exist to be sold to the
| highest bidder or to coast indefinitely long in infinite
| investor money, and never turn a profit.
|
| There's still expectation in Europe at large that your company
| should have an actual business plan and a path to
| profitability.
| blitzar wrote:
| + DeepMind and its founders are _the_ examples of founders
| who beat the game
| dukeyukey wrote:
| I don't think thats's true in the UK as much. Loads of
| startups here follow the US model.
| bjackman wrote:
| Not just in startups. Feels like Arm lost almost their whole
| software division over a few years. This was an extremely
| stable high-profit-margin business, and it was obvious that it
| was uncompetitive on the labour market. But something in the
| culture stopped management from increasing salaries, so
| everyone buggered off to foreign companies.
|
| I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary
| loss.
| aa-jv wrote:
| >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 technological advancement
| which occurs in the UK_ , from GCHQ outwards, like a kraken
| with deep, deep tentacles.
|
| I've worked with multiple UK-based startups which, as soon as
| they start to gain traction in international waters/markets,
| immediately becomes the target for GCHQ embedding/plants. This
| kills the startup.
|
| Until the British people start prosecuting their war criminals
| and seeks justice for the immense human rights abuses that
| occur, every millisecond of every day, as a result of their out
| of control military-industrial oppression apparatus, there is
| simply no hope for UK technological industry.
|
| The world sees this, even if the people of the UK do not - and
| routes around it, accordingly.
|
| Nobody really wants to work with UK-based technology groups,
| knowing that they are liable for immediate corruption the
| moment their technology becomes relevant to, say, the people of
| Brazil, or Africa, or China.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > immediately becomes the target for GCHQ embedding/plants.
|
| I'd be interested to hear more about this.
| fadesibert wrote:
| Brit / American checking in and agreeing. My first startup was
| a B2B SaaS and hiring in the UK was fantastic - the arbitrage
| was just silly. Experienced software developers (10+ years) @
| GBP 70k / year - and that was close to non-finance full-market
| pay. The same people were averaging $250k in NYC / SF.
|
| And yet, the UK hires were often _better off_ after all
| expenses than the US hires.
|
| Largely due to housing being _slightly_ cheaper (other posters
| have pointed out, London is on par with SF / NY - the big
| difference being London expands, NYC and SF are both "islands"
| - yes SF is a peninsula, but commuting up 280 or 101 is not a
| pleasant experienced).
|
| Also, even offering private healthcare (BUPA) - the UK hires
| were cheaper. I'm in my late 30s and reasonably healthy - my
| all-in, gold-plated UK policy was GBP 2k / year - I was at
| $2,000 / _month_ in the US.
|
| * _However*_ - salaries in the UK are unsustainably low.
|
| Three reasons: [1] BOMAD - The Bank of Mom and Dad (parents
| paying / lending the deposit for a house so the mortgage is at
| a low rate) is effectively exhausted. This means that current
| entrants into the housing market are either renting (which is
| nearly as expensive as NYC, especially after the inflationary /
| interest rate jump), or saving to "buy" a house (I enclose in
| quotes because at a 95% mortgage you don't own much of your
| house). [2] Professional salaries outside of finance are way
| too low. My fiancee works in a highly skilled, professional
| field and her salary in 2024 was, in _nominal terms_ the same
| as my starting salary in NYC 17 years ago working for a large
| investment bank _IN THE BACK OFFICE_ - where salaries were
| decidedly blue-collar. My unproven hypothesis is that the UK
| professional world is still largely geared towards those with
| alternative assets, private incomes (especially high-prestige
| non-professional jobs, especially around politics). This makes
| it _impossible_ to compete with US venture backed startups,
| even post-ZIRP, because the offer is always going to be better.
| And yet that private-income driven base has largely been eroded
| through capital gains, inheritance tax and general downward
| social mobility (or, perhaps, less doom-and-gloom - averaging
| towards the center. The difference in wealth and income between
| the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class has narrowed
| significantly). [3] There has been over the last 5-7 years
| significant negative messaging and tax policy against economic
| success. A confiscatory top-tax band, an erosion of a "job
| perks" friendly tax regime and a political climate that is very
| anti-success, even prior to the labour govt (largely started at
| the same time, though perhaps not by, Theresa May's 2015 speech
| and focus on "Just about managing").
|
| VC in the UK is hard, largely because the majority (though by
| no means all) VCs are focused on aping mid-market pension
| managers. Their ambition is limited to businesses that already
| work (and yet anything transformative by definition does not
| work yet) - and are interested mostly in post-revenue companies
| with linear or lightly superlinear growth.
|
| This, IMNSHO, is largely caused by the fact that, given state
| expenditure and the corp and personal tax burden, there simply
| isn't enough capital for US style VC - the portfolio approach
| requires capital to absorb failures. Most VCs here cannot
| afford failure.
|
| The closest we get is the EIS / SEIS tax policy, which allows
| the offsetting of losses in failed businesses (by the
| equivalent of Accredited Investors) - as well as a friendly Cap
| Gains treatment of successes. But these are largely made as
| common stock investments by individuals - and limited to a very
| small scale.
|
| Which brings me to my final point - the SAFE note is not only
| not ubiquitous here, it's rare. Even pre-seed investments are
| either common stock or (more rarely) convertible notes. This
| requires a level of diligence (even on small tickets) that make
| capital formation incredibly burdensome.
|
| There's absolutely a path to resolving this - but the UK first
| has to make a political and cultural decision to embrace
| startup-led GDP growth, which is has not yet made.
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| Been there before, and wrote about the experience -
| https://blog.jacobstechtavern.com/p/yes-actually-means-no-th...
|
| US vs UK investors are night and day. UK investors only want to
| see profitability to protect their cautious capital
| 946789987649 wrote:
| Going through our pre-seed round atm and it is incredibly
| frustrating. I haven't raised in the US so it may be similar
| there, but the amount of time wasted for a relatively small
| amount of money is painful.
|
| I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a
| great scheme, but the SEIS limit of PS250k feels almost too
| small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally
| later stage or re-investment from SEIS.
| Shinchy wrote:
| I agree and it's a real shame, we used to spearhead some of the
| most initiative companies in technology (Acorn, Arm, Sinclair,
| Sage, Deepmind). Now it's just a shadow, while places like
| Silicon Valley or Stockholm have jetted ahead the UK just sort
| of stagnated - it's kind of embarrassing.
| constantcrying wrote:
| European countries do not want start-ups to exist. The barriers
| e.g. Germany puts up make it extremely difficult for any start
| up to exist.
|
| Not only is the bureaucracy difficult, the labor laws make it
| very difficult to hire and compensate talent.
|
| Germany wants innovation to be done by large corporations, not
| by start ups.
| marcinzm wrote:
| My view is that the US startup culture exists because of wealth
| inequality at the $1-$20m net worth level. Wealth inequality is
| socially incentivized at that level because of the lack of a
| decent social safety net. If you don't save money then at 50
| you may end up homeless on the street due to bad luck. But if
| you don't get bad luck then you end up at 50 with a large
| amount of money that you don't have much to do with. So you
| start investing some in riskier things because who cares.
|
| US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k
| from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.
|
| There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so
| be careful what you wish for.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I was also trying to raise recently. It's interesting to me
| that the UK has an absolutely incredibly generous startup
| investment scheme (SEIS)[0], and still hasn't managed to make
| this work. SEIS is ludicrously generous, and should make
| getting funding a breeze in the UK, and yet ... somehow it
| isn't.
|
| 0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who
| gives you PS250k can get PS125k relief on their income tax (not
| what they'd have paid on PS125k, literally the whole PS125k),
| and then claim a further 50% back of the remainder from the
| government if you go bust.
| yobbo wrote:
| Set UK/EU tech salaries at maybe 30%-50% of US, and factor in
| higher taxes. Then integrate over 40 years, resulting in a
| number from which investments can be drawn. Add to the
| corresponding US number all the profitable exits from previous
| ventures. There's just so much more US investment capital
| available.
|
| It can be argued that a responsibility falls on EU equity
| companies, pension funds, and so on, but they do not make seed
| investments.
| mbesto wrote:
| As a former founder (formerly living in London) trying to raise
| VC funding in London this is exactly what my experience.
|
| I once did a pitch contest and they required we put together a
| business plan with financials. You want me to...what? Who on
| earth can read a pro forma for a pre-revenue SaaS business and
| say "ah yes this is worth of investment because this pro forma
| looks great".
|
| London is all about banking and it shows.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| 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?
| James_K wrote:
| God, this place is such a sh*thole (literally if you count the
| sewage in the water). It's depressing. Every week, X is going
| downhill, Y is failing, we're out of money. I am so hopeless
| about my country's future. I feel that this is our century of
| humiliation.
| blast wrote:
| Hopefully we'll at least get something new out of it, like punk
| rock the last time.
| smartties wrote:
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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.
| alecco wrote:
| The problem is policy is oriented to growing GDP and not
| GDP per capita. Large corporations benefit from GDP growth
| and lower wages, so they incentivize the political class to
| grow the population artificially (wink-wink).
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| The other problem is the welfare state or just the state.
| So much graft and just living off printed money. It
| pushes out success. What percent of the UK is effectively
| civil servants or people receiving benefits? What percent
| are net takers? A lot
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Why do you equate civil servants with people receiving
| benefits? What a load of nonsense.
| truckerbill wrote:
| it's more about wealth. You need a functioning welfare
| state to allow people to take risks
| youngtaff wrote:
| Most of the benefits bill in the UK is paid to people who
| receive the the state pension
|
| Of the others it's split between those who don't earn
| enough from work i.e. their employers don't pay them
| enough to live on so those benefits are essentially
| subsidising companies
|
| And the other large chunk is people who aren't fit to
| work, this increased as a result of Covid but also the
| underfunding of health / social care by the previous
| government
|
| The civil service isn't that big but the largest influx
| of people was caused by Brexit and the need to duplicate
| many of the things that didn't need to be separate when
| part of the EU
|
| The people who've been living off printed money as those
| with assets, almost all the gains from the cheap money
| supply over the last 15 or so years has gone to the well
| off
| sealeck wrote:
| > The other problem is the welfare state or just the
| state. So much graft and just living off printed money.
| It pushes out success.
|
| I see these uninformed comments all the time, and to be
| they suggest that the person in question has an intense
| ideological bent, but an aversion to evidence. As another
| commenter pointed out, a large amount of UK benefits
| spending (~PS100bn) is on the state pension (the single
| largest benefit).
|
| You are correct that there are a large number of
| economically inactive people in the UK (something like
| 20% of working-age people). We have had at least 50 years
| of government presupposing that the problem here is that
| these people are lazy, and a little stick will motivate
| them back to work. The mere fact that this has not worked
| (and we have tried it repeatedly) might suggest that the
| problem is a bit more complex than this.
|
| One issue is that the general health of the population is
| very poor. Unfortunately, improving this is a very hard
| problem. I think people underestimate just how hard. If
| you could solve this, you would create hundreds of
| billions of pounds in value (I am not underestimating).
| Presumably some starting points would be working out how
| to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase
| the cost of ultra-processed fast food. Not sure what else
| helps here. I would give this a read:
| https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=61595
|
| The other problem is that there are no jobs for the
| people in question, so even if they want to work (or are
| heavily incentivised to do so) they are not able to. The
| government can create some employment for these people,
| but a better vocational training system might help here.
|
| The graft and living off printed money I do see is mostly
| in housing - people in the UK love to own and rent out
| houses. This means that (compared to e.g.
| Germany/Switzerland/Austria) there are very weak
| protections for renters. Additionally, when house prices
| are really high it makes it very challenging to build
| industries on top of this.
| Symbiote wrote:
| > Presumably some starting points would be working out
| how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and
| increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food.
|
| Britain has implemented a sugar tax, but I despair when
| even a right-wing governments attempt to make walking and
| cycling easier falls victim to culture war nonsense.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| It's exhausting trying to explain this to American leftists.
| They believe the UK / EU is rich, their healthcare is amazing
| and "free", and no one has to work more than 35 hours a week.
| They visit London and Paris once in 10 years for vacation and
| think they understand the economic order.
| riffraff wrote:
| Both things can be true: I am happy with the European
| welfare state and still think there are structural
| problems.
|
| UK and EU _are_ rich, even if their economy is not doing
| great.
| alecco wrote:
| European corporations and political class are rich and
| benefit from high GDP stimulated by mass migration and
| foreign funds cornering the housing market.
|
| But European salaries are stagnating and job security is
| dropping like a stone, while the cost of living is
| steadily rising. And public healthcare is getting
| terrible with months of wait for an appointment.
|
| Spain is now used as example of a growing economy in EU
| but youth unemployment is high and rising and wages are
| peanuts compared to housing. A lot of native Spanish kids
| are just checking out. I guess the Spanish corporations
| and foreign investors are having a blast. And the boomers
| with their fat pensions and renting their real estate
| portfolio.
|
| Of note, the same is happening even in China. I feel
| really bad for Gen Z.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Ah yes, my fabulous Dutch healthcare basically consisting
| of being told "you're fine" and overpriced acetaminophen.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Ironically when we were living in Ireland and my daughter
| was going to have to wait 16 months to get a suspicious
| growth checked for cancer it was the UK that made it
| possible for us to go to a private clinic near Belfast
| and have her checked in a week. And it still wasn't even
| expensive. Free healthcare isn't actually free if you die
| waiting.
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| alecco wrote:
| Only the Conservatives? You think Blair, Brown, and now
| Starmer did great things for the country? Give me a
| break. The whole political class is rotten. And the
| upcoming "Reform UK" is a joke, to say the least.
| defrost wrote:
| > You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great
| things for the country?
|
| No, but apparently _you_ think that I think that. Perhaps
| you might like to work through that again ...
|
| Leaving the state of the UK as a whole to one side, the
| NHS was actively kicked like a dog prior to Blair who did
| at least stop kicking it and attempt to reverse the
| decline with some, albeit limited, success.
|
| eg: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1871752/
| alecco wrote:
| The comment I replied to only places blame on
| Conservatives. There is a name for this: "lying by
| omission".
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| amenhotep wrote:
| I'm currently being treated by the NHS and they've been
| excellent, and I got a same day appointment with a doctor
| last week.
|
| Admittedly I did phone the surgery at 0800 to get it. But
| this is awful hyperbole.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Certainly not my experience. Phone up for an appointment
| and get it same day.
|
| Seems to be a postcode lottery
| zelos wrote:
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| It's nice here! My kids can bike to school and not be
| killed. But the health care is... meh.
| ta1243 wrote:
| And yet you pay more per capita than the UK
| James_K wrote:
| You should understand that the American situation is, in
| fact, much worse than ours in many ways. For instance, the
| average American pays a 40% tax rate compared to our 25%
| once you account for healthcare.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The majority of Americans pay 0% tax. They get free
| healthcare via Medicaid or Obamacare, and get refunded
| any taxes paid by the EITC.
|
| The richest Americans pay an outsized amount of taxes.
|
| The upper middle class pays a very low tax rate. If your
| family income is less than $500,000 per year, your
| blended tax rate will be around 35%.
|
| Europeans do pay taxes for their healthcare. You can't
| "hide" the taxes Europeans pay, that is illogical
| constantcrying wrote:
| American leftist discourse about Europe is always
| hilarious. Apparently someone forgot to tell them that the
| "free" healthcare just means that it is forcibly deducted
| from your pay and only "free" if you don't work (Free
| meaning the people who work pay for you). Also they forget
| to mention that the actual health care system is
| chronically understaffed and that you should avoid the
| hospital if at all possible and that you might wait months
| to see a specialist.
|
| Car discourse is another very good one. Apparently
| Europeans just really hate cars and take bikes/busses
| everywhere. They seem to genuinely believe that the US is
| the only country in the world with a car culture.
| realusername wrote:
| I lived and worked in both countries and I feel like the UK
| is in a worse situation than France nowadays.
|
| It's hard to admit for French citizens but the EU
| significantly props up the French economy and reduces the
| structural issues of the country.
| sebmellen wrote:
| EU meaning... Germany?
| realusername wrote:
| EU meaning the rest of the EU, Germany included but
| everybody else is contributing to the common market
| ta1243 wrote:
| Germany provides about the same contribution to EU GDP as
| California and Texas do to the US.
|
| The top 8/51 states(+dc) generate 50% of US GDP, the top
| 3/27 EU generate EU.
|
| The bottom half of EU states generate just 9% of EU GDP,
| but then the bottom half of US states generate 14%
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I have also lived in both and I agree with you. The UK is a
| lot worse.
|
| At least France has some things going for it, healthcare is
| still good, unemployment benefits are good, etc.
|
| The UK has literally nothing to show for.
| alecco wrote:
| Arguing about which sinking ship is going down faster.
| izacus wrote:
| When in reality neither are actually sinking.
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| A few here have commented on different aspects, and they have
| their part to play but I agree with you, market fragmentation
| is the scale killer.
|
| From an outside perspective it might appear like Europe is a
| true single market like the US but it isn't. Scaling to a
| European level isn't impossible but it is difficult. Some of
| that will just be difficult to do anything about, language,
| different cultures, etc. On the political side I'm sure there
| is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.
| James_K wrote:
| Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as
| a language goes. The language barrier is just the cost of a
| translator. Is that cost prohibitively high in Europe? I
| hear a lot of explanations of why Europe has fewer tech
| companies than America, but they are almost never backed by
| statistics. The most obvious answer continues to be the
| Bretton Woods system, by which large amounts of money are
| funnelled into America, seemingly without reason. China
| inverts this flow by debasing its currency, and Europe does
| not.
| sealeck wrote:
| > The language barrier is just the cost of a translator.
|
| Is it?
|
| > Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far
| as a language goes.
|
| Market fragmentation isn't about language fragmentation -
| the EU has no single market for services currently, which
| means if you want to launch a product EU-wide you are
| effectively launching a product in 27 different
| countries. There is some harmonization, but not much. If
| you launch a product in the US you have a large fully
| harmonized single market.
| izacus wrote:
| The most bizarre thing is that the loudest critics of EUs
| market fragmentation are usually the most aggressive
| blockers of integration that would mitigate these issues.
| James_K wrote:
| What exactly is the current single market for services
| lacking?
|
| https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/single-
| market/ser...
|
| They seem to have a lot of bases covered.
| eunos wrote:
| Well specifically for engineering-related products (both
| software and hardware).
|
| How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors
| in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid
| ecosystem and generous support from the government?
|
| I am specifically worried about the future of European
| engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and
| moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy
| built by your predecessors.
|
| If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all
| would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds,
| or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they
| not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.
|
| Quantity has a quality of its own.
| mhh__ wrote:
| 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.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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 cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of
| our university cities at the edges without much better
| transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro
| rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as
| well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.
|
| And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated
| people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities,
| and I don't just mean London.
| CalRobert wrote:
| BUUUT MuHHH PAAARRRKiiiiNNNGGGG!! (And house values). And
| we can't _possibly_ make the town look different than it
| did in 1972 because "heritage".
|
| We're talking about a bunch of crusty old church biddies
| who will literally force you to put the most godawful,
| hideous house covering in the history of man BACK on your
| house because they're terrified of being reminded it's not
| the 70's.
|
| (Sorry for the mail link)
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592033/Put-
| pebble-...
