> • £25,000 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.
(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.)
The county council covering the Cambridge area is actually based in Peterborough, and so effectively controls a lot of the countryside around Cambridge, as it is in charge of transport. So arguably the lack of development could be their fault as well.
Supposedly the government is plan is to reduce everywhere to one layer of local government (currently Cambridge is covered by both a county and district council). TBH the areas which are currently unitary seem to work a bit better but there's still massive opposition to building.
From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is one reason why London is becoming a super hub (among other reasons). London broke the ice and now they are trying to keep progressing but physical distance is becoming a limiting factor. Other municipalities will need to embrace change if they want to keep developing into a place where people want to live and work.
The bigger problems in the UK are business rates (extortionate), profiteering by landlords and land owners, insanely expensive utilities, crumbling physical infrastructure, and Brexit.
We could have had a government that invested/fixed in all of those things, but the big landords and land owners decided they didn't like that idea. They'd prefer to keep the country struggling and backward, because it appeals to their sense of aristocratic self-importance.
A lot of Cambridgeshire is frankly flat, ugly monoculture.
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
[EDIT: Having now reviewed the source that was provided, it certainly supports a drop in industrial production, but I'd be skeptical that it indicates "de-industrialization" ]
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
They could do this is one fell swoop with a single bill by the Parliament that dissolves these local councils, and land owners the right (and freedom) to build whatever they want on land they own.
Building safety codes would still apply; but zoning permitting could be erased in one fell swoop with a single bill.
Just change default NO to default YES, BUT..
I don’t think there should be any restriction on what people can build.
You could have a rule on bad smell, that applies to equally to everyone, so a farm would be legal, if they can control the smell.
Egg-laying chicken farm in between two multi-family units would be perfectly legal. I see this as a good thing.
Noise pollution? Chickens don't have much of a reputation for being quiet.
Also various farming can have quite different hours compared to residential living.
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.
Major problems are rarely solved with one fell swoop, but instead thousands and thousands of small improvements.
I live in the countryside (I live in a small flat btw so I don't care about property prices) and I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want to live in a concrete jungle that is fine, I and many others don't. I moved out of Manchester because I hated it there.
Importing cheap foreign labour from the third world was always one of the goals of Brexit. This game gets played over and over - import cheap labour to keep wages down, lament about how the country is being invaded, and then blame immigrants for lack of investment, corporate profiteering, and other structural policy problems.
That does also make utilities easier, but it's not magic… well, you could say it is but only in the sense of Penn and Teller: lots of effort that most people don't ever think of that already happened before the audience started watching.
There was problems with houses becoming to expensive (there are multitude of reasons for this) while we were still in the EU. Part of this was also do with the monetary policy of central banks after the 2008. Part of this is there is a shortage of housing. There was problems with utilities well before we left the EU, because of mismanagement.
This is all a deflection anyway from the point that high levels of immigration increase demand. Unless you don't believe in supply and demand, which is basic economics. BTW I don't believe that immigration is the only reason there is high demand, there are others. But it certainly doesn't help that we have record numbers of people entering the UK.
*Supply* and demand.
Immigrants supply, they don't just demand.
Immigrants (everywhere, not just to the UK) have a slightly higher supply-to-demand ratio than locals, owing to many of them not starting at age 0; likewise emigration tends to means supply going down faster than demand.
Berlin wall was there to keep people in.
Why is there a massive shortfall then when we've had the largest amount of immigration then?
Why was there a shortfall previously when we were still in the EU?
> Immigrants (everywhere, not just to the UK) have a slightly higher supply-to-demand ratio than locals, owing to many of them not starting at age 0; likewise emigration tends to means supply going down faster than demand.
You can assert this but I don't believe it for a second. It is pretty much accepted by anyone that is doing any stats on this that demand is increased by immigration.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/mi...
https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/514/record-n...
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
Almost everything says that immigration has raised prices on rent and buying (which is a proxy for demand). It depends on the area because each area has different rates of immigration.
So your statement doesn't pass the sniff test.
> Berlin wall was there to keep people in.
Not sure what this has to do with anything.
The UK may decide less immigration, or skill-weighted immigration, or lots more indiscriminate immigration - but the vote should be in the Mother of Parliaments, where else?
Scale issue here: if "everywhere in the country" were build up to the population density of Manchester city, the UK would house 1.2 billion people.
I'm fairly confident there are not 1.2 billion people who currently want to live in the UK.