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Accurate.
|
| In fact, the only post 1972 thing you ARE allowed to do
| is pave over your front garden and park two Jeep
| Cherokees (neither of which actually fit in the available
| space) on it.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Ah yes, it's a delight that the pavements are now covered
| in SUV's too because they're too big to park legally.
| Very in keeping with the distinct cultural heritage of
| the area.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| But build a bike lane or even a bike shed, and they'll
| drag the city council all the way to the EU Supreme
| Court, even though half of that demographic voted Brexit.
| happymellon wrote:
| And the neighbours don't have any of that awful looking
| pebble dash.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| Yes there are ridiculous rules like that are enforced.
| However tbh she should have checked first.
|
| Rules around how the area should look, should be decided
| by people that live there. There are many better examples
| where it makes a lot of sense for the locals to be strict
| about rules about what can be erected.
|
| I used to live near the Village of Corfe Castle.
| Generally the argument is that the place would lose its
| character and it won't be the same place anymore if it
| didn't keep its distinctive look.
|
| https://corfecastle.co.uk/the-village/
|
| If you would just start building places that don't fit in
| with the rest of the village. The village wouldn't have
| it character and thus it wouldn't have its tourism in the
| Summer as a result.
|
| There countless towns and village with a bunch of
| heritage that literally goes back maybe a millennia and
| the argument that we should throw this away to build a
| load of crap houses (new houses BTW are awful, I've
| looked at many in the last few years) is completely
| asinine.
| CalRobert wrote:
| But it's _good_ when houses look different. Growing up my
| family would drive around new developments and say "ugg,
| these cookie-cutter houses all look the same, I miss when
| you we built unique and individual houses" and then it's
| jarring to move somewhere where people value conformity
| above all else and being different is considered bad. God
| forbid your house has eaves.
|
| Explains a lot, actually.
|
| I'm not talking about knocking down thousand-year old
| houses. I note that your example doesn't seem to have a
| problem putting car parks in, incidentally. But "locals"
| (aka old people with enormous amounts of time on their
| hands who bizarrely feel the right to tell other people
| what their home should look like) insisting that
| everything stay mediocre forever because they grew up
| with it this way is a bit much.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| I think it is perfectly fine that people that actually
| _live_ in an area get to decide what it looks like. If
| people don 't involve themselves in that process and it
| is monopolized by people "with too much time on their
| hands" that is their fault. If they don't like the busy
| bodies then they should _make time_ and actually go to
| the meetings.
|
| You decide you own level of involvement in the community.
|
| > I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem
| putting car parks in, incidentally.
|
| It is very interesting that whenever you bring up an
| example where it illustrates a particular point well,
| they will try to find _anything_ they can point to so
| they can dismiss the general point being made. Guess
| what, a place in rural England that you can only travel
| easily to via car or coach will prioritise parking.
|
| BTW I suspect knowing that area, you probably couldn't
| build anything other than parking in those places.
| CalRobert wrote:
| The challenge is that the people who _live_ in an area
| use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes
| very expensive or outright impossible. The people who
| would _like_ to live in that area have no say, and lack
| representation.
|
| The bigger picture here is that it means even two
| rational people can inadvertently make the situation
| worse for themselves.
|
| Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B
|
| Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A
|
| Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city
| A, because it makes their own home worth more.
|
| Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City
| B, because it makes their own home worth more.
|
| It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up
| worse off.
|
| And I just meant that the car park is butt-ugly and shows
| the council's true priorities. They could at least put it
| on the edge of the village.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| > The challenge is that the people who live in an area
| use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes
| very expensive or outright impossible. The people who
| would like to live in that area have no say, and lack
| representation.
|
| Okay so what? I think that is perfectly fine. It isn't
| necessary for everyplace to cater for everyone.
|
| > The bigger picture here is that it means even two
| rational people can inadvertently make the situation
| worse for themselves. > > Person A lives in City A, but
| wants to move to City B > > Person B lives in City B, but
| wants to move to City A > > Person A votes to make it
| hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their
| own home worth more. > > Person B votes to make it hard
| to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own
| home worth more. > > It makes sense in a self-interested
| way but both wind up worse off.
|
| These seems like a fantasy scenario to me. Typically
| people are either moving to a particular area, or out of
| a particular area, not swapping one nice affluent area
| for another equally affluent area (which is somewhat
| assumed in your scenario).
|
| The reason btw housing is expensive is because housing
| became an investment vehicle isn't because of nimby's and
| we have about 600,000 (net) people entering the UK every
| year.
| CalRobert wrote:
| So... if I move to a county I can decide nobody else gets
| to build a house there? Even on land I don't own?
| GasVeteran wrote:
| That isn't the argument being made and you know it.
| CalRobert wrote:
| It very much is, in the aggregate.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| Not at all. It is quite clear that you are doing the
| "lets take this to the logical extreme". That might be
| fine in some sort of debate club tactic but it isn't what
| I was suggesting should happen at all and you know it. So
| I think we will leave it there.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| That's fair when it comes to villages, but it's mostly
| the edge of small cities, and within larger ones, that
| growth needs to happen - because that's where
| infrastructure exists or can be added on.
|
| Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box
| nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to
| get work done.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| The issue is that those cities end up growing into the
| countryside. I like there is a big green barrier between
| Greater Manchester and Macclesfield.
| CalRobert wrote:
| It would help if the cities and larger towns built higher
| and denser.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| Yes lets cram everyone in like sardines in massive sky-
| scrapers that blots out the sky.
|
| The other alternative is that the UK doesn't allow
| 600,000 people (net) in every year.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The usual suggestion is to build cities more like Berlin
| (for example) which has an inner city with many 4-6
| storey buildings -- much denser than London's terraced
| houses, but without the isolation of skyscrapers.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| These are all solutions that ignore the main problem.
| They literally cannot build enough properties (whatever
| they are) to fill current demand. Even if they relax the
| regulations that we currently have in place. Even there
| were enough properties built the infrastructure for
| utilities can't be scaled easily. There are issues
| building new properties right now because the electric
| grid cannot handle the combination of that and large data
| centres.
|
| Since supply of house cannot be increased to solve this
| problem, you need to lessen the demand. The most obvious
| way to do this that I can see is to put a cap on
| immigration that is much lower than the number of people
| leaving (about 400,000 people leave the UK each year).
| However for various reasons this is seen as absolute
| verboten.
|
| BTW, I know exactly the type of buildings you are talking
| about (we have them in Manchester) and they are typically
| look awful and usually start falling apart after shortly
| after construction. They are also not very nice to live
| in (I have lived in one for short amount of time).
| twic wrote:
| Hold on though, that's not 1970s pebble dash, that's
| 1920s pebble dash, that was on the house when it was
| built (ish - seems that area was built up between 184 and
| 1914). The house is in a conservation area, which means
| you've got to keep it looking original. If you don't want
| to do that, just don't move to a conservation area!
|
| Found a non-Mail link BTW:
| https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/planning-
| inspecto...
| youngtaff wrote:
| It's also the quality of the build... most new build houses
| are shit because the house building companies are more
| interested in their profit than the quality of the product
|
| If we made cars like we make houses there'd be a long queue
| outside every car dealer as people returned them to get
| their money back
| Earw0rm wrote:
| That's partly (but not entirely) survivor bias.
|
| The Victorians built a lot of absolute garbage.
|
| Much of it was destroyed during or immediately after
| WWII, or extensively - and expensively - renovated at the
| tail end of the 20th century. Some of it muddles on in
| not-really-fit-for-purpose condition: terraced houses
| with lath-and-plaster walls between units, street plans
| that can't accommodate modern requirements for recycling
| bins, parking and so on, homes that are difficult to
| insulate or retrofit with modern heating.
|
| It's a bit like software that's been in use for 20 years.
| Most of the bugs have been worked out, and all the mid-
| tier stuff that was written at the same time has been
| abandoned and forgotten.
|
| Meanwhile, a lot of those beautiful-from-the-outside
| Georgian and Regency townhouses that dominate the streets
| of much of inner London? In many cases they're really not
| that great to live in, unless you gut them and rebuild
| the entire inside.
|
| I'm not saying all new-builds are great, mind. Some of
| what I've seen seems particularly mean - small and high-
| density, despite being in the middle of nowhere - all the
| cons of density without any of the pros. You'd think we'd
| have learned by now, but no.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I think the new builds also highlight the problem in that
| we're mostly obsessed with building these weird not-
| quite-a-town clumps of houses rather than actually
| growing patterns that we know work.
|
| That and people have no taste. I like Poundbury, but I
| would also accept some modernist Foster-ville if someone
| actually did it and was prepared to put their foot down
| to make it consistent.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Oh, I'm not saying old houses are better (although many
| of them have more generous sized rooms and plots)
|
| I'm saying as an absolute that the quality of most new
| build houses in the UK is shit from both design and
| construction perspectives
|
| A key test for me is look at the back of a new build
| house and see how ugly many of them are - they literally
| design them to have curb appeal but no appeal when you're
| sitting in the back garden.
|
| They fit them with smaller windows so they don't have to
| add as much insulation... the list of shitty things the
| major housebuilders do is pretty long
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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).
| mhh__ wrote:
| Yes, so destroy the current system, then we can do all
| that. All we basically need is a system that can properly
| facilitate "Yes, but" rather than "No" and has a mechanism
| for bartering.
|
| Also I don't think you're right about university cities.
| Taking Cambridge for example, it's completely strangled,
| and not by a need for buses. The causality is backwards.
| torginus wrote:
| I heard the joke that the man who contributed the most to
| modern London's urban planning was called Adolf Hitler.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| The problem is the institutions are unaccountable and can't
| be easily made controllable by the electorate again. Bank of
| England, the judiciary etc. These control the country not the
| MPs. Blair onward
| mhh__ wrote:
| Judicial review at the moment is just completely insane.
|
| If you want to do _anything_ it takes the best part of a
| decade of planning and environmental review, in large part
| because there are a small army of charitable organisations
| (often with their fees capped) waiting to challenge
| absolutely everything.
|
| A government consultation was recently blocked! A
| consultation!
|
| We need to completely destroy this system, they can do
| something useful instead. Angels sing whenever a Quango
| dies.
| lobochrome wrote:
| Well - care to be joined by the Germans? It's the reason I am
| now living in Japan...
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| What made you move from Germany to Japan?
| vv_ wrote:
| How did you get a job in Japan? What were the requirements?
| lobochrome wrote:
| Speaking the language helps. Also working in a highly
| specialized field.
| vv_ wrote:
| If it isn't a secret, what field?
|
| Do you think it is possible for an Embedded SE to find
| work in Japan?
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Exactly. It's not merely the Fabian state, being ruled by
| lawyers, by socialist agitators, it is the vast swathes of
| proles who cheer every time they crush success or do wealth
| appropriations. It feels like you are always just two steps
| away from being rounded up in a pogrom for merely having
| savings.
|
| The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings.
| It's horrid.
| truckerbill wrote:
| How much savings do you have? Is it used for rent-seeking
| behaviour? I think that's the key issue the country is
| facing.
|
| If you have a little padding no-one will be coming for you.
|
| Everyone in power is desparately trying dance around tax
| reform. When you tax productive work much more heavily than
| unproductive work (looking at our etf holdings grow and
| crowding out home/business owners with buy-to-lets), you are
| going to get stagnation.
| bloqs wrote:
| It's not, its just that you are swept into the news cycle of
| doomerism where engagement is established with FUD. The UK is
| fine compared to many of its peer nations in many areas.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's not quite that bad - the news obviously makes it seem like
| it's worse than it is. Also we finally got rid of the Tories,
| so at least things are heading in the right direction. I made a
| list of some positive changes Labour have made already:
|
| * Allow onshore wind
|
| * Means tested winter fuel allowance
|
| * Inheritance tax for farms
|
| * Assisted dying bill (controversial but I think generally
| people are in favour of this)
|
| * Scrapping the public footpath registration deadline
|
| The only stupid thing I think they've done is the porn site age
| testing thing, but that was also a Tory policy.
|
| IMO the big problem is the right-wing media. Take something
| like the winter fuel allowance. _Very obviously_ the right
| thing to do, and even pensioners were generally in favour
| (check this article:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gegy4r9ndo ), yet it
| still somehow a huge controversy with disingenuous articles
| even on the BBC like this one fuelling the faux outrage:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80l9lde5yjo
|
| How can we make any improvements if such obviously good changes
| meet such an irrational reaction?
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Keep importing skilled workers. I'm sure it will work out for you
| eventually. /s
|
| Seriously, I feel bad for our British bretheren. The UK
| government is seemingly out of control and actively working
| against the people. There are also long-running geopolitical
| trends like outsourcing to contend with. Talk too much about
| these things and you're probably getting sent to prison. It's
| time for the US to bring some democracy to the UK lol.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you switch UK and USA in your post and you are right
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Lol the US is not without its problems but the UK is worse,
| hands down.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| Try unfollowing Musk for a bit. It'll do you good.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Try unfollowing CNN, MSNBC, and BBC for a bit. It'll do
| you good.
| bdangubic wrote:
| that's like a US election, eh? you drunk at 2:00am and
| there's two of the ugliest people on Earth at the bar but
| you know you taking one of the home :) I'd still pick MSM
| over fucking Elon :)
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| So you'd pick whiny crybabies calling everyone they don't
| like "literally Hitler" over a cool but somewhat flawed
| tech entrepreneur who drops based memes on the regular.
| Sounds lame.
| bdangubic wrote:
| "cool but somewhat flawed" is interesting way to describe
| a person who was balding in his 20's and could not get
| laid and who now has more complexes than just about any
| human that ever lived...
|
| yea, give me fucking CNN every day of the week and twice
| on sunday
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > Talk too much about these things and you're probably getting
| sent to prison.
|
| This trope is getting a bit ridiculous. For the record, the
| event that inspired the notion that complaining online could
| get you sent to person involved individuals encouraging the
| public to burn down council offices[1] and a hotel[2].
|
| Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious
| offences in English law for centuries, and that's even before
| you add the murder part to it.
|
| [1]: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/man-jailed-7-half-
| years-e...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.nottinghamshire.police.uk/news/nottinghamshire/n...
|
| PS. I am nonetheless aware that we burnt down the White House.
| On behalf of Britain, sorry about that.
| Duwensatzaj wrote:
| Google's not pulling it up but I swear I read about police
| visitations for immigration criticism that didn't involve
| calls for murder or arson.
|
| The UK arrests people for writing the n-word on Twitter
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/black-twitter-
| ra... or praying silently near abortion clinics.
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo so it's not
| exactly a stretch.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Here's one:
|
| As relayed by Russian propaganda outlets:
| https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/1820724008637063664
|
| Reuters fact check: https://www.reuters.com/fact-
| check/video-arrest-over-faceboo...
|
| >VERDICT Missing context. The clip shows a June 2024
| arrest, according to Devon and Cornwall Police, and
| predates the Southport knife attack by around a month.
|
| Hence not debunked (a strategy we're used too).
|
| Times article on the subject: https://archive.ph/3OkeG
| Police arresting nine people a day in fight against web
| trolls
|
| >More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last
| year over so-called trolling on social media and other
| online forums, a rise of nearly 50 per cent in two years,
| according to figures obtained by The Times.
|
| >About half of the investigations were dropped before
| prosecutions were brought, however, leading to criticism
| from civil liberties campaigners that the authorities are
| over-policing the internet and threatening free speech.
|
| >Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group,
| said the Crown Prosecution Service emphasised section 127
| was to be used only in "extreme circumstances". "But the
| problem is 'grossly offensive' is not something you should
| normally be prosecuted for. It's not showing harm to other
| people. It's not showing that somebody is being harassed
| ... attacked or threatened."
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| This gaslighting is getting a bit ridiculous. The oppression
| did not start in the wake of Southport, it has been in place
| for years. But I'm going to talk about Southport first.
| People were arrested for pointing out that the Southport
| murderer was a Muslim terrorist. Well guess what, he was:
| https://news.sky.com/story/southport-stabbings-suspect-
| faces... The media said it was all disinformation and put
| forth many straw man claims to smear people who are fed up
| with their government covering for the crimes for immigrants.
|
| >Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious
| offences in English law for centuries, and that's even before
| you add the murder part to it.
|
| I'm not defending conspiracy to commit arson. It is a fact
| that people have been jailed for far less serious things. I
| heard some reports that people were jailed for recording the
| riots or even posting about the existence of the riots.
|
| Nevermind arson, Britain jails people for flame wars online:
| https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2017/10/14/british-
| police-a... And that is OLD, and nothing has changed. I hear
| regular reports of absurd arrests coming out of the UK.
|
| As the article says, "section 127 of the Communications Act
| 2003, [...] makes it illegal to intentionally "cause
| annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another"" and
| that can be and regularly is used to punch down on people
| expressing simple grievances. It is entirely subjective what
| causes "annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety" or is
| intended to do so. Our mere existence probably causes
| annoyance and inconvenience to some people. Got a problem
| with immigrants who don't respect your culture and
| disproportionately commit all the crimes? Well, it is going
| to cause some brown people to be anxious if you talk about
| it, so off to the slammer you go. That is truly how it goes,
| unless you're in a good position to fend off political
| attacks.
| switch007 wrote:
| > This gaslighting is getting a bit ridiculous
|
| Totally agree
|
| They always take the extreme part of your posts, find a
| minor counter claim, then imply we have total free speech
| youngtaff wrote:
| He wasn't a Muslim he was brought up a Christian!
|
| The rumours were he was an asylum seeker who came over on a
| boat
|
| But as you end up quoting Breitbart what hope is there
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Just because someone was "brought up as a Christian"
| doesn't mean they are one. And he WAS a terrorist or
| wannabe terrorist, as evidenced by everything said in
| that article. You're over here whining about Breitbart as
| your neighbors are being jailed for merely talking about
| these issues in a way that displeases your overlords.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Just because he was a wannabe terrorist doesn't make him
| a Muslim which what you claimed
|
| The people who were jailed were generally jailed for
| rioting and incitement to riot
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| He was at least Muslim-adjacent, I think we can agree.
| Does it matter? Immigrant with ties to Al Qaida plots
| terror attack and actually murders people, comment
| section screaming "Ackshually he was not proven to be a
| Muslim" for real...
|
| >The people who were jailed were generally jailed for
| rioting and incitement to riot
|
| And I'm sure that given that officials gave many of them
| a year in prison, just a week after arrest, and after
| letting real criminals out to make room in the prisons,
| and after promising to make examples of them, means
| justice was served. Give me a break. Obviously the
| authorities can claim that anything calmly painting
| immigrants or even known criminals in a bad light is
| inciting a riot. It means nothing when laws are as
| screwed up as they are in the UK.
| youngtaff wrote:
| The people released were nearing the release point of the
| sentence and many would have been released due to prison
| overcrowding anyway
|
| People trying to burn down hotels with migrants in or
| wanting to attack Mosques, and those encouraging are real
| criminals too you know
|
| And he wasn't an immigrant, he was born in Cardiff!
|
| Rather than casting vague assertions about the role of
| the authorities you can go read why people were jailed as
| it's public record
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| >And he wasn't an immigrant, he was born in Cardiff!
|
| Minor children of immigrants count as immigrants as well
| IMO.
|
| >Rather than casting vague assertions about the role of
| the authorities you can go read why people were jailed as
| it's public record
|
| I've seen enough examples of BS to not trust your system,
| the reporting, or even most court records. I also don't
| have time to go read a ton of legal transcripts in other
| countries. The fact that many people that have been
| arrested for being perceived as rude online or in person
| is all I need to prove my point.
| youngtaff wrote:
| So you don't live in Britain but are claiming to be
| knowledgeable about what happened here!
|
| And when challenged you decide to produce your own
| definitions of things... when are you deporting Melina
| and Barron?
| Earw0rm wrote:
| You've got the wrong end of this one.
|
| UK has long pursued a strategy of "social mobility", which is
| shorthand for: some places will be shit, and if you're
| hardworking or clever you can and should leave.
|
| So the bright, capable people from white working-class towns
| either joined the middle classes or skipped the country
| entirely a generation or two ago.
|
| Leaving behind a bunch of people for whom no wage will tempt
| them to London to do the hard, menial work needed to keep the
| city running. So on that front we have no choice but to import.
|
| The people left behind either have caring responsibilities that
| means they can't move, long term health problems and
| disabilities, or just lack the basic work ethic, motivation and
| so on to get on in life.
|
| Ultimately who's going to mop the floors at City banks and so
| on? It won't be the bright, ambitious kids of second and third
| generation immigrant families, not if they can at all help it,
| nor the sons and daughters of white middle classes, whether
| that's metropolitan elites or the trades and services people.
|
| (This, btw, is why immigrants are generally hard working:
| "people willing to relocate their lives halfway around the
| world to an often hostile culture where they'll never truly be
| at home" is a strong filter for people with drive and
| motivation. Those lacking it stay home, regardless of which
| host and guest culture we're talking about).
| GasVeteran wrote:
| There is a constant narrative that is pushed on everyone that
| immigration is necessary because people won't do the menial
| jobs. There is a huge number of problems with this this
| narrative.
|
| * Menial jobs were/are normally done in the past by younger
| more inexperienced people. These were usually done part time
| while in education. This allows younger people to build basic
| competency and money management skills. They aren't supposed
| to be jobs for life and _everyone_ knew this in the past. By
| constantly importing people from to do these jobs, you stop
| younger people from building up this basic competency. This
| stuff is important btw, as I know many people who never had
| these jobs and had the bank of Mum and Dad pay for them for
| far too long, they don 't know how to manage money.
|
| * A lot of more menial jobs are done by people that are part
| retired. When I was younger I worked with many part retired
| people that had a stressful job and moved away and part
| retired and were on the checkouts out the supermarket,
| cleaning, pushing trolleys or delivering things.
|
| * A lot of immigrants seem to do jobs like Uber Eats,
| Deliveroo and other zero hour contract food delivery jobs. If
| you don't believe me, go to your local McDonalds at 8am on a
| Saturday morning and every driver picking up food will be a
| immigrant of one sort or another. These are jobs where people
| are literally too lazy to drive 5 minutes to the McDonalds
| drive through on a Saturday morning. I am normally very pro-
| free market however do we really need to immigrants to do
| these jobs? I don't use Uber Eats and I have no idea how much
| it costs, but I think the guy up the road that has a small
| mansion a Jag and Two Teslas can probably afford to pay a bit
| more for delivery.