Australia 2,303 214
New Zealand 2,174 202
United States 2,164 201
Canada 1,948 181
UK 818 76
look at this chat - courtesy of perpexity.
United States 11,855 KWH China 5,474 Germany 6,483 Australia 7,000 (approximate based on recent trends) Singapore 9,000 (approximate based on recent trends) United Kingdom 4,701
Energy consumption of the uK is that of a poor developing country.
people will cite the size of uk homes due to lack of land as if you can't build houses with a lot of sq/ft - sq/m vertically ?
the only thing keeping uk afloat at the moment is the friendly immigration policy.
money doesn't move in capital markets but people would rather pump money into property.
https://energyforgrowth.org/article/how-does-energy-impact-e...
Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling)
% area housing = area_house * population
aus 0.08%
nz 0.42%
us 1.82%
can 0.08%
uk 2.14%
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_.
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?
> [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.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
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.
- 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
They ended up with 100% of Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley; 84% of RBS, and 43% of Lloyds.
The history of Anglo-Irish Bank is an even more interesting story; Sean Quinn is one of the few bankers who was actually jailed, even if only for a short time.
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.
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).
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.
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.
It is fairly clear what was the best option.
(this includes property as an export industry! Leaving increasing areas of the UK owned by overseas absentee landlords.)
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.
Just before the actual cut-off date for customs controls, I had the stuff that had been in storage (loft of family house) shipped over.
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.
Every single person who currently is looking to rent or buy a house has appetite for increasing market supply.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
but still has worse growth than the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_aust...
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...
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/CZE/...
The conservatives ran austerity-based policies for the last 14 years. Is your argument that they did not have a choice?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Germany's progressive tax system also directly incentivizes working fewer hours, as the more you work the smaller your hourly wage becomes.
Who says those countries were well governed though? IMO they are all run by idealogical morons
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Public funding is easier to access in part because the people that are overseeing it usually don't understand or care to understand what it is they're overseeing. My boss in 2015 or so was presenting my regular IT work as research and development and somehow it worked.
It's not just in new business either. Canada has the lowest investments in business machinery like computers to improve productivity. I don't know what the friction in that regard but just to give you an example; the big name company I was working in 2023 retired the DLink Fast Ethernet switches that we were using as core networking for one of our labs. $200 to upgrade the component that was bottle necking 20+ employees was not worth it and I had to buy it out of my own pocket to demonstrate just how badly it was hampering. And this was after showing fancy power points on the financial impact of 20+ employees doing file transfers at 1/10th the speed they could be (not so much that they didn't have the money, they just didn't believe that an engineer could understand finances. Go figure).
I gotta run, but there's more I can comment on.
If someone's businesses is already working, then why would they go and get investment money?
It seems like the investors don't realize that if someone does have that much net profit, they actually don't have that much leverage over them to get good equity deals. So they are essentially just paying high and selling low later.
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?
Nobody is talking about the difference between 1 and 2 billion, they are talking about the difference between 50 and 100 thousand, while competing.
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.
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]
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.
My take would be that once people have 100k€ 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.
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/03/10/infographic_marginal_rat...
You can't rely on such paper figures to determine real tax burden in the past.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.).
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"At present the CAA do not allow for these types of flights as there has to be some degree of collision avoidance in that the aircraft must be kept in visual line of sight at all times to avoid a collision.
The CAA does not regulate the use of drones indoors and there is a short section on indoor use at the following web page, about ½ way down the page.
https://www.caa.co.uk/Consumers/Unmanned-aircraft/Recreation..."
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As if a search and rescue, or crop monitoring drone would be useful inside a building, complete madness.
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).
I don't think I've ever seen this claimed anywhere except as a criticism.
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 ...
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.
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.
To be fair, that's probably true in the vast majority of cases.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
It wasn't for a long time though. There's a bunch of other similar schemes which caught famous people[0] when they were declared illegal by UKGOV.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jun/19/tax-scheme-...
So, my opinion is that splitting people by class/income/whatever does not help a lot. You need rules/systems to avoid as much as possible cheating schemes, and compared to like 30 years ago things might already be better, but as nobody can check every news many can end with the impression "the system is bad".
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.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/start...
This is really ridiculously and needs to stop.
Annoyingly, in 20 years of working I've never been fired or laid off.
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 conventionée”, 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.
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)
[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F34991/...
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of thinking, if I remember correctly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
2022 and 2023 were the highest years on record for net migration into the UK. The only reason 2024 wasn't even higher was due to the new Conservative government's policy stopping international students from bringing dependents to the UK.
https://news.sky.com/story/net-migration-to-the-uk-falls-by-...
Migration to Ireland is at the highest level since 2007. It represents a 3.5 per cent increase in population - which in a given year would be one of the highest ever recorded for a single country.
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/06/10...
>>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.
Wildly bad faith wasting of my time as it's one of the most famous speeches made in a Western Democracy in the 21st Century, but since I have to lead a horse to water... here's a translated transcript from the website of the HUNGARIAN GOVERNMENT.
https://2015-2019.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime...
>>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.
But of course the rules are different for your opponent in debate. Laughable.
>> In the UK we literally don't have the right to free speech...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
I think you're conflating two issues here - Hate Speech and 'Freedom' of Speech.
Hate speech receives substantial protection under the First Amendment and is specifically covered under 1A as per Matal v. Tam (2017). But there are several carve-outs. The most famous is the fighting words doctrine; a well known limitation to freedom of speech under 1A - enshrined in a 9-0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942).
More to the point, the First Amendment prohibits defamation actions based on “loose, figurative language that no reasonable person would believe presented facts". Not actions like when Donald Trump defamed E Jean Carroll by denying her allegation of sexual assault to the tune of $80m+ in damages.
That said, this didn't stop ABC News paying $15m (£12m) to US President-elect Donald Trump to settle a defamation lawsuit after its star anchor falsely said he had been found "liable for rape" as opposed to liable for "sexual abuse", which has a specific definition under New York law. This is despite the substantial-truth doctrine which many jurisdictions adopted, which protects a defamation defendant as long as the “gist” of the story is true.
Something something willfully ignorant. /s
These aren't the same people as the people wanting to migrate away. I am talking about people that were born in their home countries wanting too leave. You are quite well aware of this you are being disingenuous.
Also there is 400,000 going out of the country last time I checked (and that was a good few years ago). Why are those people leaving?
> Migration to Ireland is at the highest level since 2007. It represents a 3.5 per cent increase in population - which in a given year would be one of the highest ever recorded for a single country.
Again this the same thing.
> Wildly bad faith wasting of my time as it's one of the most famous speeches made in a Western Democracy in the 21st Century, but since I have to lead a horse to water... here's a translated transcript from the website of the HUNGARIAN GOVERNMENT.
I don't follow Hungarian politics. I also don't trust American news sources. Thank you for the link though.
> But of course the rules are different for your opponent in debate. Laughable.
While they numerous and frequently get buried on major search engines. It been an issue for years now in the UK.
Most notable examples are on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...
There are literally countless cases now. Last time I checked there were 7 cases a day prosecuted and that was way back in 2018.
> I think you're conflating two issues here - Hate Speech and 'Freedom' of Speech.
Hate speech is a made up term to limit freedom of speech.
I am put in the unenviable position of defending people that I dislike because I think people should have the right to speak their mind.
> The most famous is the fighting words doctrine; a well known limitation to freedom of speech under 1A - enshrined in a 9-0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942).
Firstly I am talking about the UK not the US. So why you are talking about the 1A in the US is beyond me.
Also I know Fighting words is not anything like the hate speech laws in the UK. So this is irrelevant.
> More to the point, the First Amendment prohibits defamation actions based on “loose, figurative language that no reasonable person would believe presented facts".
You are now conflating defamation with hate speech. These are not the same thing. Again this isn't irrelevant.
> Something something wilfully ignorant.
Yes you are being wilfully ignorant about UK hate speech laws. There are loads of cases in the UK where people have been prosecuted for Hate Speech, There is also non crime hate incidents which can show up on background checks when you go for a job.
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/10.1080/01439685.2024.2...
https://reason.com/2019/10/03/the-e-u-orders-global-censorsh...
https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/03/german-businessman-cleared...
>>https://reason.com/2019/10/03/the-e-u-orders-global-censorsh...
Eva Glawishnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland is a defamation case. Look up venue-shopping in London for American defamation cases if you want a counterpoint. The CJEU later clarified hosting providers’ obligations to remove defamatory content
https://www.ehrc-updates.nl/commentaar/209146
>>https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/03/german-businessman-cleared...