|
| * I am from the South of the UK. If you aren't from London or
| another big city, London is one of the most horrid places to
| visit, work. I spent maybe a 4 months working as a freelancer
| in London (travelling in). People are downright rude,
| everything is a ripoff. I'd rather be slightly worse off and
| live here than be "better" off an live in London.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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 cafe 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 Russell Group uni on
| cruise control, and getting top grades AND having a part
| time job AND hobbies and a social life isn't easy.
|
| Then you have menial work that's actually fairly skilled.
| Social care, childcare and so on. That's not something a
| student is going to do for a couple of years on the way to
| something better.
|
| And a shift, for various reasons, to the contracted-out
| agency model for cleaning. Mostly done by immigrants, but
| they work harder than most semi-retired Brits would be
| willing to. Even if they're less flexible than the old boy
| who'd fix a bad door or window as well as sweeping the
| floor, and have none of his loyalty.
|
| UberEats on the other hand is taking the mick. A lot of
| their workers are undocumented, the self-employed
| contractor status allows the operator to avoid the normally
| stringent penalties for immigration law breaches. I don't
| know if they lobbied for the law to be that way, but it's a
| massive loophole. So this is illegal work and maybe
| shouldn't be conflated with legit immigration. How much
| it's a problem I'm not sure.. the actual numbers are quite
| small, but like the loudspeakers on the bus thing, it's a
| very visible breach of the norms and rules, so there's an
| argument that it's bad for society on that basis. And like
| I say, the operator is blatantly exploiting it, they can't
| be blind to what's going on. I'm pretty liberal on
| immigration, miss the positive contribution the former
| Eastern Bloc countries made prior to Brexit, but the whole
| food delivery sector is overdue a clean out.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| > 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 cafe work, but that's
| about it.
|
| That is often repeated but I don't think that is quite as
| true as people make out. There aren't robots yet (or
| likely to be) stacking the supermarket shelves. Yes self
| service has taken most of the cashier jobs (not all btw).
|
| > And a shift, for various reasons, to the contracted-out
| agency model for cleaning. Mostly done by immigrants, but
| they work harder than most semi-retired Brits would be
| willing to. Even if they're less flexible than the old
| boy who'd fix a bad door or window as well as sweeping
| the floor, and have none of his loyalty.
|
| In other countries to emigrate there you need to have
| skills they _need_. When I moved abroad previously the
| company had to justify looking outside of the country to
| employ me. I don 't understand how it can be justified
| that they can't find cleaning staff. BTW I employ a
| cleaner so I know roughly how much they cost.
|
| > UberEats on the other hand is taking the mick. A lot of
| their workers are undocumented, the self-employed
| contractor status allows the operator to avoid the
| normally stringent penalties for immigration law
| breaches. I don't know if they lobbied for the law to be
| that way, but it's a massive loophole. So this is illegal
| work and maybe shouldn't be conflated with legit
| immigration. How much it's a problem I'm not sure.. the
| actual numbers are quite small, but like the loudspeakers
| on the bus thing, it's a very visible breach of the norms
| and rules, so there's an argument that it's bad for
| society on that basis. And like I say, the operator is
| blatantly exploiting it, they can't be blind to what's
| going on. I'm pretty liberal on immigration, miss the
| positive contribution the former Eastern Bloc countries
| made prior to Brexit, but the whole food delivery sector
| is overdue a clean out.
|
| It doesn't matter whether it is small or not (I don't
| think it as small as you are making out). It shouldn't be
| happening. Also just because you don't like the people
| that are highlighting this issue, doesn't mean that the
| issue isn't important.
|
| The reason why things are a mess is that nothing gets
| sorted out properly in the UK. We have had leadership
| failures now for years.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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.
| GasVeteran wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Most of the skilled labour that I've encountered in the
| UK from immigration was Indians etc. that Accenture
| brought over. It is a gold ticket for the Indian
| developers and it is cheaper than paying people like me.
| So they do the same thing from the most skilled to the
| least skilled if the company is large enough.
|
| > There's no way you can just bring a cleaner over from
| abroad because you want someone to clean your
| house/office.
|
| I wasn't claiming to. I was saying that I know roughly
| what the costs are.
|
| > 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.
|
| This feels like a false dichotomy. Many things can be
| done quickly if the bureaucracy wills it. The fact is
| that they don't.
| JaDogg wrote:
| Could you elaborate further? I am a skilled immigrant in the
| UK. I pay my taxes and have not used any benefits. I even pay
| for my medication; the only free service I have used is a GP
| appointment or a hospital scan, which was likely covered by the
| IHS (Immigration Health Surcharge).
|
| What have I done to make the country worse off?
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| It's nothing against you personally. I'm sure many immigrants
| are good people and some scarce skilled workers must be
| imported. But there seems to be a desire from the top to
| import too many foreign workers across the West. This
| contributes to the low wages and lack of opportunities
| described in the article.
|
| The UK also has outsourced a lot of manufacturing, which
| further worsens the job market. I don't know how many
| hardware engineers are imported unnecessarily or else part of
| "offshoring," but by all indications I've seen personally the
| number may be significant. This is from an outside US
| perspective, so take it with a grain of salt.
| constantcrying wrote:
| If you are opening your job market to the entire world, the
| average salary for your workers will become the global average
| salary.
|
| It is pretty trivial to see that this is exactly what is going
| to happen and the weighted average of UK and Indian wages are
| pretty close to Indian wages.
| tidenly wrote:
| I left the UK after graduating at 21, fully intending to come
| back within a couple of years. Its weird watching it from the
| outside for 10 years waiting for a "good time" to move back and
| realizing that time isn't coming more and more each year.
|
| The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the quality
| of life and how far my money goes is so much better than if I
| lived back at the UK. Every time I go back it seems more and more
| people are struggling to pay for basic expenses - and even if I
| moved back it seems get a great salary I'd have to live in
| London, which I dislike.
|
| I imagine lots of people far more talented than me must also be
| feeling the pull to not stay in the country too. Its festering
| politically and economically. Besides family there really is no
| benefit to remaining.
| tjpnz wrote:
| >The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the
| quality of life and how far my money goes is so much better
| than if I lived back at the UK.
|
| In a similar situation to you apparently. Every couple of years
| I'll take a look at UK as well as NZ and Aus (all places I can
| legally work) and Japan is still the better option. Even with
| the yen situation and despite all the doom and gloom others
| write online, life is still pretty nice here.
| robocat wrote:
| As an NZer, jobs in Australia pay wayyyy better and everyone
| here seems to agree that the lifestyle is better there. Lots
| of NZers move to Oz to improve their life and opportunities.
|
| The NZ economy isn't doing great.
|
| I'm personally worried that demographics and an incoming
| Labour government will mean that if you have saved for your
| retirement our next government will simply tax your savings
| until you have nothing (they keep talking of a 2% wealth tax:
| if we go back to a 4% annual return environment that's 50%
| tax of your savings over time). Plus they are slowly
| introducing means testing or equivalents.
| sgt wrote:
| In the meantime, it seems your parliament is quabbling over
| (the limitation of) Maori rights and so on. I guess the end
| goal is to improve the economy but is the chaos worth it?
| defrost wrote:
| or, alternatively the limitation of Pakeha rights.
|
| It goes to the foundational treaty between the two
| peoples and the land grants and land uses agreed to.
|
| There are sticking points lost in translation, to say the
| least.
| robocat wrote:
| Not worth it. Maori rights are an intractable problem -
| the only way to win is to avoid the topic and punt it to
| a future government. I'm sure you've worked on projects
| sunk by a non-technical distraction so you surely
| understand the mechanics.
|
| National says they (and ACT) are the business party but
| they seem to be mostly windbags. The NZ government
| traditionally screws over businesses and founders - they
| certainly fail to encourage businesses while producing a
| lot of ineffectual programmes.
|
| I don't recommend anyone try and start a business here.
| Plus NZ society generally cuts down tall poppies -
| especially capitalists (sportspeople is the main way to
| achieve without approbation). Be an employee or leech on
| the welfare state are the usual alternatives.
| eunos wrote:
| > Australia pay wayyyy better
|
| well having a relatively small population and bountiful
| natural resources do great wonder.
| lobochrome wrote:
| We should form a club - even though I came here from
| Germany...
| maeil wrote:
| Exact same story for Korea. Dollar-term salaries similar to the
| EU, but when you compare to CoL it's a much better deal.
| timeon wrote:
| How about suicide rates?
| bboygravity wrote:
| IMO the UK should look at what Singapore did and maybe learn
| from that.
|
| There's really no excuse for a country like the UK other than
| ordinary plain and simple mis-management from the top.
|
| Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out
| of 3rd world poverty. To name an example.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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 who
| thinks eating a sensible diet and enacting basic public
| health policy is "woke".
|
| It's a good thing we banned indoor smoking in public
| buildings in the early aughts, there's no way you'd get that
| through in today's political climate.
| pjbster wrote:
| You're not thinking like an economist :) Here's something I
| saw on Twitter (no source):
|
| _The bicycle is the slow death of the planet. General
| Director of Euro Exim Bank Ltd. got economists thinking
| when he said: "A cyclist is a disaster for the country's
| economy: he does not buy cars and does not borrow money to
| buy. He does not pay for insurance policies. He does not
| buy fuel, does not pay for the necessary maintenance and
| repairs. He does not use paid parking. He does not cause
| serious accidents. He does not require multi-lane highways.
| He does not get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor
| useful for the economy. They don't buy medicine. They do
| not go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing is added to the
| country's GDP (gross domestic product). On the contrary,
| every new McDonald's restaurant creates at least 30 jobs:
| 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietary experts and
| nutritionists, and obviously, people who work at the
| restaurant itself." Choose carefully: cyclist or
| McDonald's? It is worth considering. P.S. Walking is even
| worse. Pedestrians don't even buy bicycles._
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Author hasn't been to SW London on a sunny weekend then.
| PS5K bikes strapped to the top of PS70K cars as far as
| the eye can see.
| ta1243 wrote:
| 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.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It's a black hole money-pit everywhere. There is no
| return on spending money for people who will never be
| productive again.
|
| The only way that kind of wealth transfer works is with a
| growing proportion of workers, but that has long not been
| the case in many developed countries.
|
| The solution for all these countries (even the US) is to
| dismantle all wealth transfer to old people. It might be
| the only way to incentivize production of families that
| raise productive children. Or tell old people to expect
| declining quality of life (faster than it already is).
| pjc50 wrote:
| Transferring away from older _voters_ is not going to
| happen, other than very gradually.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| The west is caught in a web of its own creation. We have
| basically incentivized the countries to get older by
| taxing the young to subsidize the rich.
|
| Unfortunately, there's no easy way for democracy to
| correct this. older people vote and are wealthier. Both
| of those mean they have large political power.
| ta1243 wrote:
| More workers to older people ratio
|
| More social care from family (which is unpaid and thus is
| hidden in GDP figures)
|
| Less social care
|
| Expectation in the UK that wealthy old people should not
| pay for their own care and instead poorer working people
| should
| coopierez wrote:
| The UK cannot just "be Singapore". What happened in Singapore
| was a specific, unrepeatable combination of its geography,
| the needs of the region, the size of the country, and the
| culture.
|
| To maintain its wealth today, Singapore relies on a large
| underclass of underpaid non-citizens. Around 40% of the
| country are non-citizens.
|
| In addition, London sort of has its own Singapore(s) in the
| form of the City and Canary Wharf. That's great for those who
| work there, but it's not feasible for a country of nearly 70
| million for everyone to just work in finance.
|
| Final comment:
|
| > Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb
| out of 3rd world poverty
|
| Singapore's wealth is built on trade and foreign investment.
| To assume that without other countries it would be equally
| successful is absurd.
| PakistaniDenzel wrote:
| This is true but there are many policies that the UK could
| copy from other countries like Singapore that would work
| much better than what they are currently doing
| Symbiote wrote:
| Can you give a couple of examples, for those unfamiliar
| with Singapore and/or the UK?
| ta1243 wrote:
| Housing+Development Board comes to mind. Singapore
| housing policies ensures people can afford to live
| somewhere reasonable.
| klelatti wrote:
| And the author's most recent tweet [1] (apart from one referring
| to this HN post):
|
| > Is it just me or is UK's hardware scene really kicking off
| again?
|
| > Founder friends have just raised millions, moved into massive
| warehouses, imported CNC machines and some started metal casting.
|
| > Even SaaS VC friends are talking about hardware now
|
| [1] https://x.com/joseflchen/status/1881058447946391848
| devnullbrain wrote:
| The article mentions Arm, but even they describe themselves as a
| software company[1]
|
| [1] because the implied higher margins mean this attracts more
| investment
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| I'm not from the UK, but I get the same vibe here in Sydney.
| There doesn't seem to be much technical work here, all of it is
| in Silicon Valley.
| RachelF wrote:
| Very true, the Australian scene is so dismal, it makes the UK
| look great.
| Onavo wrote:
| OP's views on British companies are questionable.
|
| > _Consider: Dyson: From a Wiltshire barn to a global technology
| powerhouse, now innovating in Singapore and Malaysia._
|
| The founder of Dyson is a Brexit proponent who enjoys outsourcing
| and playing games with tax havens. I doubt he's doing any
| "innovating" in those places.
|
| Does OP think CS prodigies are building world changing stuff? 90%
| of the top 1% are building SaaS. Perhaps the 0.01% get to work on
| actual foundation model ML research or cutting edge theoretical
| CS. Everybody else will optimize buttons in CSS to pay their
| bills. Software just pays more, it isn't an exception to economic
| forces.
| jbc1 wrote:
| Implementation is what takes that raw R&D and uses it to solve
| problems real problems, which is where it derives it value.
| Armies of people slightly modifying slightly different saas is
| how those foundational ML models end up in the everymans
| workflow.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Reading all this negativity about the UK made me wonder: is it
| possible that the UK throwing in the towel and asking to become
| part of the US could actually become reality? It's an admittedly
| outlandish idea, but suddenly it didn't seem entirely
| preposterous.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why would the US want the UK? The UK does not seem to have
| natural resources that the US would want. The main resource is
| intellectual talent, which is already free for the US to obtain
| via immigration and a common language.
| quacksilver wrote:
| Possibly the UK's worldwide military bases / islands to build
| bases on or mine the oil and some restricted technology.
| Maybe a 'Hong Kong' style outpost in Europe.
|
| May be a bit of a stretch though.
| zipy124 wrote:
| We already offer those, just look at diego garcia
| currently, or RAF Menwith Hill in yorkshire which is an NSA
| base.
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| Probably because 85%+ of the population would reject it.
| t43562 wrote:
| No way. There would be a much bigger loss of "sovrinty" than
| people were prepared to put up with in the EU and that's in the
| miraculous case that the US wanted it.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Nope
| ggm wrote:
| You'd need to change the basis of JV and IPO in the UK, the
| nature of chartered engineering, and probably the laws on being
| declared bankrupt. America has a financial regulatory environment
| which is somewhat unique, and encourages this kind of innovation.
| The UK has a different view both of the financial risk
| management, and of the consequences of engineering.
|
| The history of canals, bridges, roads, railroads and lighthouses
| in the UK is littered with people blowing wads of money up.
| Speculation was rife. I think it led to caution which has stayed
| with us across the victorian era into the modern day.
|
| If you want an object lesson in "god, could we do this better" -I
| was told Australia had world-class optics industry, at the end of
| WWII due to the need to diversify the supply chain and get away
| from European sources now in the Axis. Russia and Japan seized
| the day, while Australia basically _shut itself down_ and gave
| away any market lead. People laugh at russian cameras but the
| glass was excellent, they got half of German tech at wars end.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I left the UK for the USA in 2020. It was only last week that
| another HN commenter finally opened my eyes to the fact that
| since I have left the UK, I have become someone with the ability
| to take things from 0 to 1.[1]
|
| I do not believe I could have achieved what I have in the last
| half-decade if I had stayed in the UK. There is something deeply
| rooted in the UK's contemporary culture (which I cannot yet fully
| explain in words) that serves to crush the individual ambitions
| of the working and middle classes.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705792
| kjellsbells wrote:
| So good to read this and feel...validated, somehow. The UK is
| culturally a very difficult place to start and run a business.
| There's a crabs in the bucket mentality that I didnt have words
| for before I'd left the UK for a few years, but now when I
| visit or do business there is absolutely everywhere.
|
| One business thing that really strikes me is that people in the
| UK treat bankruptcy as a moral failing, as if you cheated your
| investors, and not a strictly financial one, as in, you ran out
| of cash before achieving product market fit. It seems rooted in
| an unusually Victorian ethis, which is ironic, because in that
| era, businesses started and folded all the time.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I wonder how much of this has to do with a more rigid class
| system compared to the US.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Depends on the bankruptcy. Nobody is going to shed tears over
| investors losing out. Speculate to accumulate, risk and
| reward.
|
| But IDK how it works in other countries, UK bankruptcies also
| means customers, unsecured creditors (often other small
| businesses), and the State (payroll taxes) also lose out.
|
| And it leaves a bad taste when a company run at high risk of
| bankruptcy ("oh but we're a Start Up") screws over their
| suppliers which are often more traditional businesses
| (whether that's print designers, lawyers or tradespeople) by
| carrying on trading far into insolvency.
|
| That implies a kind of arrogance ("You just have a business
| which pays it's bills, _I_ have a _vision_ ) which UK culture
| is allergic to.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| In the US, most of those suppliers understand the nature of
| startups and are accustomed to working with them, fully
| aware they are likely to fail. The deals are structured
| appropriate for those realities and some suppliers
| specialize in or have a preference for startups.
|
| In the UK, many suppliers still treat startups like an
| exotic beast, or worse, a corner shop. US business has a
| familiarity and comfort with startups, due in no small part
| from being an increasingly prominent part of the American
| business landscape since the Second World War. It is the
| water they swim in.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| That's interesting!
|
| Here, failing to pay your bills is both a breach of fair
| play, and what "dodgy" people i.e. criminals and con-
| artists do.
|
| But equally it means we can operate a bit more of an
| honour system in terms of lines of credit. Small
| businesses typically allow one another at least some
| amount of credit terms, which they would not offer a
| private individual.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Half my feed is Americans talking how terrible it is, the other
| half non-Americans (or immigrants) praising it.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Anecdotally, the British people I have interacted with in a
| business setting _seem_ to have a dearth of ambition. These
| people weren't depressed, but I sensed a kind of defeatist
| cynicism.
|
| As an American I realize our culture encourages taking risks
| and we are remarkably forgiving of failure. In fact, we seem to
| congratulate people for the fact that they tried in addition to
| overlooking the failure. I'm not sure if this comes from "the
| frontier spirit" or if this mindset used to exist throughout
| the Anglosphere. In any event, I do feel bad for the UK as a
| whole. It just seems like things keep getting worse and at some
| point the national mood becomes a self fulfilling cycle.
| CalRobert wrote:
| American parents: "You can do anything you set your mind to!
| Anyone can be president! If you fail, pick yourself back up
| and try again! Your cousin with the big house started out
| washing cars and built an amazing success from nothing!"
|
| British (and Irish) parents: "The whole system is rigged so
| don't even try, the guy in the big house up the road got it
| through shady government contracts, my uncle can get you a
| job at the council so you'll never, ever get fired, the only
| reason to ever save money is for retirement or a house, your
| cousin who tried to start a company thinks he's better than
| us...."
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| It really starts at a young age.
|
| I remember playing (my) football (your soccer) in school and
| my neighbourhood as a kid.
|
| If you were going to strike you needed to be pretty sure that
| you can score or that you can take the heat from your team
| mates if you fail.
|
| In contrast watching kids play sports in the US, everyone is
| constantly trying to lift each other up after failure.
|
| These small cultural differences easily add up in how you
| carry yourself in business.
|
| Negativity seems to be culturally frowned upon in the US
| (what a downer). Positivity seems to be culturity frowned in
| Europe (naive 'happy go lucky' kind of guy).