Despite being acquitted, the Michael Much case was fairly understandable - the public prosecutor said freedom of expression had to be weighed against human dignity...(and) that propaganda does not fall under freedom of expression. No arguments here. 1A Rights aren't going to save you either, unless you call someone a 'pedo-guy'.
The reason I specifically brought up Spitting Image is that I knew you'd cite this case - with this point specifically argued in court.
"Partsch also pointed to popular TV-shows doing, he said, that did the same. If the court found against Much, it would mean a ban on creating political caricatures."
The guy had his house searched by police, a €6000 fine and had to go challenge it in court. The fact that it happened at all is the problem.
"In Hamburg, a man (59) who had called Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (54, Green Party) a “complete idiot” on “X” (formerly Twitter) went unpunished. In Wunsiedel, Bavaria, the district court has now imposed a hefty penalty on someone who called Habeck an “idiot.”
"P. feels he has been treated unfairly and claims: "My Facebook post was meant to be satirical." His role model: the ZDF satire magazine "heute-show" . It regularly awards the "Golden Idiot" prize, for example to Winfried Kretschmann (75, Green Party), Sigmar Gabriel (64, SPD) or Björn Höcke (51, AfD)."
https://www.bild.de/news/2024/hamburg-regional-politik-und-w...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
In other words, this is actually welfare fraud that happens to have a travel component.
Home break-ins can be avoided by abolishing locks on your front door and leaving them open for the public. You go first please.
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.
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.
As a philosophy of law point, aren't laws passed to make things illegal if they aren't wanted? Rather than legal?
"it's not that I don't like them - I am not like that, its just that I don't want illegal immigration"
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.
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.
> 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, §329
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.
(Not an American.)
Where and how do you get 50 vacation days/year.
By taking big risks, one might ascend to this capitalist class if they succeed.
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.
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.
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?
A lot of people choose to start businesses near their friends or families.
Not sure if it's true so let's look at some stats: Germany median for software engineer: €66,000 United kingdom median: €58,000
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.
EDIT: Please don't downvote me for admitting a mistake
33% less equates to them earning roughly 50% more. The difference between 10-15% and 50% is huge!
(trivial example, if someone is earning £100,000, then someone earning 33% less makes £66,666. But Someone earning £100,000 makes 50% more than someone making £66,666)
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...
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.
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
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.
This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.
You don't hear about the small capital firms investing in boring slow growing companies, because they are boring and slow growing.
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.
It's anti success. And there is garbage everywhere, people keep voting for antisocial housing and bad cultures. It's a failing state.
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.
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
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.
they dont mean location, they mean ownership of the equity.
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.
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.
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?
And i'm not saying it matters - i'm saying that the OP is lamenting that the UK is no longer owning innovative companies.
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.
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"
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.
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.
There is an element of truth to that, self build projects seem to go about was well as the typical software project.
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.
I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a great scheme, but the SEIS limit of £250k feels almost too small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally later stage or re-investment from SEIS.
US vs UK investors are night and day. UK investors only want to see profitability to protect their cautious capital
It can be argued that a responsibility falls on EU equity companies, pension funds, and so on, but they do not make seed investments.
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).
By comparison, the performance of the UK in the last 20 years vs the US or the Nordics is a singular tragedy.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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
Also, there was a complex web of international treaties and alliances that eventually pulled the UK into the war.
They were first cousins, along with the German Kaiser they went to war with.
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.
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
Its a Europe wide problem.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
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?...
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.
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.
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_Union
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.
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.
“In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to other Allies.” ~12x that when counting for inflation.
As pointed out by a sibling poster Russia produced more of them than the US but not more than US + England. But the context was tanks are relatively difficult to ship, so America focused on other areas.
Tanks & SPGs
British Empire - 47862
USA and territories - 108410
USSR - 119769
Other vehicles
British Empire - 1475521
USA and territories - 2382311
USSR - 265000
Bombers
British Empire - 38158
USA and territories - 96872
USSR - 21116
Total large ships
British Empire - 558
USA and territories - 2020
USSR - 63
https://anonpaste.pw/v/6f99bf00-ab49-48fc-978a-27f656a37c02#...
Nonetheless, the production hell people working at those factories went through shouldn't be downplayed.
Documentary (2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjGYMFVMeYo
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.
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.
Or failure to compete with startup banks...
Is number of war ships, or billionaires, a good measure for a country?
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/food-thought-rationing-...
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.
https://www.quora.com/What-was-Hitlers-opinion-of-the-Britis...