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Spot on. I've met several foreign exchange students during
| my time at university. A simple observation from one of
| them really stuck with me: "You Americans really like to
| help strangers."
|
| The "happy go lucky" observation squares with what I have
| been told by my Eastern European friend. Any stranger, or
| mere acquaintance, who is friendly and offering help is
| likely trying to obligate you into repaying the favor later
| on. People who for fall for this are naive or simpletons.
| There's definitely a level of trust that needs to be earned
| before you experience the same kind of positivity and
| goodwill that Americans seem to dole out to "randos" they
| just met.
|
| Right after that "like to help" comment he followed it up
| with: "It is like you are all Golden Retrievers". Which I
| found both hilarious and fitting.
| scientism wrote:
| A theory I've heard of why this happens is that Europeans
| are generally suspicious because there is a lot of
| international trauma considering Europe was the center of
| two World Wars, both relatively recently. The US on the
| other hand didn't have that imprinted in its collective
| memory.
| akomtu wrote:
| It's the UK's aristocracy, most likely. They own nearly
| everything in the UK, haven't earned any of it, and the last
| thing they need is the invasion of rich self-made
| entrepreneurs.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| The same thing is trending in the USA, just got started a
| couple hundred years later.
|
| It'll get there.
| Animats wrote:
| If engineering isn't near the factory, it's not as effective.
|
| Here's one of the most generic electronic components - a 1K
| resistor.[1] These sell for about US$0.0015 each. DigiKey has a
| list of many suppliers.
|
| There are a few old-line US resistor makers in there, including
| Bourns and Ohmite. They're price competitive with Chinese
| companies. But when you look up their engineering job locations,
| none are in the US or UK.[2] Plants are in Mexico, Malaysia,
| Taiwan, and Hungary.
|
| To get prices down, engineers have to be very familiar with what
| goes on in manufacturing. If you separate engineering from
| manufacturing, you get overpriced designs.
|
| Not that many people who went to a good engineering school in a
| first-world country today want to spend their lives inside a big
| factory in a low-wage country. But that's what it takes to make
| stuff.
|
| [1] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/chip-resistor-
| sur...
|
| [2] https://jobs.bourns.com/go/Engineering/9254400/
| nine_k wrote:
| > _spend their lives inside a big factory in a low-wage
| country_
|
| Some gladly would if paid handsomely by the local standards,
| that is, adequately by the US standards.
|
| The bigger problem is raising children away from your native
| culture.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| You should probably recommend them to Apple recruiters, since
| they regularly have shortages of bilingual top tier talent
| willing to work full time at major factories.
|
| Even with extremely generous FAANG salaries in areas with
| cost of living less than a quarter of Cupertino.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| I spent a decade in a low-wage country and the number of
| people who were "glad" to spend even half that much time
| there -- paid handsomely! -- could probably be counted on one
| hand. Virtually the only people who stay longer than 3-5
| years are ones who end up founding their own businesses
| there.
|
| Raising children away from your native culture isn't the deal
| breaker you imply. There are international schools (though,
| with eye-watering fees) and expat enclaves in most places
| I've been.
|
| But very few (effectively zero, though I did come across a
| handful of exceptions) companies treat these employees the
| same way as the ones back in the home country. If you don't
| rotate back to HQ in ~3 years then you're in a career dead-
| end. So you've got this situation where you need people who
| are ultra-ambitious -- willing to throw away all their
| existing social networks to go work in a foreign country for
| years on end! -- but that means those same people aren't
| going to want to stay past their expiration date. And
| companies know that, too. A lot of them make it an explicit
| part of the deal. I met one high-level guy (regional CTO I
| think?) at Coca-Cola who was Indian and the deal with
| corporate was he'd do 3-years in a low-income country (not
| India) but then he'd get transferred to the US. Met some
| people in the oil industry who had similar deals. Do 2 years
| in Vietnam then you get to go to Malaysia or whatever.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| So everyone fully admits that these countries are in fact
| "worse" in every way?
| namdnay wrote:
| I'm not sure what "admission" you're looking for? That
| life is generally better in wealthy countries? Wow big
| surprise
| chronic7300690 wrote:
| > So everyone fully admits that these countries are in
| fact "worse" in every way?
|
| Considering money is the universal currency? Yes. Worse
| in every way.
|
| Churches ask for donations. Women marry rich men. You can
| buy politicians. You can buy more expensive healthcare
| treatments.
|
| Can you do that in a worse SEA country?
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| Being an engineer means mastering your production tool. For
| everything to do with physical production, you need to be close
| to the means of production to gather essential information on
| quality, capacity, operator feedback (machine and quality
| operators are invaluable sources of information.), etc.
|
| Most information is not digital or hardly digitizable.
|
| I don't completely agree with the article's classification of
| ARM as a hardware company. ARM produces VHDL and resells
| licenses, but does not produce any chips. It's closer to a
| software company than a TSMC.
| llm_trw wrote:
| I'd go one further and say you have to be at least a
| journeyman in whatever tools your process is using.
|
| The difference between someone designing a part in cad and
| someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes
| the part in cam is night and day.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| We could discuss this at length, but I completely share
| your point of view. Anyone can design a part that's
| impossible to produce.
|
| The real added value is knowing how something is actually
| going to be made, in how many stages, with what tools, what
| controls will be carried out, with what tools, what the
| acceptance and rejection criteria are, and how these
| criteria have been determined, are essential points.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The difference between someone designing a part in cad
| and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that
| makes the part in cam is night and day.
|
| I remember, in a CNC programming class, the instructor
| calling out one of the students on a lathe program: "One
| millimeter increments?! What material do you think you are
| using? Styrofoam?!".
|
| That class is where I feel in love with the ASR-33 teletype
| and its cadenced hum. It was punching the tapes we feed
| into the CNC machines. I wish I could have bought that
| machine when it was retired not too long after my class.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| > "One millimeter increments?! What material do you think
| you are using? Styrofoam?!"
|
| I'm an EE not a MechE but I'd be truly curious to know if
| there are any MechE programs where a fresh graduate would
| have ever heard the term "feeds & speeds".
|
| In a similar vein, I learned to solder in EE but not
| because of any of my course work. We were lucky enough to
| have an aerospace electronics manufacturer situated on
| the north edge of campus. The IEEE Student Society worked
| out a deal with them where EE students who wanted to
| learn could come and do a 3-hour crash course with the
| techs. I could solder before I did the course, but my
| ability to solder _well_ improved dramatically as a
| result of those 3 hours of training. And, even more
| importantly than learning to solder, I learned a ton of
| things about solderability: what makes a circuit board
| easy to solder and what makes it hard to solder under
| different manual and automated manufacturing techniques
| (wave soldering, paste + pick & place, etc).
| rbanffy wrote:
| > if there are any MechE programs where a fresh graduate
| would have ever heard the term "feeds & speeds".
|
| This was an extracurricular activity, and the MechE's
| were in their fifth year or so. I was in my first year
| (semester, really) and I was suggested I take the course
| because I was already a reasonable programmer and there
| was very little materials in the course, but it was more
| about programming the machines (simple loops, no real
| decisions, etc).
|
| I was doing 0.1mm increments in my code because I "felt"
| steel wouldn't be soft enough for more, but I never got
| any real training on that before second year.
| qazxcvbnmlp wrote:
| My brother, who graduated 2024 in MechE is aware of the
| term "feeds & speeds".
|
| Mechanical engineering is a pretty broad discipline
| covering everything from micro fluidics to structural
| requirements of sky scrapers. It's a good skill to have
| but I'm not sure that awareness of operating a milling
| machine is critical for success after graduation.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >I'd be truly curious to know if there are any MechE
| programs where a fresh graduate would have ever heard the
| term "feeds & speeds".
|
| Germany has dual degrees where you both learn a trade and
| get a degree. If you are doing this for Mechanical
| Engineering you definitely will learn this.
|
| Degree programs also have required internships and there
| are definitely courses which you can take during your
| degree. I would be surprised if there weren't a majority
| of mech eng graduates who would know the basics of
| milling.
| petra wrote:
| What about using simulation(or estimation using software)
| to understand the manufacturing process well enough to
| design for it, without being in the factory?
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| Simulation is a tool. Determining whether the results of
| a simulation are consistent and valid requires a great
| deal of experience. Almost anyone can use fluid mechanics
| simulation software and obtain beautiful multicolor
| images. Only an expert will be able to determine whether
| they're worth anything, and when it's time to run a mock-
| up to validate calculations.
|
| Simulation can help train new engineers, helping them to
| understand complex physical phenomena, but it cannot
| replace field experience.
|
| The organization of the production site, the employees
| and the quality culture are an integral part of the
| production tool, and cannot be simulated.
| Animats wrote:
| For a while, we had the "maker movement" and "maker
| spaces", and people were learning that stuff. But that all
| tanked when TechShop went bankrupt.
|
| There are still maker spaces around, but most of them are
| now more into sewing, paper folding, and hot glue than CNC
| machining. Few go beyond a 3D printer. The ones that do
| tend to have some kind of subsidy from a larger educational
| institution.
| llm_trw wrote:
| We used to have shops in schools back when funding for
| education went to education instead of administrators.
|
| That's not been the case for a generation so no one under
| 70 even knows what we've lost.
| petra wrote:
| There are plenty of industries where product engineering is
| done at a different company or place than product
| manufacturing.
|
| For example, consumer electronics, industrial machines and
| robotics, telecom and medical devices.
| huijzer wrote:
| The fact that it exists doesn't mean it's the best. You see
| it all the time that businesses do something just because
| everyone does it too. For example, the current AI
| investments, collatoral debt obligations in the 2000s, and
| conglomerates in the 1960s.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >the current AI investments
|
| As someone whose done both hardware and AI, the current AI
| investments are at worst a repeat of the 2000 dot com boom.
|
| They aren't wrong, but they may be premature with how
| terrible our compute substrate is.
| n144q wrote:
| Very weird comment. Article talks about hardware talent in UK.
| Your comment tries to prove "engineering jobs" are not in the
| US by providing the job listing of a single supplier, when
| everybody knows that there are a huge amount of hardware talent
| in the US working at great companies that deliver amazing
| products. Your comment seems to equate "manufacturing jobs" to
| "hardware engineering jobs" which apparently isn't correct.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| Totally anecdotal but to your point, the engineering jobs in my
| hometown followed the manufacturing jobs in leaving town in the
| 1990s after NAFTA.
|
| Engineering seems to be returning as domestic manufacturing
| increases thanks to foreign auto companies setting up shop
| across the state, replacing what the US companies left behind.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Taiwan is kinda nice though? And just a short hop to Japan for
| holidays or even long weekends.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Taiwan is the only Asian country that has western
| sensibilities. Gay? Who cares.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Many of the legacy component vendors retain domestic US
| manufacturing to supply military parts. They come with a
| premium price and aren't usually worth using commercially but
| that is one of the last backstops preventing all knowledge from
| disappearing.
| itissid wrote:
| I wonder this is also what doomed some, but not all, of meta's
| hardware efforts like its watch from 2023 (Portal was
| successful and a solid build but that was more pacakging than
| manufacturing and died for a different reason: Priorities).
|
| In general though it seems where design/code<->hardware
| feedback loop needs to be very fast in some cases, it is a non
| trivial separation of concerns.
| jasonjl wrote:
| Software is eating the world
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I see this in the USA too - electrical engineers fiddling with
| css to make buttons dance, published computer scientists working
| on trivial systems for massive data centers billing systems - the
| tech market does always seem inefficient, and yet, at some point
| the market is going to have more knowledge and expertise than it
| needs, especially if AI predictions play out. What happens then?
| happymellon wrote:
| > especially if AI predictions play out
|
| Thats a big _if_. Big tech has enshittified everything its
| touched for a long time now.
| incog_nit0 wrote:
| It's not just in the hardware sector, it's across the board.
|
| My (American) wife moved to London years ago and was a manager in
| a prestigious London museum overseeing 60 people.
|
| She has over 20 years experience in some of our top museums and
| her salary in 2023 was a paltry PS30k.
|
| We just moved to the US and within a couple of months she has a
| job in museums here but now paying 2.3x the salary (converted
| back to PS) and only managing a team of 20 people.
|
| Less stress, more resources for uniforms and initiatives and
| annual salary increases here way above inflation.
|
| As a Londoner I feel quite aggrieved by the situation. It's one
| thing to increase your salary 50% as a lot of engineers do moving
| to the US. But to 230% increase your salary is just nuts.
|
| Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but
| now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is
| slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.
| Nursie wrote:
| The UK pays terribly in a lot of areas when compared to the US,
| Canada and Australia. In software, the only way to keep up is
| contracting, preferably in London, preferably in finance.
|
| But my partner also pretty much doubled her pay in retail
| management when we moved to Australia.
|
| The London financial sector may be losing talent to Europe, but
| from what I can tell European pay in fintech is not comparable.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure engineers are also 230% increase or more.
| marcinzm wrote:
| If you take advantage of the larger number of tech company
| jobs in the US and were in a non-tech company in the UK then
| you can make 500% more.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| The culture sector in London is notoriously badly paid. Mostly
| staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the
| financial sector.
|
| Even similar sized public sector organisations (thinking
| education) pay far better. A senior headteacher with 50 or 100
| staff will do a lot better than a cultural manager.
| porker wrote:
| > Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and
| wives of the financial sector.
|
| Oh so true. Which helps to explain the number of levels of
| management in UK cultural institutions, because in London
| there are enough of these people who want a (poorly paid)
| role that it's better to have 3 layers of management when 1
| would do.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Museum jobs are hideously badly paid. In many cases the real
| work is done for free by "volunteers" (really poor saps on a
| 2-5 year job interview) before finding out the actual job went
| to a buddy of the museum director who doesn't even need to show
| up most of the time.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| If your wife used to manage 60 people and now manages a third
| of that, it seems like her talent is being wasted NOW, not when
| she was in the UK.
|
| I'll add that 70K is nothing to write home about in the US,
| especially if you're not in a low COL state.
|
| The article is about people not going in the field that they're
| talented at, because it's low paid. Clearly it doesn't apply to
| your wife which is talented and went in the low paid field.
| gadders wrote:
| >> Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive
| - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector
| is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.
|
| Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.
| marcinzm wrote:
| A quick Google search will return many:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/city-london-chief-says-
| brex...
|
| TLDR: They're not moving to Frankfurt but they are moving out
| of the UK.
| sealeck wrote:
| What do you expect the Lord Mayor to say? "Yes we think
| Brexit was great and that the government is going a good
| job." They're a lobby, they want to lobby for more
| concessions.
| dgellow wrote:
| That's a shame, Frankfurt (am Main) is a pretty nice place
| zipy124 wrote:
| Software engineers can usually expect to at least 2x their
| earnings, the median in the uk is PS50k and in the US it is
| PS100k, and that is not acounting for the significantly lower
| tax burden. (That pay excludes medical benefits, if you include
| the dollar value of that and bonuses and equity the difference
| rises).
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Feels the same. Moved to UK a couple of years ago, can't find a
| PS25k job. Found some outsourced work at American companies and
| now suddenly I'm going to hit the higher tax bracket
| pjmlp wrote:
| This is an issue in most countries, not only UK.
|
| The job market is not prepared to fulfill the promises the talent
| expects, and in places like SV, what you get is the STEAM version
| of Hollywood, where every waiter dreams of being the next movie
| star, and there can only be so much.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Except that not so long ago the dream mostly came true. For
| many decades an engineering degree was a golden ticket to
| middle class financial stability and job security. Both in
| Europe and the US.
|
| Nowadays that is no longer the case. Mostly because of
| international competition. People are still completely in
| denial, that there are people in China who do just as good of a
| job as they do, but for half the wage. Even more striking in
| software, where outsourcing to India is very common.
| remus wrote:
| Not to disagree with the thrust of the article, but I think
| they're wrong on
|
| > Hardware is riskier than software: No longer true
|
| If you're building hardware you need to source materials for the
| thing, manufacture the thing somewhere, store the thing somewhere
| and distribute the thing. All steps that either don't exist with
| software or are orders of magnitude easier. All this stuff costs
| money and adds risk, making hardware inherently harder and
| riskier than software.
|
| Obviously building stuff is still possible, but if you're going
| in with a VC "how do we scale this to 100 million users in 2
| years" mindset then there's a lot of logistics in there for
| hardware.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| Taxes and a hatred of success by over half the population
| varispeed wrote:
| Author missed that due to low wages in engineering in particular,
| people will stop study that, because it requires more effort and
| is more expensive to learn than stacking shelves - that pays very
| much the same.
|
| It's a problem of class warfare - government hates working class,
| including the current Labour government - that despises the
| working class in particular. They don't want ordinary people to
| develop skills, start businesses. They want them to slave away in
| foreign big corporations.
|
| You don't have to look hard for evidence - PM jets around the
| world asking foreign big corporations to hire British slave
| workers, instead of spending time home and creating environment
| for local business to thrive.
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| The problem I see in the UK is a lack of hubs. I wrote to the
| Department for Levelling Up when it was a thing.
|
| Finance has done well in the UK due to London and having a
| significant number of firms in a single place. I can get a new
| job for a different company, doing a similar thing, in the same
| building.
|
| How does that work for any other industry in the UK?
|
| Its no wonder that wages haven't risen when moving job also
| requires you to move house/schools/away from friends and family.
|
| We need the government to get involved and create regional hubs
| for different industries and really facilitate giving them
| everything they need. Address transport, power concerns, housing,
| labour and education requirements. The government is in a far
| better place to be able to influence across all these
| requirements.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > How does that work for any other industry in the UK?
|
| I don't know about other industries but in silicon there are a
| few hubs - especially Cambridge, Bristol and London.
|
| When I lived in London there was a big start-up scene around
| Hoxton.
|
| It's not going to happen for consumer product type things
| (think Dyson) though because none of the manufacturing is in
| the UK. Who gets injection moulding done in the UK? Nobody.
| Dyson is a rare exception and even then it's only R&D that
| happens in the UK - manufacturing is all in Malaysia.
| jna_sh wrote:
| I've seen this exact trajectory play out with several friends.
| Get a good degree in robotics engineering or the like, options
| are working for civil servant pay at a defense subcontractor, or
| Ocado. Pretty much it.
| kleiba wrote:
| If my salary had been my only or even my main objective, I would
| have taken a very different route in my career. Sure, for some
| people it is, but there are other factors as well. But if you're
| from the UK, young and independent, and money is your main drive,
| what's keeping you from moving to the US, at least for a couple
| of years?
| eptcyka wrote:
| The green card lottery?
| zipy124 wrote:
| Getting a visa is incredibly difficult, with the easiest route
| being working for a US firm in the UK and transfering to their
| US offices, but at which point you're already one of the lucky
| few to score a US job in the UK and are probably paid well
| enought that uprooting your life doesn't seem worth it.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| > what's keeping you from moving to the US, at least for a
| couple of years?
|
| Visas. US has a very very weird visa system that really hates
| skilled workers.
| saos wrote:
| The U.K is not doing anything innovative that creates jobs and
| wealth. Instead the U.K. focuses mostly on housing wealth and
| building a property empire. This is evident with a govt that's
| hell bent on stoking demand...after so many years they've only
| just stopped "right to buy"!!
|
| If we want higher salaries then the uk needs to start creating
| meaningful and impactful products that other countries want...
| pjbster wrote:
| Back when he was still considered quotable, Dominic Cummings
| often mused about the UK's future post-Brexit. I seem to
| remember his blog mentioning data science and drug research as
| possible areas where UK could build a global advantage.
|
| I can't be bothered to wade through it all but if you're
| interested his (old) stuff is here: https://dominiccummings.com
| constantcrying wrote:
| _And_ these products need to be globally unique. You can not
| compete with a product that China can make far cheaper.
|
| The US has achieved this numerous times through start-ups.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Founders: Stop fleeing to the US. London can be the hardware
| capital of the world. We have the talent. We have the creativity.
| What we need is your audacity.
|
| Easier said than done, Europe doesn't have the money for that
| (partially because all the exit money circulates in American
| VCs).
| thom wrote:
| Things are tough all over. I'm based in Sheffield, and we have an
| Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and obviously a rich
| history of manufacturing and engineering across the city that
| pioneered chrome steel. But the process for new enterprises
| always seems the same, you get some small, timid spinout from one
| of the universities, that spends years iterating through various
| crumbs of grant money, and maybe finds a corporate partner to
| commercialise some tech. Everyone's excited about Northern
| Gritstone, the new regional VC which has raised PS300m and
| deployed about PS40m so far, but even that is itself basically a
| university spinout.
|
| I was at an event recently where everyone was excited about a
| programme to create thousands of new apprenticeships in the steel
| industry in the region, and sat at the one table of tech people I
| couldn't help feel they'd probably do better if you just taught
| them to code, even in this job market. Or alternatively if we
| actually want a steel industry to challenge China let's do that.
| But no half measures.
|
| The UK has vanishingly little risk capital compared to the US. It
| has very few exits and almost no secondary, so what angel money
| exists is often tied up long term. The British Business Bank are
| trying to convince more pension funds to expose their assets to
| the risk/return of VC funds but that's a long and controversial
| battle. Startup investing is largely driven by income tax breaks
| rather than dreams of outsized returns. And of course property is
| such a reliable investment in the UK that it sucks up most of the
| free money anyway.
|
| A lot of this is (the lack of) network effects and we get grumpy
| if you say it's a cultural thing. But just once I'd love to hear
| someone saying they're investing in their local ecosystem, or
| creating an accelerator, or whatever, because they want to make
| loads of money. That isn't something you can comfortably say out
| loud at most startup events in the UK. Lots of talk of Impact
| Investing, an endless merry-go-round of gobshites wanting to give
| advice and mentoring, or "do you have any "SEIS left?" Lots of
| tech agencies working on making other people's ideas go big,
| selling reliable hours instead of unreliable equity. And a good
| enough quality of life that all this is fine!