Better if they had let the Nazis won and ruled the UK? WTF?
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.
Europe wasn’t like this for centuries. What is the cause of this mindset?
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...
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.
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.
It is a generic handwavey excuse for losers who never tried.
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.
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.
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.
How come we don’t do it?
i have some ideas but my insight to europe is limited so I'm at least half wrong.
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.
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.
0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who gives you £250k can get £125k relief on their income tax (not what they'd have paid on £125k, literally the whole £125k), and then claim a further 50% back of the remainder from the government if you go bust.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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
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).
I briefly looked at a couple used vehicles just outside of warranty and one within warranty that had literally had two oil changers in 100,000k, that’s 60,000 miles for the uninitiated.
> You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part
It’s just a lot more expensive and labor intensive to apply.
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.
>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.
The technology has got a shinier interface since I started, but the fundamental problems are the same.
When it breaks, you call the service technician, unless your the one in a thousand employee who happens to be a boilermaker by trade, an IT service technician and software neonate, also handy with a soldering iron, can install and repair refraction systems, work on live mains safely, research and install additional power supply protection devices, lighting suppression, UPS, knows there way around layers 1 through 7…
And that company treated me like I was some kind of freak.
But yeah, generally a laser cutter operator pushes buttons, and empties catch trays if they’re lucky.
Engineers design the things, the operators are largely meat for the grinder.
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...
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.
Growth of the software industry isn't constrained by the cost of capital
Whilst others working in software (myself included) can have a far greater quality of life and salary working in 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.
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.
It's also one of the wealthiest areas outside of London. But house prices in the really nice parts of Solihull are also high.
Is it as glitzy as London. No. But saying there is "no culture" is just absolutely asinine.
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?
For example I lived not far from Putney. Putney to Windsor & Eton Riverside takes 39 minutes and costs £6.90.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/51.5330/-0.1146&layers...
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.
30-60 minutes would take many Londoners to the countryside, the South Downs, Chilterns, etc.
I take it you've never been to Yorkshire then?
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.
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.
If you can afford a flat that's big enough for you and the kids
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!
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...
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.
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!
[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...
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.
365 are probably the best playing place outside of Manchester in the NW. So I find this rather hard to believe.
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.
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.
I just found multiple jobs that pay more than that easily.
85k job up north is a comparable lifestyle than 100k+ job in London.
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.
But I agree we don't compete with the USA. Even London struggles with that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's also £135 off-peak return, so a night out in Birmingham might be more appealing.
Most people I know who ended up at RR live in Nottingham or the Peak District and commute in to Derby. Appreciate that’s perhaps not as exciting as London but it’s hardly a shit hole up here.
Agree on pay though. I work for a different engineering conglomerate (foreign owned) and I applied for a HPC role at RR a couple of years ago and the salary was £20k lower. The disparity would be even more now.
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.
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.
> 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/£1 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.
If you're looking for a culprit, I'd suggest a closer look at that.
Meanwhile industrialisation has been off-shored to China, which is now the tech and industrial powerhouse the US was in the 50s and 60s.
The former industrial centres in the US and UK were largely left to rot, because the people doing the offshoring simply didn't care about former workers. (In fact - in Thatcher's case, and probably Reagan's too - they actively hated them.)
Once you lose an industrial culture it's very hard to rebuild it. It's not just the factories, it's the investment, infrastructure, and education pipelines that feed them at all levels.
You've got me there.
That's what I started doing in the late 1970's :)
>I'd suggest a closer look at that.
That's one thing I have been doing in real-time since the 1960's, you should have seen how bad it already was before the oil shock.
Oil shock was just the nail in the coffin.
I made sure I could do a lot of unique things with oil & gas ever since.
Would never have done that if things hadn't gotten so bad, I was into alternative energy.
Still spent most of my time with chemicals anyway, for one thing they aren't cheap enough to burn for fuel and that makes a big difference, even if many of them are more toxic than petroleum itself.
There's always been more money in oil though, because there's so god damned much of it :\
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.
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.
But yeah I'm not gonna argue that sw isn't faster than hw in 99% of the cases.
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.
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.
We definitely value software, and the devs are our friends. It's not such a huge place that we're totally isolated from one another.
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.
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.)
The council housing provided an option at a base price, private landlords could not compete if they also had to pay for the mortgage, at a time when interest rates were a lot higher.
Once the council housing was sold off, there was no longer this base price, unless you wanted to spend five years on the list for a housing association, as in the privatised council housing estate.
This change meant that the best place for your money was in property. Property was no longer a near-depreciating asset, house price inflation went through the roof, but was not part of the inflation index.
Since then the economy has been that of rent-seeking. There is no point making stuff as you might as well sell the premises to a developer to convert into luxury flats, which then get bought by rent-seekers and rented out to people that would have had a full-feature council house in previous times.
When a rent-seeker has income from one property, they can remortgage to buy another, then use leverage to buy more and more.
Rent-seeking is not adding anything to the economy, no product is made. However, rent-seekers vote Conservative.
In an economy where everyone has to pay more for the parasites that are the rent-seekers, the cost of labour goes up. This is just because people need more money to pay to have a roof over their head, not because they want gold taps.
This is the root cause of the decline of the West, you are probably old enough to remember how this capital from rent-seeking spread out from London to even the slowest seaside town. Wherever it went, businesses stopped making stuff and started importing instead. Once that business of making stuff has gone, it never comes back.
The real value is in making stuff even though there is plenty of profit in retail, 'no product is made'. Furthermore, it is not possible to stop someone from doing the same as you, buying widgets from China, marking them up and flogging them with an English manual.
In the USA the situation is the same in the big cities. In the flyover states there is a different Ponzi scheme afoot, with vast tracts of suburbia built but without the long-term tax base to maintain the roads and other infrastructure indefinitely. So long as there is cheap oil and the dollar is the reserve currency, it all works with printing money, with the world taking the inflation hit, not the USA.
The sheds you see full of toys are not in New York, they will be somewhere such as Florida or Texas.
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.
The US.
But 4 year election cycles and quarterly earning reports are incompatible with long-term planning.
Everything has trade-offs.
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?
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).
>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?)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
There's little appetite to join the American one, as it would mean lowering standards (food etc) which ruins Britain's specialties.
Food is cheap in Britain, cost and supply aren't problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not for the average person
OP was talking explicitly about start up founders.
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.
Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product, that you can convey in a video that gets people excited imagining how much better their life would be. That's what motivates pre-purchasing and also sharing/virality. That's why the LIFX Kickstarter campaign worked. But even with the $1.3M crowdfunding, they needed a lot more funds from investors; the crowdfunding just helped with initial funding and to prove demand.
Still, that company didn't turn out to be a big success. It was hard/slow to get the product into production and shipped to consumers – it took 2-3 years I think. Established lighting vendors like Phillips were quick to get competing products into major retail stores. Along the way the company seemed to have a lot of internal drama, and investors became disenchanted. The company was acquired in about 2019 [2], then that company went bust, then the LIFX assets were acquired again in 2022 [3].
So, from its early signs of huge potential success, it ends up being a cautionary tale and another case study that investors can look at as a reason not to invest in hardware startups.
Another cautionary tale is the "Coolest Cooler" [4], which ended up in a lawsuit [5]. I heard someone mention that a factory they engaged in China held them to ransom (staff went "on strike" in the middle of production) but I don't know details beyond what's been reported.
These cases demonstrate all the ways these kinds of projects can go wrong, and are much harder to turn around than a software project in which you can be building your product to maintain customer satisfaction and growth day-by-day.
And even still, this approach only works for gimmicky consumer products, not B2B products that are more likely to work commercially in the long term.
Edit: Also remember Pebble (watch) which was a huge Kickstarter hit and seemed like a successful company for a few years after that, then suddenly went bust.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade/2013/12/11/eureka-h...
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/building-energy-monitoring-com...
[3] https://www.techhive.com/article/827458/lifx-smart-light-bra...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/...
> Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product,
I see customers as a wider pool than end consumers - they can also include businesses - quite a few large businesses also have investment arms.
For example you mentioned Philips - they have one - https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/innovation/philips-venture...
I guess the worry for startup's there is if you too close then they might 'steal' - however big companies are typically quite keen on upholding IP laws - they use their venture arms to spread their bets - partial stakes ( and inside knowledge ) on a whole array of startups.
That can be a good path if you’re making something that one of these companies would want to acquire and an acquisition by such a company is an appealing outcome for you.
But it’s not going to help you if you want to be an independent company and brand that can do things the way you want long term.
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.
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.
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.
The main issue now is competition for capital: the majority of tech investors regard software startups as much safer paths to huge returns. Whether they’re right or wrong in any individual case is a separate issue; they’re playing the percentages.