|
| But it can be really hard to find somewhere to plug into and get
| the energy from. Kudos to those that are making/have made the
| slog here.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >a programme to create thousands of new apprenticeships in the
| steel industry in the region
|
| It seems very cruel to put people into a job market where the
| entire industry is undercut by China and has very little reason
| to exist, besides a nominal interest by the government in
| security.
|
| If you want to challenge China, you have to embrace Chinese
| poverty, how else are you going to make profitable steel? You
| have higher energy prices, higher labor cost, higher
| construction cost and more bureaucracy and you want to compete?
|
| >I couldn't help feel they'd probably do better if you just
| taught them to code, even in this job market
|
| Seems very cruel to put people into a job market where the
| entire industry is undercut by India.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Here's a story I tell from time to time. When I was at uni, we
| had an internship as part of the course. The course was a joint
| course between Engineering and Econ/Management, so you could
| choose from a very wide variety of industries to satisfy the
| thesis requirement. The business school would coordinate the
| internships.
|
| So I went interviewing in the engineering firms to the west of
| the country. Aerospace, materials, that kind of thing. Someone
| offered me PS12K/year. Even for a student, that seems kind of low
| as I'd be looking for a short term accommodation somewhere. I
| kept it secret from the business school because I knew they'd
| pressure me to take it.
|
| A couple of weeks later, I got an offer from Intel. Not in
| engineering, but in marketing. PS15k, just about enough to pay
| rent and eat. But a lot more than engineering. I took the job and
| has a great time, and I still know people there. Turned down the
| return offer, due to the firm itself seeming a bit complacent,
| but also...
|
| During the internship I went to see my friend in central London.
| He had landed the coveted Goldman's internship. Fully paid
| apartment for the period, with a view of the river, plus money.
| PS37k/year if you include the free rent.
|
| So when I went back to university for the final part of the
| degree, it was clear where I was going to look for work.
|
| I got a job at a prop trading shop, and in the first week a guy
| told me about his story. He had originally taken one of the jobs
| in the west country, some sort of aerospace engineering. He had
| accidentally seen his boss's paycheck, and that made him start
| looking for work in finance.
|
| These days, what are your options realistically in this country?
| Particularly if you want to hang around your family in the south?
|
| Finance, big law, consultancy, certain US tech businesses. I
| don't even understand how doctors live here.
| gadders wrote:
| Fundholding GPs don't do badly. A lot get 6 figures if they are
| partners in a surgery.
|
| I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants
| until they make decent money.
|
| But I'm like you - fell into banking due to being a Lotus Notes
| developer when it was flavour of the month and have never left.
| I reckon I'm on over double what I would be if I'd ended up
| working for IBM or Cap Gemini or similar.
|
| [And I should say I ended up in project/programme/change
| management. I'm not still a Notes Developer]
| sgt101 wrote:
| >I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're
| consultants until they make decent money.
|
| A consultant gets PS100k -> PS140K ish from the NHS. However,
| many supplement that with private work and therefore make
| significantly more.
| Marazan wrote:
| Yeah, 100k is starting pay band for Consultants, 140k is
| after 14 years of service _as a consultant_.
|
| To get to the starting line of Consultant they have to go
| through the Residency gauntlet which start you off at 36k
| and hideous hours.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Yup - I'm not saying it's good or fair, or bad and
| unfair. I'm just saying this is what it is.
| gadders wrote:
| To be fair though, they work for it. A consultant I saw
| recently did a full day with the NHS and they 3 - 4 hours
| of appointments in the evenings privately at a different
| hospital.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I don't know, the doctor route seems like a lot of work for
| the money. My FIL told his kids not to do it, and he was a
| surgeon who ran a department. They messed around with the
| doctors' pensions, and it made a lot of them quit. Conditions
| are also awful, he started the department in a temporary
| building and retired with it still there.
|
| A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school
| graduate. They'd have the pick of what university course to
| do, and then they end up doing this thing that takes until
| you're 30, with insane nighttime hours. It just makes no
| sense to me that there are still kids who think this is
| worthwhile. It's not even as if you are guaranteed to be
| allowed to specialize in what you want either, that's a
| battle with all the other top students.
| gadders wrote:
| >>A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high
| school graduate.
|
| Yes, because the number of med school places in the UK is
| limited by the government (because they have to fund the
| extra cost of the course over what students pay in tuition
| fees). You don't really need to be that smart to be a
| doctor.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Is 6 figures a lot?
| blitzar wrote:
| top 5% nationally is PS81k
| varjag wrote:
| 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.
| zipy124 wrote:
| 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.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I have noticed this anecdotally as well in costal areas of the
| United States.
|
| It's like textbook Baumol's cost disease[0], except housing is
| rising fastest while the cost of labor nearly not at all,
| because buyers (hiring firms) just don't buy
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
| pydry wrote:
| I always found it interesting that a lot of economists
| thought that a rising tide lifting all boats could be
| characterized as a "disease".
| tome wrote:
| Personally I'd prefer it if good quality healthcare were
| cheaply available to all without having to be bottleneck on
| expensive-and-time-consuming-to-train human labour, even if
| it did mean that the 0.5% of the population that are
| doctors might end up working differently (and not
| necessarily for less -- it's not as though the industrial
| revolution has impoverished society).
| pydry wrote:
| That's not the same issue at all though.
|
| A waiter from the early 19th century will have much the
| same productivity as now. Doctors (we would hope) could
| be more productive by, say, not using bloodletting and
| leeches to heal people.
| tome wrote:
| It is the same issue. The reason that medical care is so
| expensive is that it's bottlenecked on a small number of
| people who are qualified and licensed to provide it. If
| it weren't bottlenecked on them then it would be a
| massive boon to society overall, and it's not clear that
| it would be particularly detrimental to those people.
| pydry wrote:
| >It is the same issue. The reason that medical care is so
| expensive is that it's bottlenecked on a small number of
| people who are qualified and licensed to provide it. If
| it weren't bottlenecked on them
|
| That bottleneck is unrelated to the baumol effect.
| tome wrote:
| The bottleneck is the _cause_ of the Baumol effect. If
| medicine didn 't require qualified and licensed human
| labour to provide then we wouldn't have such high
| healthcare costs.
|
| Now admittedly, there is a gap between the increase in
| labour productivity of wait-staff and the labour
| productivity of healthcare providers over the period
| since, say, the industrial revolution, but both are
| outstripped by orders of magnitude by the increase in
| productivity in the manufacturing and IT sectors.
| Manufacturing is no longer bottlenecked, because we
| offshore it, and IT is not bottlenecked because new
| technology is continuing to rapidly increase labour
| productivity.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think, my layman's understanding is the Baumol effect
| can be basically thought of as paying people to not be
| the next highest productivity gaining job.
|
| So say bond market traders and computer programmers got
| more productive relative to doctors, then baumol effects
| would be paying doctors to not quit and get jobs at
| google or some bond desk. It'd be much less
| pronounced/related than say, trade school electricians
| who haven't become much more productive with the advent
| of computers but are still needed. Doctors have a lot of
| other effects limiting their supply by things the
| licensing practices
| tome wrote:
| Right, I think that's a valid way of seeing it, and you
| pay them not to do the next highest productivity gaining
| job because their current job _is_ productive,
| particularly in price inelastic sectors like healthcare.
|
| The reason I think it's valid to call it a disease is
| because you want it to be higher productivity yet, and
| more price elastic. Increasing healthcare provider
| productivity would _not_ lower their boats, it would
| either shift them into the next highest productivity job,
| or better all round, shift them into _new_ roles within
| the healthcare system opened up by the increased
| productivity (for example, personalised healthcare).
| tome wrote:
| Actually, I think I understand now.
|
| From the point of view of "the alternative is people earn
| less", "disease" does seem a misnomer. I was thinking
| from the point of view of "the alternative is sectors
| become more productive", so "disease" doesn't seem to fit
| as well.
| mattnewton wrote:
| The Baumol effect is paying more for the same productivity,
| which can feel like a disease when you have to pay more and
| more for the same in some area for services relative to
| goods to the point where you end up pathologically
| preferring goods over services.
|
| The JFK-popularized term defending a special interest
| project trickling down benefits to a wider community isn't
| really what it feels like to someone in a coastal US city
| and who is trying to hire an electrician or baby sitter and
| finding they are priced out of the market.
| pydry wrote:
| The Baumol effect means that as society gets richer and
| GDP goes up, orchestral musicians or wait staff or any
| other profession whose productivity which which enjoy but
| whose productivity largely hasn't changed since the 19th
| century get paid more.
|
| The "disease" is equivalent to a rising tide raising all
| boats or the _lack_ of commodification of certain forms
| of human labor.
|
| The "cure" for baumol's "cost disease" would be an
| explosion in income inequality.
| tome wrote:
| But if we had robotic wait staff then that would be a net
| benefit for society, and the human former wait staff
| would go and do something else that's slightly more
| valuable for an amount of pay that's either slightly less
| or slightly more depending on the effect of automation on
| the whole economy, probably slightly more in the long
| run. This is the story of industrialisation!
|
| Thought experiment: would it be good if we replaced mass
| transit by individual taxi drivers, because there would
| be so much demand for those taxi drivers that their boats
| would be lifted?
| swarnie wrote:
| I wonder if we ever crossed over, i also worked for Intel in
| the west country (Swindon) and now whore myself out to
| aerospace/defence in the same area.
|
| I see what our engineers are paid and its genuinely concerning.
| ktallett wrote:
| Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the
| outlier? I would say the UK, Europe, and Japan all have
| similar wages (although Japan has worse benefits and on the
| whole a larger expectation of workers so it's not like for
| like.)
| blitzar wrote:
| > Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is
| the outlier
|
| Mostly the US is an outlier. Unfortunately, UK property
| prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look
| cheep.
| gambiting wrote:
| Not disagreeing with your general point, but UK food is
| _very_ cheap, compared to almost anywhere in western
| europe and nowadays with the states too.
| Xelbair wrote:
| UK's food, not eating out mind you, is on par with even
| eastern europe in some cases.
| ablation wrote:
| That's a boring, played-out stereotype that wasn't even
| true 30 years ago, let alone now. If you've never set
| foot in a UK supermarket I could see you perhaps still
| languishing under this delusion.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think they are referring to the price, not the quality
| or selection.
|
| From a very quick search, a litre of milk is 20% cheaper
| in the UK compared to France, Germany and even Poland.
| swarnie wrote:
| But no, food is incredibly cheap.
|
| Its true i can't eat steak 4 nights a week as god
| intended but we manage to scratch cook 3 meals a day for
| 2 people for PS70 a week, PS85 with a wine pairing.
|
| If you want to forgo eight different vegetables and four
| different proteins im sure you can do it for less.
|
| I know too many people complaining "food is expensive"
| when all they live off is gas mark 6 / 25 mins beige
| rubbish.
| gambiting wrote:
| I literally just came back from a month in Poland, and UK
| food prices in supermarkets are just as low if not lower.
| Certainly Aldi prices easily beat Polish supermarket
| prices on nearly everything, maybe with the exception of
| baked goods.
|
| Don't get me wrong - M&S and Sainsburys are very
| expensive places to shop. But I don't see the quality at
| Morrisons or Asda or yes, even Aldi as being any worse
| and the prices are very low. Go to France or Germany and
| try to compare, I can bet that for your average buyer
| groceries will be cheaper.
| Xelbair wrote:
| I was there twice last year.
|
| Food was cheaper. It's not that UK is cheap, it's more
| that eastern europe has gotten more expensive.
| twic wrote:
| I think they meant by price, not by quality. And there's
| nothing wrong with Eastern European food anyway!
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| It feels like it's got more expensive though, and worse
| quality. A lot of the garlic I've had this year has been
| in a sorry state to use a random example, and as well as
| food you buy to cook things like fish and chips which
| used to be a cheap takeaway meal cost a fortune now.
|
| The depressing thing is that it'd rise a lot more if
| supermarkets weren't using their weight to squeeze
| farmers.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| >Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices,
| utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.
|
| That's not true - UK food is _very_ cheap, and overall
| living costs are quite a lot less than the UK. Property
| is the real killer in the UK (and eating out I suppose).
| ta1243 wrote:
| Eating out is entirely optional, it's property that's the
| killer, and as everyones wages increase, so does rent,
| because there's more money chasing the same number of
| properties.
| robin_reala wrote:
| US is an outlier. You can look at self-described data for
| front-end engineers from the annual State of JS survey for
| an indication (try clicking on USA vs World):
| https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-
| US/demographics/#yearly_salary
| lordnacho wrote:
| Did you at least get to play with the demo computers? Some of
| the most fun times before everyone had a super powerful
| machine were when we got to borrow the top-of-the-line demo
| machines to play on all weekend. Set up in one of those
| conference rooms, pizza for everyone.
| amelius wrote:
| At this point someone please explain to me how finance doesn't
| exist to extract wealth from the rest of us.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| It's called capitalism because we use capital to allocate
| value creation. So obviously finance extracts wealth, that's
| their job in a capitalist system.
| DrScientist wrote:
| We only allocate to value creation if there is a
| functioning free market.
|
| The banks profit margins would suggest that they are not
| really facing the fierce winds of competition.
| amelius wrote:
| But in the case of OP the value creation does not happen
| because they are working in finance instead of in a job
| creating value.
|
| I want to see some decent analysis of the situation, not
| stories about how the system is supposed to work.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Decision of where to allocate money creates value.
| Imagine you have 500k to allocate. You can choose to
| invest in A or B, after analysis you realize A is a
| failing business, but B with 500k invested will create
| enormous value by producing product C. If you didn't
| allocate in B this company wouldn't have had enough money
| to produce C and succeed.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, but this can still be true if the system works in a
| perverted way.
|
| In your example, you should include how many $ go to the
| entity doing the allocation. If this is an insane amount
| of money, then maybe we are better off without finance
| and just figure out the optimal allocation in some other
| way.
| skirge wrote:
| if money come from printer and not from factory you need a
| "printer operator", not a worker or engineer
| mjburgess wrote:
| The job of secondary financial markets is to redirect areas
| of surplus unproductive wealth (that makes no return), to
| productive areas. By the magic of markets, sustained
| profitability = productive use of resources.
|
| The problem with labourers who work in these secondary
| markets however, is the same as the guards who watch the
| gate: they can extract large tolls for being in the right
| place at the right time.
|
| People in finance are rich because they're well-placed to
| skim highly productive traffic. However, it is -- in the vast
| majority of cases -- only skimming. The system functions very
| well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it
| effectively.
|
| Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are
| increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side
| effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > The system functions very well to take unproductive
| surplus and allocate it effectively.
|
| How do you quantify this?
| amelius wrote:
| I've heard this many times, but where is the proof? How
| would you apply it to the story of OP?
| bell-cot wrote:
| This...but a twisted, bloated, incompetent, and
| malevolently self-serving version of it.
|
| _Actual_ efficiency would dictate that there be only a
| relative handful of finance jobs, let alone very well-paid
| finance jobs. And that the vast majority of the money go to
| actually productive industries. And that the financial
| markets understand the principles and timescales of other
| industries, so they don 't screw everything up with
| decisions equivalent to "Fiscal quarter ends in June, and
| Farmer Jones says he can harvest zero corn by then. Shut
| him down."
| vladms wrote:
| > Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are
| increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side
| effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
|
| For markets to exist, monopolies must be avoided. As you
| can't expect large companies to police themselves, this was
| generally the role of the state. The states must strike a
| balance between keeping large companies happy (that want
| monopolies and have cash today) and true markets (which are
| efficient on the long run).
|
| The finance industry is probably just a side effect of
| everybody focusing on short term (both public traded
| companies and politicians/states)
| yobbo wrote:
| > The system functions very well to take unproductive
| surplus and allocate it effectively.
|
| What did you measure to come to this conclusion?
| rich_sasha wrote:
| In much of the developed world, economic productivity
| seems to correlate strongly with availability of free
| capital (I don't have a source but I imagine it's fairly
| straightforward to cook one up). Even US vs Europe, kind
| of similar economies, but with capital so much easier to
| come by in the US, and US productivity per capita is
| flying compared to Europe.
|
| Availability of free capital is a function of both just
| general wealth of a society, and how well lubricated the
| wheels of finance are.
|
| I don't think this is a controversial theory, even if it
| comes with unpleasant side effects (white collar crime,
| inequality etc). Just as having a buoyant defence
| industry that can churn out a lot of boom is great for a
| country's war fighting potential.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| It's essentially the willingness of a society to fund
| what looks like and could actually be a complete waste of
| time and money.
|
| In the US there's plenty of money to throw on seemingly
| frivolous pursuits, because stagnant money is generally
| considered wasted money. It's considered better to have
| that money "working for you" invested in _something_ ,
| _anything_. You could lose out, you could also win big,
| at least you tried. Can 't have omelets without cracking
| eggs, as the saying goes.
|
| Another Europe-like example is Japan: A rich society with
| lots of money, but society doesn't want to waste it. So
| most of the money is stagnant, stored in deposit accounts
| or in a bedroom drawer (literally, see: Tansu Yokin[1])
| instead of being invested in something consequently
| leading to a stagnant economy.
|
| [1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/a-nations-
| character-rev...
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Money in a drawer doesn't really detract from any
| national investment. It's just paper.
|
| It's the allocation of _capital_ that matters. Land,
| machinery, and so on.
|
| The extent of this is that if money sits in drawers not
| being spent, it represents diminished demand, which
| suppresses prices; the government can then print a
| corresponding amount of money to allocate capital towards
| other purposes. Leaving money in the drawer means
| delaying until another day your vote for how national
| resources should be allocated.
| hoppp wrote:
| The modern monetary system is a big pyramid scheme so...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| It's actually Pretty Bloody Hard(tm) to store or move
| money/wealth safely and properly, not the least because most
| of us are all highwaymen when given the opportunity. Banks
| exist to try and bring some civility to that madness, with
| the cost being (ideally) a pittance skimmed from the top to
| keep their highwaymen tendencies at bay.
|
| If you want to call them a protection racket akin to the
| mafia... you're probably right.
|
| Of course, banks these days are much more than that and
| there's plenty to rightfully crucify them for. But even
| still, there's a reason being called a third-rate bank clerk
| is an insult among the highest order.
| pja wrote:
| Finance jobs in London / New York (partially) can afford
| those pay rates because they extract wealth from the rest of
| the world.
|
| Whether they do so in return for services rendered or are
| extracting rents by acting as gatekeepers is a question that
| never quite gets resolved. A little of each I suspect,
| depending on the context.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The UK is over educated so everyone who walks into an interview
| has a degree so it just isn't worth anything and puts you at
| the starting line, internships are there to mold nothing into
| something and if that values too low for you there is a queue
| of people behind you also with degrees who would be happy for
| the opportunity.
|
| If your focus is money then higher education is the wrong path
| anyway, it's oversubscribed.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > These days, what are your options realistically in this
| country? Particularly if you want to hang around your family in
| the south?
|
| In 2013 I was working as a CTO in London, managing a team of
| 40, and I could just about afford a run-down 2-bedroom in a
| just-ok part of Zone 1, assuming I wanted to make some savings
| too. My salary wasn't bad for the role, outside of banking.
| Anyway, that was pretty much the end of living in the UK for
| me.
| ta1243 wrote:
| 90% of the problems in the UK come down to the cost of
| housing in London (and maybe a couple of other key cities,
| but mainly London)
|
| This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London, so
| people on good salaries can afford more, so prices go up as
| supply is constrained and demand increases.
|
| The rest of the western world is starting to see this, and
| before London had the issue, city states in the far east like
| Hong Kong and Singapore had the same problem.
| mellosouls wrote:
| If you are only doing it for the money, your point is fair -
| but there are many of us for whom - beyond reasonable
| necessities - that is at best a secondary consideration.
|
| Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have
| their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like
| they had no choice.
|
| Agree though that London and parts of the South place extra
| pressures on people looking to build a life and home.
| officialchicken wrote:
| > Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have
| their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like
| they had no choice.
|
| Ahhh, the classic no true engineer / scotsman argument ... I
| couldn't possible be an Engineer because I like hard software
| projects with smart people, good budgets, and tight
| deadlines.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Passion does not pay the bills; or later on, a comfy
| lifestyle.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Senior doctors are paid OK actually. Consultants are paid
| between 105-140k [1] with a big pension contribution too.
| That's not Goldman pay, but also quite secure and a big pension
| contribution from the employer which isn't included in the
| salaey. Also scope for very nice NHS/private combo. Also at
| this point, to have any medical care in the UK, you basically
| need to know a doctor...
|
| Now, sure, that salary might be too low, and working for the
| NHS seems like hell but it would seem the money isn't the main
| obstacle. Maybe not right now for 2 years ago that was a very
| good pay.
|
| There are other pay-related issues. Marginal tax between 100
| and 150 or so is incredibly high, around 60-70%. This is
| because many nasty things kick in there. Tax free allowance
| shrinking for example. Doctors are double screwed in some
| cases, as by law they have to contribute a lot of their salary
| to pension, and in this threshold often exceed their allowance
| - which is a real kick in the nuts, seeing how they can't
| reduce it, and anyway, pension saving should always be seen
| favourably in a place like UK. These are by the way some of the
| reasons for doctor shortages in the UK, senior doctors have
| little incentive to work harder, many cut their hours with
| little difference to their net pay.
|
| But these aren't strictly linked to their headline salary.
|
| [1] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-
| roles/doctors/pay-d...
| Symbiote wrote:
| In ~2006 I had a similar experience arranging my work placement
| during university, although I was earning a bit more -- PS16k
| for software development in the South East, just outside
| London. The banks were certainly offering a lot more,
| PS30-something-k.
|
| The university careers person said five banks would each take
| all fifty of us, just on the basis of us being Imperial College
| students, so we should apply them and forget anything else we
| were interested in as it wouldn't pay well. She couldn't
| understand the person who wanted to work at a computer game
| company.
|
| We complained to the head of department, who was furious. A
| short time later there was a new careers person.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| I also had a similar experience in Northern Italy. I did an
| unpaid internship for 2 months during my bachelor (you don't
| really have a choice here) and then remained working part-time
| from time to time while getting my master. When I graduated
| they offered me EUR17k, meanwhile I got a EUR65k internship
| offer in Milan...
| awanderingmind wrote:
| This is interesting, but as other commenters have noted, the
| general point applies more broadly than hardware versus software,
| or UK versus the US - if you're only trying to optimise for
| income, 'go work in the US and/or the financial industry' is
| solid advice for many people, and the macroeconomic incentives
| driving this are not easy to shift. I also make much less than my
| counterparts in the US - but here in South Africa moving to the
| UK to work in the finance industry is considered a major win for
| many people, because the salaries are better and is considered
| higher 'prestige' for some reason.
|
| Eleven years ago during my MSc. in theoretical physics I was
| writing Fortran code to solve scattering equations to serve as
| input into quantum field theory calculations. Since then I've
| worked for a bunch of startups, alternating between writing
| boring backend services and doing 'data science' that is often no
| more complicated than linear regression or writing SQL queries.
| The continual hype, toxic positivity, and unhinged growth
| expectations has made me essentially tap out mentally. I also
| consider this a 'waste of my talent' (not that I was ever really
| a great physicist!), but as I get older I am no longer sure what
| would have satisfied me in that regard (is this bad or good? - I
| honestly don't know). More money would be nice I guess. I
| typically get bored/frustrated and change companies every few
| years - I'm currently 3 years in at a fintech (elixir backend).
| gadders wrote:
| >>"Engineers: Your brain's worth billions. Build empires, not
| apps."
|
| Pay engineers billions, then, not CEOs, VCs and shareholders.
| benrutter wrote:
| I think a lot of this is exactly right - but one tiny caveat I'd
| add is that comparing the UK to the USA is sometimes a misnomer.
| On a size basic, the UK is much more comparible to a US state
| that the USA as a whole, and a lot of the observations made here
| are probably equally true of some US states like Colorado where
| talent is moved out to California.
| piker wrote:
| The UK is almost twice the size of the largest US state--
| California. And that comparison doesn't fare well for the UK.
| The UK is below the US' poorest state in terms of GDP per
| capita.
| benrutter wrote:
| I'd still argue that it's a more realistic comparison (even
| if 2x off) than comparing to the whole of the USA
| (significantly more off)
| AdamN wrote:
| > UK is almost twice the size of the largest US state--
| California You mean by landmass? Looks like the UK is quite a
| bit smaller than California and I presume is a middle-sized
| state in size terms:
|
| https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-
| comparison/unit...
| IshKebab wrote:
| He meant population.
| t43562 wrote:
| Just a note - 100k jobs aren't that common in software in the UK.
| Perhaps they're there in finance but there are a lot of people
| looking for software jobs now who accept much less. I've managed
| to avoid the finance sector my whole career in the UK by working
| for telcos, since I felt that, for me personally, finance was
| intensely boring and motivated by all the worst and most short
| term values.
|
| IMO the whole attitude to finance here is difficult because not
| enough people have become rich through software/electronics to be
| angel investors. It's still a place where the big old money comes
| from people in banking. The arts are respected, being rich is
| respected, but the rest of us are still "techies" and that's an
| attitude prevalent throughout the population. The person who
| fixes your washing machine gets called an "engineer."
|
| It's a matter of who has the power.
|
| Success breeds success and we have had some great ones - it's
| just that the whole economy is still skewed towards finance.
| People want the pound to have a high value. Investment comes here
| to seek "safety". Costs are high. Everything is short term. We
| have "spaffed billions" on leaving our local trading bloc but
| moan a lot about investing in HS2. In other words we're not
| really united and trying to build a future. The population is
| aging and some of it thinks "only a few more years for me" and
| "I'm alright jack".
|
| Do I really know? This is all just the bullshit whirling around
| in my head.
|
| There's a chance with net-zero. It will require huge investments.
| If you want to do hardware then I suggest you think about that.
| Octopus Energy's Kraken system, heat pumps that work together to
| spread out demand over the day, home energy controllers, battery
| chargers ...who knows. One word of warning though: I'm actually
| from Africa and any idea that ends with "....for disaster relief
| in Africa" is a mistake. If your idea only works in poor
| countries then I think you'll never make any money. Nobody really
| cares significantly about disaster relief, especially the
| potentates of those countries who have allowed the disastrous
| situations to occur through their own mismanagement.
| ldite wrote:
| > 100k jobs aren't that common in software in the UK
|
| They really are, if you're prepared to work for $BIGCO
| zipy124 wrote:
| Exactly what he means by not common, meta employs only around
| 1000 software devs in london, same for goldman. If you only
| have 1000 devs you can bet they aren't hiring that many per
| year. There aren't that many $BIGCO jobs in London, but yes
| they do pay very very well.
| ldite wrote:
| I didn't mean FAANG companies - these days I work for a
| boring 500 person SaaS company (outside London) and we have
| at least 50-100 engineers at PS100k+, excluding equity.
|
| I get a lot of recruiter spam on Linkedin for roles at
| retail banks, outsourcers, consultancies, SaaS companies,
| startups, etc. etc. in the PS90-110k bracket. I do also get
| a lot of recruiter spam for laughably underpaid jobs, in
| particular hardware/embedded roles, which is why I switched
| out of embedded.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| The common European tragedy, if I could go back in time I
| would've never majored in CS. The salaries are just not worth the
| effort and struggle required to get there.
|
| Much better to have partied and taken a lightweight major. Those
| extra 400-500 euros simply don't make up for the wasted youth
| reading Tannenbaum.
| alexisread wrote:
| Sadly the UK has a long history of underinvesting in cutting edge
| tech, from aerospace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Aerospace_HOTOL further
| development of Concorde)
|
| to transport
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Passenger_Train
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracked_Hovercraft
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertravel
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Birmingham,_United_King...)
|
| to chip design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmos transputer,
| static RAM, VGA standard).
|
| Interestingly, the 3 British designers who made up Flare
| Technology, had a big influence on console and computer designs
| in the 80s/90s: They were responsible for the ZX Spectrum
| (partly), Konix Multisystem, Atari Falcon, ATW (and Blossom
| graphics card), Atari Jaguar, Super FX chip, Nuon
| wazoox wrote:
| This problem isn't limited to hardware engineers, nor to UK. All
| across Europe, a massive brain drain is occurring, and the way
| it's going we'll become developing countries in a couple of
| decades at most.
| mgaunard wrote:
| The comparison of salaries doesn't necessarily make sense there.
|
| Cost of life in the UK is only high in London, and remains lower
| than California.
|
| I remember working as a software engineer on PS32k, and I could
| still afford a 3-bedroom house with a garden, garage and a car.
| IshKebab wrote:
| That must have been a very long time ago!
| mgaunard wrote:
| 10 years ago.
| turbojerry wrote:
| Firstly I would not go back to London unless I had the protection
| level of a government Minister. My life is not worth any amount
| of money and violence is out of control.
|
| Secondly the government acts as an economic terrorist by stopping
| innovation. Search engines and social media are a classic example
| by treating them as publishers so the owners are liable for any
| copyright infraction. No one is going to build a company with the
| threat of being prosecuted over the actions of one of their
| users. This goes for hardware as well, e.g. the government
| brought in the EU regulations on drones, which bans the flight of
| autonomous drones and thus stops innovation. This means people
| like myself who were working on autonomous drones had to stop,
| causing me to lose out on millions in revenue and the government
| missed out on the taxes I would have paid.
|
| Short of a revolution or an economic collapse nothing will
| change. The latter is baked in at this point, when and how bad it
| will be I do not know, I'm hoping for the best and planning for
| the worst.
| 0x70run wrote:
| > Firstly I would not go back to London unless I had the
| protection level of a government Minister. My life is not worth
| any amount of money and violence is out of control.
|
| I feel like there's heavy observation bias here. Maybe you had
| a bad experience or two, but I've been living in London for the
| past 4 years and haven't had any such encounter(s) so far. You
| make it sound like London's some third world warzone; I
| personally felt that New York, SF, and LA were far more unsafe
| when I was living there with the amount of homeless people and
| fentanyl addicts walking around.
| tomhoward wrote:
| I don't think it's just a UK thing, or that it's much easier to
| start a hardware startup in the USA.
|
| I think it's more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off
| the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in
| the world.
|
| Personally I've been trying to self-fund and bootstrap a hardware
| startup (based in Australia but I'm reasonably well connected in
| Silicon Valley as I'm a YC alum). I've had plenty of early
| success and validation of all my market theses, but it's super
| hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say "exciting" and
| want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding
| needs and path to market.
|
| In a world in which investors and other startup industry contacts
| are accustomed to seeing a bootstrapped SaaS app showing signs of
| growth and revenue just a few months in, with a hardware startup
| it's just impossible to avoid looking like a failure by
| comparison - due to all the costs, delays and complications
| involved with getting an MVP to market. And because successful
| hardware startups are so scarce relative to software ones, it's
| hard even to get any good advice; there's just barely anyone
| around with good, relevant experience to share (and I already
| know many of the people who have built companies in this vertical
| in past decades, none of whom are in SV).
|
| I've come to the conclusion that the only way to make it work is
| to start by achieving success as a software startup, then
| transition into hardware to later - but even then you'd have to
| convince investors that it's worth the risk.
|
| In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS
| wins over the past decade, and that's all that most investors are
| willing to even consider.
|
| The exceptions are "start-big and-get-huge-fast" plays like Groq
| - but the founders of that company were already highly
| credentialed and connected when they started, and even then
| vanishingly few investors are willing/able to fund new companies
| like that. That's not the kind of thing young, unproven founders
| can pull off, anywhere.
| sylware wrote:
| Yep, look at RISC-V, the most promising hardware is from the
| USA. It is not yet on the latest silicon process, but with the
| latest GPU, I guess we could run the latest games, until the
| game devs recompile and QA a bit their games (obviously on
| elf/linux)
| jononor wrote:
| Most promising by what definition? And what subset of
| applications/markets are you considering? In the
| microcontroller space, China is leading on RISC-V. EspressIf,
| WCH, et.c are already shipping units at scale. Of course
| these are low value chips, but the volumes are large. The
| combined shipments for microcontrollers are in tens of
| billions of units annually. The technology choices in the
| space changes slowly (32 bit over 8/16bit is quite
| recent...), but over the next 10 years RISC-V looks poised to
| take a decent chunk.
| sylware wrote:
| Look at risc-v official web site, some company called
| sifive and their UEFI workstation boards.
|
| And I want to be able to buy a USB-C RV64 SOC (without ARM
| blocks) with tons of GPIOs for my future keyboard
| controller.
| zipy124 wrote:
| The largest problem I see is shipping times. If I need to
| download a new software "part" (library or other), the shipping
| time is the download time, nearly instant.
|
| If I need new hardware pieces, its either next day shipping, a
| few days by air-freight or three weeks on a boat from china.
|
| This limits prototype turnover time, and means iterating quick
| is much harder.
|
| Finally you have the problem that hardware is expensive and an
| additional cost. A hardware startup has all the same costs as a
| software company but with the addition of hardware.
| tomhoward wrote:
| That's a big part of it. But mostly it's that your
| dev+deploy+evaluate cycle is so much slower. With web
| software you can write a feature or bug-fix and push to prod
| in minutes - and repeat that many times a day. With hardware
| each equivalent cycle is weeks or months (especially in my
| vertical - farms).
| zipy124 wrote:
| That's what I meant by prototype turnover time, your
| iteration cycle.
| bluGill wrote:
| Some of us write software for embedded devices where a
| mistake in programning means a critical machine in a remote
| area needs someone to physically go there and thus spend
| months in test before we dare deploy. Some of us care about
| quality and won't allow a customer to see bugs thus even
| though we can deploy in seconds our reputation won't allow
| it. There is also software that bugs can kill people so
| again we won't deploy without evtensive testing - much of
| this is regulated and we would go to prison for deploying
| at will even if it works.
|
| those who work in any of the above react in horror to
| stories of how the web deploys to production so fast. we
| know we are not perfect and don't understand how you would
| risk it.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| True but that reality applies to all your competitors. Your
| investors should care about your performance relative to the
| market.
| progbits wrote:
| Not to your competitors in Shenzhen, they can get basically
| any part within one day or can get any prototype made
| easily.
| llm_trw wrote:
| They also get it stolen even faster.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Investors are generally wanting to see little existing
| competition so that's not really the issue.
|
| They're more concerned with factors that will cause the
| company to self-destruct. Running out of money before
| hitting PMF and growth is the most common failure mode for
| any startup, and is much more likely with any hardware
| startup, due to the dramatically slower iteration times.
| varjag wrote:
| The pace is not really parts supply constrained in my
| experience. It just takes much longer to build and validate
| even relatively modest design changes.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Parts are pretty much instant, pcb turn around times are 3 to
| 15 days depending on how complex they are.
|
| Even in the bad old days of punch cards and priesthoods the
| turn around for software was faster.
|
| I have a little pcb mill in the garage that I use for
| prototypes.
|
| To this day I've not met another EE that knows what a voronoi
| mapping is, or why you'd want one. In a previous startup
| where I was the software engineer I got through more
| prototypes for the analogue signal paths in an afternoon than
| the two other EEs had in the previous week.
| YakBizzarro wrote:
| Only for simple pcb. If you are making multi-layer pcb with
| complex stacks, pcb manufacturing and soldering (with
| associated tooling setup, validation and so) are easily 2
| months of turnaround
| mrmlz wrote:
| Well to be fair if you add "validation" the turnaround
| for any noncomplex piece of software can reach months
| pretty quickly as well.
|
| But yeah I'm not gonna argue that sw isn't faster than hw
| in 99% of the cases.
| ta988 wrote:
| In some shops this is solved by staggering scheduling so
| people work on several projects. Some aspects of HW can be
| simulated (think analog with SPICE-likes, or logic level like
| the chip designers and FPGA users do) so this reduce the need
| to iterate every time in hardware.
|
| A lot of the iteration work can also be done on the board you
| received. You don't have to wait for your new board to see if
| those additional decoupling capacitors will do something, you
| add them on your current board by hand... You would be amazed
| at how far rewiring can go, sometimes entire BGAs are
| removed, installed dead-bug style and each pin wired by hand.
| nradov wrote:
| Do you see potential for better software design and
| simulation tools including VR to reduce the need for physical
| prototypes?
| analog31 wrote:
| Where I've worked in hardware dev, the biggest bottleneck is
| software.
| jillyboel wrote:
| It's because hardware developers don't take the software
| side seriously and either assume they can just do it
| themselves or don't think it's worth a decent salary
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Couldn't be more untrue
| Folcon wrote:
| Just to chime in and say that bootstrapping does work in this
| domain, I say that as someone who's had a few friends go down
| that route, but yes, it's really tough.
|
| There's also people I know who built small scale solutions and
| then managed to push that into funding and funnily enough a
| Kickstarter as well though I don't think he'd recommend anyone
| follow that route.
| hintymad wrote:
| UK ignited the First Industrial Revolution. It's sad to see
| that UK has slipped to number 16 or lower when it came to the
| market share of global manufacturing. And the problem is not to
| just UK, but to pretty much all the developed countries. Many
| nations and people have benefited greatly from globalization,
| but I have to ask: is it worth it if the cost is forfeiting my
| own country's manufacturing know-how and supply chains? And
| yes, I'm fully aware of the theory of comparative advantages,
| but in the meantime, but manufacturing can still bring great
| income to many families and nations still compete and even go
| to wars with each other, right?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Even the Americans can't manage economic isolation. It takes
| a global civilisation to build a smartphone. We _might_ have
| been able to get closer to it by being in the EU, but now we
| 're on our own on that one.
| hintymad wrote:
| Yeah, I do recognize that. I just wish that the US could
| have a healthy mixture of light and heavy industry, so that
| the cost building any mission critical systems will not go
| through the roof, and so that we will be able t build
| anything domestically if we want. Even though it's likely a
| pipe dream now, but at least the US can do so for the WW II
| and after WW II for quite some time.
| talldayo wrote:
| That ship sailed. It's like the other comment said -
| China embraces manufacturing to make other countries
| inept at it. It's not _only_ that American precision
| engineering is mostly at parity with China, it 's that
| manufacturing _anywhere else_ is a waste of money. When
| unibody aluminum Macbook cases are machined, they _never_
| are machined in America. They 're sold to Americans,
| marketed as an American company, but your device (even at
| the markup Apple charges) cannot be made economically in
| America, period.
|
| In a broader sense, I'd say that America is headed down
| the same road the UK is too. We expect people to pay
| hand-over-fist for our tech talent that isn't any better
| than what you can get in Pakistan or China. Our hard
| markets are getting bearish, our leadership wants to de-
| globalize, and American tech wants to maintain global
| control without acquiescing to local governance.
|
| America had the economic lead before WWI and after WWII,
| but now we've bet the farm on our ability to market
| bullshit. America's national economy cannot survive if
| the App Store and ChatGPT are our premier exports.
| creer wrote:
| > unibody aluminum Macbook
|
| This to me is a super interesting example. Nobody but
| nobody NEEDS a unibody aluminum anything. But it's cool,
| light, beautiful - and sells great - so it's what gets
| produced even when the only place that makes sense for
| that is China. The Macbook could temporarily return to
| more manageable production - like plastic - and the world
| would not end.
| talldayo wrote:
| It's a commercialized and well-distributed example. You
| could replace it with any other machined commodity -
| engine blocks, turbojets, ablative shielding, toilet
| seats, you name it. The industries have all moved in the
| same direction and have no hope of ever coming back.
| Capitalism fought authoritarian subsidy, and capitalism
| lost.
| creer wrote:
| > Capitalism fought authoritarian subsidy, and capitalism
| lost.
|
| If we are going to blame something I would think it's the
| chinese enthusiasm for capitalist business development.
|
| It's not the chinese State Owned Enterprises that earn
| american contracts, mostly. Not to mention Foxconn being
| a taiwanese company that earned that business in the US
| to begin with (and only later moved it to mainland
| china.)
| nradov wrote:
| Realistically in order to prosper the UK needs to join up
| as part of a "greater NAFTA" trade bloc. But the UK no
| longer has anything that the USA needs so they'll have to
| make major concessions to get a deal done.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The UK left the largest free trade area a few years ago.
|
| There's little appetite to join the American one, as it
| would mean lowering standards (food etc) which ruins
| Britain's specialties.
| brewdad wrote:
| I realize it's an outdated stereotype but man it says
| nothing good about America when the UK won't join up
| because it would compromise the quality of available
| foods.
| nradov wrote:
| When you're starving you eat what's available regardless
| of how appetizing it looks. The UK isn't starving yet,
| but how long can they hold out? And has NAFTA ruined
| Canadian or Mexican food?
| creer wrote:
| That's not entirely true (about global civilization being
| needed). Any nominally developped but not too wasteful
| country or even just California could do it. It's just that
| that ship has sailed and we collectively decided a long
| time ago NOT to go that way. Recovering from these choices
| would take a lot of time and a lot of money that we would
| rather spend on railroads to and from nowhere (California).
| Sarcasm aside, americans, europeans, japan in particular
| are not ready to pay the price for that - even while they
| could totally afford it. They are busy paying the price for
| lots of other things and can't be bothered.
| wcfrobert wrote:
| 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.
| soVeryTired wrote:
| Or... Bob makes bread, Alice grows flowers. Alice needs
| bread; Bob likes flowers but can go without if he wants to.
| Who's going to come off worse if they have an argument?
| chronic7300690 wrote:
| > Who's going to come off worse if they have an argument?
|
| The US.
|
| But 4 year election cycles and quarterly earning reports
| are incompatible with long-term planning.
| ericmay wrote:
| On the other hand, long-term planning is susceptible to
| disruption and unforeseen events, and when we have long-
| term government plans they have a way of taking on a life
| of their own and defending themselves even if they have
| outlived their usefulness.
|
| Everything has trade-offs.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Bob bakes bread, Alice grow apples. Everyone is better off
| because of specialization.
|
| America is 300 Million. Europe is almost a Billion. These
| populations are more than large enough to specialize in
| everything.
|
| >Everyone is better off because of specialization.
|
| Why?
| creer wrote:
| > These populations are more than large enough to
| specialize in everything.
|
| My impression is that population size is not very
| relevant in the math of trade specialization profit. It's
| still more profitable to play on relative strengths and
| weaknesses. You can find other things to worry about like
| security (from droughts and earthquakes perhaps), or
| political or strategic desires. In particular, trade is
| likely beneficial even when local production would be
| cheaper than remote production - just because there are
| other things that can be done localy and even stronger
| (like phone games or advertising-oriented browser feature
| destruction /s).
| constantcrying wrote:
| Why would European population of almost a billion people
| need to specialize on anything? What would it even
| specialize on. What does that world need that there need
| to be 10% or the world working on it?
|
| >In particular, trade is likely beneficial even when
| local production would be cheaper than remote production
| - just because there are other things that can be done
| localy and even stronger
|
| This only matters if you can not do both. If your
| population is large the amount of things which it can do
| especially good can easily be exhausted before you run
| out of people.
|
| I don't even see how you _can_ specialize. What does
| China specialize in? (Before answering, think about the
| things which China is not trying to produce or the
| services it is not trying to perform. Can you name even
| one?)
| creer wrote:
| "Specialize" is not quite the right word. In trade
| economics (from the very crudest level), trade is
| beneficial to BOTH parties EVEN when etc etc etc. i.e.
| higher profit. It's really hard to beat trade.
|
| It's not that anyone needs to specialize as in "otherwise
| it won't work". It's that it's more profitable and so
| people will tend to prefer that plus some extra money in
| their pocket.
|
| And it's not specialize as in only do wine, cheese and
| perfume and nothing else. It's systematically favor some
| things that you are relatively better at than others, and
| trade for the others (not even 100%, you can export some
| plastic parts and import some similar plastic parts at
| the same time). Even if the other country could
| themselves be better at it. So for France, engineering of
| all kinds, wine, cheese, perfume, meds, etc but also any
| manufacturing that by chance has gotten and remained
| strong (say, like airplanes, some electrical equipment,
| whatever else that really any other country also could
| possibly manufacture).
| constantcrying wrote:
| You did not answer any of my questions.
|
| I do not think that Europe or the US even could
| specialize in anything. The population is so large that
| for every good and service needed there is a group of
| people who are specializing in it right now.
|
| What single good/service is not at all produced in
| Europe. Which single good/service is not produced in
| China?
|
| At the scale of 1B people specialization becomes
| meaningless. You can't even accomplish it if you wanted
| to. All you could do is letting one of your industries
| get out competed by some other power.
| creer wrote:
| I feel we are talking past each other so I will leave it
| at that.
|
| The specialization you ... expect? is irrelevant.
|
| Business jets are not produced in China, large efficient
| passenger jets are not produced in China, printed silk
| scarves branded Hermes, silent diesel electric submarines
| for export are not produced in China. (See what I did
| there?) And that's irrelevant to why trade exists.
|
| Even an up-to-the-minute super competitive manufacturer
| has no incentive (except political and some risk-
| aversion) to do everything in-house or in one country. It
| does have incentives to trade with other countries and
| other companies. Even if it possibly had the machines and
| low cost employees on hand and already trained to do
| that, from an economics point of view it should (in the
| long term), sell some production units, focus on the
| others and trade for the difference.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Business jets are not produced in China, large efficient
| passenger jets are not produced in China, printed silk
| scarves branded Hermes, silent diesel electric submarines
| for export are not produced in China. (See what I did
| there?) And that's irrelevant to why trade exists.
|
| Literally every single one of these is false. China is
| producing every single one of these things.
|
| Business Jet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C909
|
| Large efficient passenger jet:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
|
| Hermes: China is well known for producing knockoff
| products. 0% chance that some Chinese factory is not
| making Hermes branded scarfs.
|
| Silent diesel electric submarines for export:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_039A_submarine (Yes,
| they are actually made for export)
|
| I think it is pretty clear that you are totally and
| utterly wrong.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| comparative advantage is disproven at this point, because
| economists are failed math majors who don't account for the
| innovation flywheel effect and general network effects.
| Silicon Valley software industry happened because of the
| proximity to the existing hardware industry there. Same
| thing for other forms of manufacturing and the US gave it
| away in the name of short term profits
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| When the UK had its industrial revolution it had an empire.
| I'd say dropping to 16 is pretty fair given its size and
| influence today.
| flir wrote:
| When I was a kid (80s) I knew old boys with lathes and mills
| and pillar drills at the bottom of the garden. They were the
| last generation, I think, of a tradition rooted in the
| Victorian era which informally transferred a lot of knowledge
| from one generation to the next.
|
| My pet theory is that their disappearance is tied closely to
| the cost of land. I see US-based hardware hobbyists' shops on
| YouTube, and I think "I couldn't even afford to build a shed
| that big". The tools themselves are often actually pretty
| cheap second hand at auction, because the demand is so low,
| but I live on the back of a postage stamp in comparison with
| those guys.
|
| (Another possibility is simply that software ate the world.)
| qazxcvbnmlp wrote:
| Land is expensive in the areas people want to live. But
| yeah, tools are much cheaper, esp if you slowly grow over
| time.
| rjsw wrote:
| My grandfather got a lathe and pillar drill as his
| retirement gift from work, he also taught me how to etch
| PCBs and build radios.
| jillyboel wrote:
| It's insane how much space there is in America, and most
| Americans don't realize this beyond a simple "america big".
| constantcrying wrote:
| >but in the meantime, but manufacturing can still bring great
| income to many families
|
| How so? If you aren't willing to buy from China many products
| will become unavailable and the rest will go up 10x in price.
|
| Disentangling yourself from the global economic system is
| hard and painful, especially if you have just disentangled
| yourself from one super block.
| foobarian wrote:
| Would it be fair to say that the "unicorn" effect is a lot
| harder to achieve as well? If VC rely on 1 out of N startups
| doing well then that 1 success needs to achieve over N-fold
| returns just to break even.
|
| On the other hand I have no trouble coming up with examples of
| hardware companies that did well: Apple, Nvidia, Intel... but
| those time scales are titanic.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Apple, Nvidia, Intel.
|
| Not sure they are great examples. Intel is going through a
| lot of pain now (but it's been very successful in the past).
| Apple was in a terrible situation before its reverse
| acquisition by NeXT (NeXT paid one Steve Jobs for all of
| Apple and got $400 million in change). Nvidia got insanely
| lucky with Bitcoin, then with AI. Its original plan was to
| make 3D accelerators for gamers and, maybe, engineering
| workstations.
|
| All of them were a couple wrong decisions away from doom
| multiple times.
|
| Think Commodore, who made one of the most popular computers
| ever, only to be mismanaged into the ground.
| nradov wrote:
| Luck and timing obviously play huge roles. But I like to
| think that as an industry we no longer frequently make
| mistakes quite as outright _stupid_ as Commodore management
| did. There are at least some generally understood tech
| industry best practices which prevent decisions like that
| when there is serious money at stake.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Nokia enters the chat
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's funny that you didn't mention Dell, Lenovo, Sony, or
| even Microsoft and Nintendo which both make their money off
| the software than the hardware, but are also companies that
| produce and selling hardware.
| brewdad wrote:
| Those companies don't _produce_ hardware. They _assemble_
| it. Big difference.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Nvidia outsourced their manufacturing, as did a lot of
| similar startups from the 90s. Even back then, VCs didn't
| want to invest in hardware companies that were going to
| actually build their own hardware because that's expensive,
| they wanted companies that designed their products in the USA
| and had them manufactured by other fabs.
|
| Nvidia got lucky by building a product that just happened to
| be amazingly well suited to a technology that would emerge 20
| years after they were founded. Credit where it's due, they
| developed CUDA and gave universities gobs of cash/hardware to
| train students to leverage CUDA for machine learning and
| later, AI. But if not for AI, Nvidia would still be a video
| card designer with a market cap of maybe 5% of its current
| valuation.
|
| It's difficult to call them a hardware company in the sense
| that Intel is. They only do designs of hardware, and a lot of
| their value comes from the software they designed to leverage
| their hardware in ways beyond their initial purpose.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > That's not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can
| pull off, anywhere.
|
| The UK, with a comprehensive social safety net, should be more
| willing to take small risks. I know it's now what happens, but
| it'd be important to understand why something that _should be_
| actually isn 't.
| varispeed wrote:
| What safety net? UK does not have a safety net.
| rbanffy wrote:
| That's fair. UC and the NHS are far from ideal, but,
| compared to the US, they are heaven.
| kristianc wrote:
| I think that needs to be qualified heavily -- salaries in
| the UK are much lower both in nominal and PPP terms, so
| there's much less opportunity to build one's own safety
| net, and the NHS is overwhelmingly focused on providing
| care for the elderly. To a young(ish) startup founder,
| the presence of the NHS and UC makes little to no
| difference.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Maybe a good way to incentivize more risky entrepreneurs
| is to provide a better safety net. I would, however,
| caution against making it too perfect (and I hate myself
| for saying that, because I would prefer people worked on
| whatever brings them happiness, not money) - part of the
| drive for Americans (and the reason they risk so much on
| it) is the need to accumulate as much capital as possible
| as soon as possible, because they know they won't enjoy
| any sort of safety net when they grow old.
| kristianc wrote:
| Let me rephrase -- in the UK we have a generous and
| expanding safety net, for the elderly, voted for by the
| elderly, and paid for at great expense by the working
| population.
| kadushka wrote:
| Isn't there a safety net for the elderly in US as well?
| I'm talking about Medicare.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The startup founder in the UK needn't worry about a bad
| cycling accident (happened to a friend in his thirties),
| an early cancer (colleague in her thirties) or losing
| their job just before a baby is born (friend in his
| thirties).
| constantcrying wrote:
| Why? Each one is life changing event. Just because some
| part of the bill is paid by the government does not mean
| it is any less worth worrying about.
| brewdad wrote:
| Those events will always come with challenges but at
| least bankruptcy won't be one of them.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Why not? If you are a startup founder you might have
| significant capital invested and be in debt. The
| government will not pay your companies bills while you
| are unable to work.
|
| I think a VC funding you is a much better security
| against any of these events than health insurance being
| forcibly deducted from your pay.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Those 3 events can easily saddle someone with 100k of
| debt. Surely you can understand how that might hamper an
| up and coming entrepreneur.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Those 3 events can easily saddle someone with 100k of
| debt. Surely you can understand how that might hamper an
| up and coming entrepreneur.
|
| That is the case in the UK as well. If you have a start
| up in which you have invested capital and suddenly can't
| work anymore that is a huge _financial_ disaster. The
| state is not going to fund your business while you
| recover in hospital.
|
| Also the medical debt is something you would only have if
| you weren't insured. Both US and UK have health
| insurance, the only difference is that in the UK you have
| to pay for it, in the US you don't.
|
| In any case having a _well funded_ startup is a far
| better safety net than a forced insurance.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| This is true. People associate a safety net with
| healthcare, but young and healthy startup founders are
| more worried about making rent or mortgage payments if
| their startup should fail.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| UC seems almost specifically set up to prevent people on it
| from starting a business, with it's look-through provisions
| and capital limits.
| DrScientist wrote:
| Interested in your opinion on crowd-funding as a way of raising
| initial capital - ie cut out professional investors and go
| direct to potential customers?
| momojo wrote:
| What are your thoughts on Anduril?
| NickC25 wrote:
| > _I've had plenty of early success and validation of all my
| market theses, but it's super hard to get any investors
| interested. Plenty say "exciting" and want to chat. All lose
| interest when you start talking funding needs and path to
| market._
|
| I started a non-tech food product company, and have found the
| exact same thing to be true in my line of work. It's odd.
|
| Here's a conversation I recently had with a potential investor.
|
| "You've got a years worth of sales to convince me you have
| found ideal PMF?"
|
| _Yes._
|
| "You've found the resources you need to scale to the degree
| that I'd get a good return if sales continue to grow?"
|
| _Yes._
|
| "You've built a small team with some industry vets, and have
| some great talent on your advisory board who know the ups and
| downs of building a brand and product in your chosen space?"
|
| _Yes._
|
| "You've boostrapped your way to $100k in revenue, have
| developed a cult-like following in your local market and are
| seeking a small amount to be able to grow the product to a
| state-wide or nation-wide scale?"
|
| _Yes._
|
| "How much do are you looking to raise?"
|
| _Not a lot by modern standards. A million dollars would last
| us several years_
|
| "Why should I invest in you? Your industry's traditional exit
| valuation isn't triple digit. Sorry"
|
| _Why the fuck did you come to me and ask for this meeting?_
|
| > _In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy
| SaaS wins over the past decade, and that's all that most
| investors are willing to even consider._
|
| This needs to be echoed from the rooftops. And seen by a whole
| bunch of investors/VCs whose hubris has prevented them from
| investing in anything else.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >Examples of wasted potential:
|
| > Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech
| payment systems.
|
| > James: 3D-printed prosthetic limbs for A-levels. Today?
| Writing credit risk reports.
|
| > Alex: Developed AI drone swarms for disaster relief at 18.
| Graduated with top honours from Imperial. His job? Tweaking a
| single button's ergonomics on home appliances.
|
| >These aren't outliers. They're a generation of engineering
| prodigies whose talents are being squandered.
|
| Just the opposite can still be like a mirror image :\
|
| When I was younger than that in the land of the dollar bill I
| had already made millions for our clients in financial
| services.
|
| At the time of course the dollar and the pound sterling were
| still backed in a non-fiat way at about $2.5/PS1 which people
| could count on for the long term.
|
| Once everything went fiat, nobody could afford anything
| physical like they could before.
|
| I didn't get out of high school until after 1971 so it was
| already far too late.
|
| Then I went to the University to study hardware type things
| so I would have something to sell where concrete value was
| being added, not merely shuffled around or gradually
| extracted. The business school had a ridiculous cheating
| scandal and they weren't as good at math as I would have
| liked anyway.
|
| But manufacturing momentum continued to dwindle with
| skyrocketing inflation and labor costs.
|
| Regardless, I'm still not finished improving my abilities to
| _create_ and /or _make_ all kinds of things from mechanical
| hardware, electronics, chemicals and more, but only sold one
| physical product for a limited number of years in my
| employers ' or my own company, which was a side product
| within a pure service provider. You can be prepared your
| whole life and still not get up to launching hardware as
| easily as you can with something having much less raw
| material cost.
|
| Which is naturally the way it always was, but one day the
| costs just skyrocketed out of sight and beyond the reach of
| millions more technologists in a most insidious way, so no
| more manufacturing for you. And millions is a lot, that grew
| to include today's big slice containing almost _all_ of the
| promising creatives who are capable of earth-shaking physical
| inventions who were fortunately not previously confined to
| such an exclusive (never be able to afford it again) club. If
| past progress would have been limited the same way, Bell Labs
| or NASA could never have even gotten off the ground in the
| 20th century. Does anybody today have any idea what places
| like this were _supposed_ to be like in the 21st century?
| Hint; not less-capable of putting every other contender to
| shame, and certainly not smaller or non-existent. While still
| being dwarfed in size by the combined power of industrial
| research labs supporting domestic manufacturing.
|
| I guess it's just remaining momentum continuing to slow from
| an era that was already bygone before I got out of college.
| Once inflation kicked in, average people couldn't afford to
| buy US-made products any more, manufacturers couldn't afford
| to keep making them, and it never got better. Reagan came
| along and it got even worse. Remember, the great mothballing
| of factories in the 20th century is only temporary until the
| value of the currency in average peoples' pockets comes back
| :\
|
| If you want to be able to make anything you could possibly
| need, you need to already be making everything you already
| need.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Completely wrong on the root causes. Britain _used_ to have a
| large hardware industry, where these people would actually get to
| do proper engineering.
|
| The difference between Germany and Britain is that Germany still
| has large, successful and innovative hardware companies and it
| still has decent engineering jobs. Britain has lost them,
| together with the companies which once offered them.
|
| But these jobs didn't vanish into thin air, they vanished to
| India and China, which now control the companies making "British"
| cars (MG, Lotus, Jaguar, Landrover, etc.).
|
| There is the delusion in many Western people that e.g. China just
| can not do proper engineering and that outsourcing jobs there
| will not work. This is false. Most engineering jobs people do can
| be done just as well by people on the other side of the world for
| half the pay. The only reason you get paid twice the money for
| the same thing is institutional inertia, a company can not move
| it's development all at once to there other side of the world, so
| there need to be people locally to do engineering, even if it is
| more expensive. This is not something which will remain true
| forever.
|
| These Hardware jobs are paid terribly because they well paid for
| the _global_ market rate.
|
| It is not geography, or lack of innovation or VCs. It is
| outsourcing.
| nsteel wrote:
| I don't disagree with anything in particular here but I'm not
| sure your latter paragraphs do anything to explain why Germany
| is different. Or are you saying it's also institutional inertia
| and it's just a matter of time for them to end up the same?
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Or are you saying it's also institutional inertia and it's
| just a matter of time for them to end up the same?
|
| Exactly. Britain has lost its industry long ago, while
| Germany did not. The situation right now is different, but I
| do not believe the trajectory is.
|
| Especially when it comes to software, even the largest
| corporations in Germany just outsource to India. And
| justifying hiring people for 2x/3x//4x the cost at "home"
| becomes increasingly hard.
| dmwilcox wrote:
| I moved from Silicon Valley to London -- a funny thing I haven't
| seen mentioned is that the tax rates on RSUs are absolutely awful
| (extra NI can push rates to nearly 60%).
|
| That is a large disincentive for working in a tech company versus
| finance. Tech companies especially start-ups largely pay in stock
| which could be mispriced and you make more (or less) money than
| could be predicted. But versus finance paying pure cash, less
| (equity) risk, and a lower tax rate the incentives are clear.
|
| HMRC I don't think should be underrated in their effects on
| answering the question -- "should I start my start-up in the US
| or the UK?"
| bArray wrote:
| I'm somewhat bucking this trend as a hardware engineer in London,
| a few comments:
|
| > Geographical Constraints: Unlike lucrative software jobs,
| hardware engineering demands physical presence.
|
| Not completely true. Our engineers take hardware home, and I have
| a mini-lab at home for developing hardware. If COVID2.0 kicked
| off tomorrow, we would be robust against this.
|
| > Venture Capital: European VCs, mostly bullish on fintech and
| SaaS, remain wary of hardware. Result? A feedback loop of
| underinvestment and missed opportunities.
|
| Extremely true. I cannot overstate how wary of hardware investors
| are. As with software, you have two types of hardware: research-
| based and engineering-based. Engineering-based hardware is
| actually quite low risk if the risks are well understood.
|
| > Innovation Stagnation: We're not just losing salary
| differences; we're missing out on the next ARM or Tesla.
|
| 100%. Even when the UK accidentally creates the likes of ARM, it
| always fails to stop it being purchased by other Countries.
|
| > False. London is around the same as NYC and more expensive than
| most parts of California and definitely Texas. This also ignores:
|
| I'll put some numbers to it. If you want a house share (one
| bedroom, shared common rooms and utilities), at a PS1600 budget
| you will struggle to find somewhere. On a PS25k salary, losing
| PS5k to pension, etc, your ENTIRE salary goes on accommodation.
| If you are one of those pesky eating humans who sometimes
| requires clothes, travels to work, etc, it's literally
| impossible.
|
| > "UK's small market limits growth."
|
| In any situation you have to realise the opportunity. As the
| article points out, the hardware engineers are 25%-50% of their
| US counterparts at the same quality.
|
| > Your next unicorn isn't code. It's cobalt and circuits. Back
| the tangible.
|
| It's actually a mixture of the two. Software and hardware working
| in tangent. The barrier to entry with software is very low, it's
| difficult to compete there. The barrier to entry to hardware is
| higher due to time and costs, you can work there and have less
| concern about competitors.
|
| The profit margins are also far higher, as there is a tangible
| thing, there is a greater perception of value. You buy <Software>
| and it takes a year to develop. You spend another year writing
| <Update>, people expect to get it for free, despite the same
| resources being applied. When you buy <Hardware>, the next
| iteration which is a year of <Update> can be sold at full price,
| and people will pay it.
| agwp wrote:
| Aside from computer hardware, another industry that the UK is
| nowhere near ambitious on (despite its fortunate geography) is
| offshore wind power.
|
| This is an area with ridiculous potential in the UK if the will
| and the financing was there to build it.
|
| [Conservative analysis
| shows](https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-
| wind...) that if only 10% of the UK's EEZ was used for offshore
| wind, it would produce >2000 TWh annually (over 2 trillion
| kWh).
|
| That is equivalent to half of [all the electricity consumed by
| the United
| States](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-
| elect....) - from a country with five times fewer people, a GDP
| one-eighth the size and a total land area 39 times smaller.
|
| Not only would developing this sector be an industrial driver
| in itself, but the sheer excess of carbon-free power could be
| used to power the growth of other sectors - from energy-
| intensive data centers to heavy industry. Needless to say it
| would also act as some protection given geopolitical risks with
| fossil fuel supplies.
|
| And also the [development of novel energy storage solutions](ht
| tps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/01/thermal-...)
| means concerns about periods of low wind will likely become
| less of an issue over time.
| zipy124 wrote:
| One bedroom house shares in london (Zone 2 or further) are
| closer to PS1-1.2k a room currently btw. They maybe get that
| high in Zone 1, but there's almost no reason to live in euston
| or kings cross over living in camden/kentish town for example
| in the northern direction.
| cue_the_strings wrote:
| This is really not a UK-only thing, it's a thing everywhere.
|
| The US has some defense jobs that pay well (but are immoral IMO),
| and there are some gambling-machine related jobs that pay well,
| but otherwise engineering pays really poorly.
|
| I used to work as an embedded engineer in Slovenia, in the
| automotive industry, and wanted to potentially move to Germany or
| Austria or Switzerland to do something similar. After
| interviewing with some really prominent companies, household
| names if you will, and seeing their offers - I bushed up on my CS
| and switched to finance.
| aiisahik wrote:
| The answer here can be found if you just "follow the money" and
| realize that while some investments follow international
| boundaries, other types of investments are highly mobile.
|
| The lack of UK hardware startups is due to the lack of local VC
| appetite and the unwillingness of US VCs to fund a non-Delaware
| incorporated company. Therefore the investment from a VC to a
| startup is generally "bounded" by geography.
|
| The lack of UK VC appetite is due to the fact that there are just
| not that many LPs that want to give their money to a UK VC given
| their choice internationally. The LP investment to VC is
| "unbounded" - meaning it just follows exactly where the returns
| are highest.
|
| What we really need is for UK startups to break the international
| border between silicon valley and the UK (or anywhere else for
| that matter). This means setting up a Delaware C corp, selling to
| the US, but keeping most of the talent in the UK.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| > I think it's more that the bar for getting a hardware startup
| off the ground is much higher than a software startup -
| everywhere in the world.
|
| I hear ya on this, and it's not just the setup costs, or the
| testing or the certification... It's a non trivial task to run a
| hardware company. Even the stuff you don't expect. For instance,
| a good friend of mine founded a health startup that makes
| wearables, and they were almost torpedoed in the first year of
| operation by some mouthy influencer who went about publicly
| calling their beta release product a fraud. This is despite the
| fact it worked and did what it should.
| throwaway83726 wrote:
| A lot of these comments tell me that most commenters haven't
| actually worked in the EU or attempted to build wealth here.
|
| I come from an unprivileged background, my father joked that he
| might leave me an empty bottle of whisky when he died. I went
| from making 20k USD at my first job to over 800k per year.
|
| Taxation never particularly blunted my avarice or desire to
| advance further, and I never minded paying my taxes either.
| Frankly, only two things ever really slowed me down: the good old
| boys clubs in Europe, where if you haven't gone to the right
| schools, they treat you like you're supposed to be a slave rather
| than expect a slice of the pie... and the good old boys clubs in
| the US, where unless you're in CA/NY, well, again, how dare you
| expect a slice of the pie.
|
| If I could, I'd gladly try to get richer than Musk, and honestly,
| fuck the taxes. Having miserable poor people around me sucks more
| than paying taxes. I'd rather they enjoy some of my success too.
| That way I can hire fewer bodyguards.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >the good old boys clubs in Europe
|
| What are you talking about? This certainly is not a "European"
| phenomenon.
|
| >I went from making 20k USD at my first job to over 800k per
| year.
|
| Then you are extremely lucky, as those just are extremely rare.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| Gotta love how the folks spinning slick pitches make bank, while
| the engineers actually building our world are left pinching
| pennies. But hey, that's capitalism for you.
| yapyap wrote:
| > Meanwhile computer science graduates land lucrative jobs in big
| tech or quant trading, often starting at PS100,000+
|
| I mean, not really
| hbrav wrote:
| I'm a Brit who has worked in finance and AI. I honestly want to
| move into building hardware. My background is physics, I want to
| build things that make the world better. But the businesses just
| seem absent. One of the UK's most exciting hardware projects was
| Reaction Engines, and they went bankrupt recently.
|
| I really want to know what we can do to fix this. As a country,
| we aren't building things that people want. Which means we are
| less powerful.
| heeton wrote:
| Same. I'm in the UK, I've been a software dev for a long time
| (with forays into physical consumer products, not
| electronics/hardware).
|
| I tinker with robotics, rpis, embedded tools, and the potential
| _power_ there is huge. But I never hear or see of jobs or
| opportunities (in the ballpark compensation of software).
| pjc50 wrote:
| > As a country, we aren't building things that people want.
|
| The key distinction is between "what people want", "what people
| are prepared to pay for", and "what the people with all the
| money really want to buy".
|
| The huge success of gatcha games which understand the economic
| inequality among their audience is important. Most of the free
| users are effectively there as an audience for the few whales
| who pay for the whole thing.
|
| Similarly, startups are not so much about serving unmet needs
| as about fishing for whale VCs, of which there are very few and
| all searching in the same pond of Silicon Valley. They in turn
| want whale companies: a mere profitable business isn't enough,
| it has to be world-dominating.
|
| The financial sector makes a lot of money because it serves the
| customers who have the money.
| rfool wrote:
| Oh no! What you describe is generally known as a 100% german
| trait.
|
| You cannot steal it from us and relabel as british! No, Sir!
|
| BTW: your examples stink.
|
| From first to last one:
|
| > Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech
| payment systems.
|
| Nice, but that fusion reactor? Where is it? Did she really
| accomplish something?
| rfool wrote:
| Btw: remaining examples are just as stupid as the first one.
|
| Ideas are worth nothing. Even if they shine
| constantcrying wrote:
| Germany has multiple successful and innovative engineering
| companies, where engineers work for good wages.
|
| >Where is it? Did she really accomplish something?
|
| Building a fusion reactor is not that hard, although that
| example is probably hyperbole. Note that a fusion reactor is
| something totally different than a fusion reactor which outputs
| net energy.
| ETH_start wrote:
| All economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if
| the underlying macro conditions aren't right.
|
| The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but
| politically anathema: cut taxes
|
| A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation.
| A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2%
| reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in
| corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
|
| The study is quite rigorous too:
|
| https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/tax-cuts-and-innovation?r...
| nedt wrote:
| The cost of living thing is debunked very quickly, but I think
| it's missing some aspects. I'm not in UK, but just on Europe main
| land, but I can easily pay for my flat, don't need a car for
| anything, while still living pretty much in the city center,
| should I lose my job I still get payed while looking for another
| job, should I get sick I can also just go to a doctor or the
| hospital and pay up to nothing, my kids just go to kindergarten
| and school also with paying up to nothing. At the very least most
| of that is not true for the US. So earning less is okish. Of
| course I'd also love to get more. But it's not as much needed as
| it might be in the US.
| ashergill wrote:
| > The reality for most graduates is even grimmer:
|
| > * PS25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms
|
| > * Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated
| better
|
| This is _exactly_ my career so far.
|
| The key thing about the British economy is that while most things
| operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by
| councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So
| the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need
| physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't
| block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building
| lab space near where people want to live and work.
|
| My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm
| in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because
| it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab
| in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but
| it shows that we're restricting our small businesses
| unnecessarily through our planning system.
|
| The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal
| for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise
| development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some
| planning reform before it's too late for our struggling
| innovation industries.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I used to live and work in Cambridge. In many ways it's a
| victim of its own success; people will, not unreasonably, argue
| that it's a beautiful little town of historic buildings,
| embedded in a primarily agricultural county of either prime
| agricultural land or protected wetland. They're not going to
| let you build Shenzen in Shelford no matter what the economic
| benefit might be. Meanwhile it's close enough to London that
| the property prices tick upwards to London commuter weighting.
|
| (This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people
| oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the
| idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums
| where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy
| development or having a bill surcharge.)
| glompers wrote:
| The wiki editor(s) who wrote the boosterish Economy
| subsection of the wiki page on Peterborough [1] (thirty miles
| away, same county) make it sound as though it is a growing
| area that does want to grow more.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough
| pjc50 wrote:
| I can tell that you've read the Wikipedia page rather than
| going to Peterborough.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Could you clarify how the vast majority of people in the
| world who will never set foot in Peterborough (including
| me) should interpret that?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > but politically suicidal for any government that tried to
| implement it
|
| Labour just got into government and literally the third bullet
| point in their manifesto is:
|
| * 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.
|
| So i would hope it's not political suicide to follow through on
| that
| tormeh wrote:
| We'll see. Taking away local control over land development is
| going to be controversial. A lot of rich and politically
| connected people are not going to like this. The last three
| decades in the west has been an endless series of victories
| for landowners. It's hard to imagine that this time really is
| different.
| immibis wrote:
| New Zealand took away local control over land development,
| and then promptly elected a right-wing central government
| that hates land development. :/
| speedbird wrote:
| 1.5M new homes won't even keep up with immigration. Not to
| mention schools and hospitals.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem always ends up being that it's extremely local
| (read: NIMBY).
|
| _Everyone_ wants more Z, Y, X. _Nobody_ wants to change
| where they are to support it. This is why even areas that
| redevelop in places that are friendly to it, take decades.
|
| The "old" solution was to just build a whole new factory town
| elsewhere, but that doesn't work as well, and especially
| doesn't work when you're not building megafactories that
| employ entire cities.
| epanchin wrote:
| Fast internet, communal office space, and a fast cheap
| train to London is just as good as a factory. Build new
| towns.
|
| Get a grip of bat and heritage protections which slow
| everything down by months or years.
| nprateem wrote:
| LOL. HS2
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| This is the true cost of the bank bailouts. This is the moral
| hazard incarnate.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Local councillors being against development is nothing to do
| with bank bailouts, which have (mostly) been repaid by
| selling off the banks again.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| That isn't what I mean. The moral hazard is caused by the
| bailouts. It isn't about the sum itself. Merely the
| guarantee that the tab for large gambling losses will be
| taken by the taxpayers.
| rjsw wrote:
| We should have shot a few bankers in 2008 to encourage
| the others.
| immibis wrote:
| How about one in 2024?
| skywhopper wrote:
| It's 2025.
| pipes wrote:
| Quite a broad term "bankers". Who does that include?
| pjc50 wrote:
| - not gambling, mortgages
|
| - not in the end a loss (banks taken into government
| ownership eventually sold for about the acquisition price
|
| - bank shareholders lost their money
|
| - you don't want to see everything turned into Northern
| Rock bank runs
| henryaj wrote:
| Yup. From Sam Bowman's Foundations[0]:
|
| > [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any
| development was permitted anywhere, to one where development
| was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in
| 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels,
| let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second
| World War.
|
| > Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject
| new developments, and little incentive to accept them.
| Historically, local governments encouraged development because
| their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but
| this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have
| centralised and capped local governments' tax-raising powers.
|
| [0] https://ukfoundations.co/
| itissid wrote:
| I remember seeing tons of shipping containers repurposed as
| offices all over london last year. Was that a way to ease/get-
| around this real estate issue?
| archsurface wrote:
| An illustration of this which I happened to be looking at:
| Average home sizes (sq ft, sq m): Australia
| 2,303 214 New Zealand 2,174 202 United States
| 2,164 201 Canada 1,948 181 UK
| 818 76
|
| Edit: formatting.
| bombcar wrote:
| Apparently, the UK size is roughly what the average US house
| size was _in 1790_ - though it really didn 't start to grow
| much until the 1900s.
| davisoneee wrote:
| ...that's not really an illustration of that. When you
| actually consider population and land size, the numbers don't
| seem so strange.
|
| Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very
| simple scaling) % area housing = area_house
| * population
|
| So... aus 0.08% nz 0.42% us
| 1.82% can 0.08% uk 2.14%
|
| The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with
| housing than the other nations mentioned.
|
| When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada
| > Australia.
|
| You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space
| to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so
| big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
| daz0007 wrote:
| it's not only the area of land but the material's used in
| the housing, as well as when the housing where built.
|
| The stagnation in other countries housing markets like the
| us is interesting, I don't know the answer but have they
| ever had social housing on the scale of the uk?
| tormeh wrote:
| This is a disease that has infected the entire West. It's just
| become impossible to do anything that requires space. Even
| industrial giants like Germany are now de-industrializing
| because it's just too hard to get permits for building anything
| new. Sure, labor costs, energy costs, environmental
| regulations, etc. are all bothersome, but what really makes
| German industry emigrate is how hard it is to get permission to
| change anything. It's such a self-inflicted wound.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| What statistic are you citing for your claim that "Germany is
| now de-industrializing" ?
| ren_engineer wrote:
| their energy policy has essentially crippled their economy
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Do you have a metric, or not?
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/624297/employment-by-
| eco...
| abm53 wrote:
| I assume PaulDavidThe1st was asking for one which
| actually supported the assertion.
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| Do you have any sources that you would recommend? So far,
| you're throwing out "got a source for that?" left and
| right and when you get a source you've nothing to say.
|
| Just curious if you have knowledge about this subject or
| if you're just trying to block the conversation from
| going in directions you don't like
| loglog wrote:
| Industrial production is in decline since 2018:
| https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2025/01/PE25_008_421.html
| pipes wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl...
|
| You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith
| institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK
| since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British
| industry. It started long before her.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Unlike lucrative software jobs, hardware engineering demands
| physical presence.
|
| Genuinely baffling. What is talking about? Most hardware jobs
| involve sitting in front of Design and simulation software.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Eventually the hardware comes back from the factory and
| somebody has to do bringup. It doesn't need _constant_ in
| office presence, but it does need to happen some days.
| Sometimes you even need to go to the factory itself.
| constantcrying wrote:
| If you are doing CAE why would you ever _need_ to look at the
| physical object?
| necovek wrote:
| 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).
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I couldn't agree more:
|
| "Your brain's worth billions. Build empires, not apps."
| mertnesvat wrote:
| > Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech
| payment systems.
|
| It's striking to imagine a fully functional fusion reactor that
| could benefit humanity, yet its creator now focuses on fintech
| payment systems. This highlights the importance of a strong
| middle class, which seems to be declining globally. A thriving
| middle class, with disposable income and free time, creates the
| conditions for innovation. Without it, even brilliant minds like
| Einstein might spend their entire careers working on immediate
| economic needs rather than pursuing breakthrough discoveries.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| What you are saying is essentially true. I just don't want
| people to come away with the notion that building a fusion
| reactor and yielding net energy from said reactor is
| equivalent. They are very very very far away from each other in
| terms of complexity.
| maginx wrote:
| Probably what was built was a Fusor. There's tons of
| instructions how to build one (https://fusor.net/board/) and
| seemingly there's a lot of focus on how "young" the builders of
| such are. Just google: fusion reactor teenager. In some of the
| stories it become apparent the fusor was never actually even
| finished but just along the way.
|
| https://newsforkids.net/articles/2024/09/04/16-year-old-stud...
| https://online.kidsdiscover.com/quickread/arkansas-teen-buil...
| https://interestingengineering.com/energy/nuclear-fusion-rea...
| ...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Are these real examples?
|
| I was curious, and all I could find it:
| https://newsforkids.net/articles/2024/09/04/16-year-old-stud...
|
| They are not working in Fintech AFAIK.
| Symbiote wrote:
| They seem believable to me, as a graduate of the same
| university.
|
| I have friends from Imperial College who now work at ESA, Los
| Alamos, quantum computer research etc, but also others
| working in banks, hedge funds or adtech.
|
| Top of my computer science class is working at a hedge fund,
| number two is working at a fintech startup.
|
| It's on their website, even specifically for electrical
| engineers (since that's the topic)
|
| - 22% working in manufacturing
|
| - 16% in IT
|
| - 25% in finance
|
| - 16% professional / scientific / technical
|
| https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-
| college/administra... via
| https://www.imperial.ac.uk/careers/plan-your-
| career/destinat...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| I work in finance too and see similar, but are _these_
| examples real, or a remix of real examples.
| rbanffy wrote:
| While it's a shame so few hardware engineers have the opportunity
| to build hardware, I wouldn't say they are being wasted. I am a
| hardware engineer. I invented a couple hardware devices, but I
| transitioned to software very early in my career and I don't
| regret that. I don't feel my talents or education has been wasted
| - my understanding of how a computer works down to the
| transistors (planar CMOS, I'm from the 80's) is handy when I have
| to predict how software will behave (and how it'll ultimately
| break).
|
| Engineers are, ultimately, problem solvers. Some problems are
| hardware - electronics, mechanical, electrical, production, and
| so on, but the space of problems we've been trained to solve is a
| lot bigger than that - If you can see feedback loops, you have a
| future in commodities, banking and finance. And, as we recently
| learned the hard way, in politics as well. We are all trained to
| identify sub-optimal solutions and to have an almost irresistible
| itch to solve them.
|
| One quote I love is that "scientists see the world as it is,
| while engineers see the world as it could be".
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > Venture Capital: European VCs, mostly bullish on fintech and
| SaaS, remain wary of hardware. Result? A feedback loop of
| underinvestment and missed opportunities.
|
| Um? We're pretty crap at SaaS too here in Europe.
|
| The problem is just that venture capital is simply not really
| around in Europe. Part of that is better labour protections, you
| can't just start a firm and dump all your staff if it doesn't
| work out. I think that's a good thing too.
|
| And really hardware is a China thing these days. The "designed
| in" is just a small part.
|
| But Britain also has the Brexit problem. I'm glad I'm not
| British.
| pyb wrote:
| On the other hand, HW engineers are very cheap to hire in the UK.
| So, as a founder, you could look at this problem as an
| opportunity.
|
| I'm more concerned with the impact of Brexit, in terms of
| attracting people, and also the issue of quickly shipping goods
| to and from the EU.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| As a former hardware engineer and a lover of all things hardware,
| the only country that isn't currently wasting its hardware talent
| is China. The rest of the world has been spoiled by the easy
| money in software.
|
| Only China has produced a stable flow of hardware startups, and
| they have generally been very impressive.
| fragmede wrote:
| BBC reports they're being wasted in China as well.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8nlpy2n1lo
| fragmede wrote:
| BBC reports they're being wasted in China as well, with many
| stem graduates failing to find jobs and working as drivers
| instead.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8nlpy2n1lo
| mike1505 wrote:
| YASA, Oxford: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701133
| Sparkyte wrote:
| The same can be said almost anywhere. The big issue is that
| businesses often offshore work to save on labor costs rather than
| to improve the quality of their products.
|
| This problem is significant, and here's why: consider yourself of
| average intelligence. Now think about how many people are below
| that level. Then consider those above your level of intelligence
| and start dividing them further by demographics, age, profession,
| interests, and so on. What you're left with is an alarming
| realization--only about 0.1-0.2% of the global population may
| truly excel in your skilled profession. Education helps, but it
| doesn't define one's ability.
|
| Unfortunately, this also means that many people end up in
| professions they are not suited for, including CEOs who shouldn't
| be in those roles. It's a sobering thought, and when you really
| consider it, it's a bit crazy to think about.
|
| Sometimes that talent pools in different part of the world too.
| ibloomt wrote:
| That's a really good article!
|
| Do you want to know a bit more?
|
| Ukraine hardware best talents -> 18k/year. Belarus best hardware
| talents -> 6k/year Some part of Russia best hardware talents ->
| 14k/year
|
| Eastern Europe -> hardware talent is basically free
| constantcrying wrote:
| You can decent even further, look at what labor in India costs.
|
| Companies are already taking advantage of that and are
| outsourcing there.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Talent everywhere is being wasted because we're all trapped
| working for oligopolistic companies or the mediocre-talented
| leadership of the rich and connected.
| aussiegreenie wrote:
| A better headline is the UK is being wasted.
|
| It ignores its strengths and uses its weaknesses.
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