I don't know much about the details about how it got started (i.e., how much Palmer Luckey self-funded it in the early stages) but the fact that he'd already built/sold Oculus was always going to make it easier to open doors and close funding deals (even if the politics/FB drama was a complication).
Also, building tech for the US military has some advantages. You have one customer with very high stakes and very deep pockets. Obviously it's hard to get started and you need to be building something that's uniquely useful and valuable for defence purposes, but once you achieve that, once you're in the door of the military industry, you're on pretty solid ground, and that's attractive to investors. The one hardware company i know in Australia that's doing well is also making defence tech.
It's much harder if all your potential customers (in my case, farmers) are small family businesses spread thinly in non-urban areas all over the world. Investors know that makes distrubuition much more challenging.
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.
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 £30k.
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 £) 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.
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.
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.
Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.
TLDR: They're not moving to Frankfurt but they are moving out of the UK.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is nothing stopping other wealthy countries from doing this besides egalitarian values, it could take the place of illegal immigrants in agriculture in the US for example
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.
The NHS spends less per capita than the US spends on medicaid. Not less per person covered, less overall.
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
That is, if someone goes out for work instead of caring for relatives, not only do we count their work as GDP, we also count the person who has to stand in for them.
So that's a large increase in paid work done, but a minimal amount of extra wellbeing generated. Especially if, say, each of them now has to drive 45 minutes each way.
If, as you say, care is paid for by other people working, are there interventions - either state or individual - to reduce the need to consume it? Obviously some people are just unlucky, and live a long time in a state of total incapacity (hence the "dementia tax" rhetoric), is it possible to incentivise people to do things that mean they need less of it - by spending a greater proportion of their lifespan in good health, say?
If I spend a day painting my garage door, and my neighbour spends a day wiring a new lightbulb, nothing is added to GDP
If I pay my neighbour to paint my garage door, and my neighbour pays me to wire a new lightbuld, that counts as GDP
Same work is done, same outcome.
> by spending a greater proportion of their lifespan in good health, say?
Might reduce the amount, on the other hand might extend lifespan and thus cost more.
There are people aged 90 who've needed 0 years of care, and others who've needed 30.
That was kind of what I meant by greater proportion.. we're all mortal, but for me personally, the idea of being utterly dependent for a long period of my later years is, to put it mildly, not something I want. As in I would literally rather be dead. I'm not saying other people should feel the same, but that's how I feel about it.
Two, three, perhaps five years at the end? Sure, that's rather to be expected. Even then, there are huge differences in quality of life enjoyed by different eldercare residents. I had one older relative in a home for his last four years, who basically had good quality of life up until the final couple of weeks. Another who was in a home for a decade+, and had almost zero quality of life from the day she went in. Not because it was a bad home, she was just too far gone.
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).
And therefore inequality between older people who have families (or have families that care about them) and those that don't?
I can see this particularly being a problem for countries like the UK which has long encouraged "upwardly-mobile" people to move away from their towns of origin in pursuit of economic opportunity, leading to families being widely dispersed across a country which, despite its fairly small size, is not especially fast to travel around.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
well having a relatively small population and bountiful natural resources do great wonder.
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 (~£100bn) 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/single-market/ser...
They seem to have a lot of bases covered.
UK and EU are rich, even if their economy is not doing great.
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.
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.
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
Admittedly I did phone the surgery at 0800 to get it. But this is awful hyperbole.
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.
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.
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.
Seems to be a postcode lottery
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.
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.
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%
We banned building stuff in 1947, we can undo it.
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.
> 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).
Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and the larger university cities on the other hand, masses of scope, and on a much smaller budget and shorter timescale.
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.
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-...
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.
Found a non-Mail link BTW: https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/planning-inspecto...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to get work done.
The other alternative is that the UK doesn't allow 600,000 people (net) in every year.
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).
Partly changing social customs - and you could, legitimately I think, argue some of this is down to immigration/multiculturalism - the old landlady/boarding house model, for example, which provided a LOT of cheap and relatively comfortable roofs over heads, was based on higher trust and cultural commonality than exists today.
But a lot of demand is driven by people living alone, either due to family breakdown, old age, or just out of personal choice.
On that basis if you wanted to increase supply, levers you could pull are an even more favourable tax treatment of rent-a-room schemes (although it's already pretty generous - people just don't want to), land value taxes to encourage under-occupiers to downsize, inheritance tax changes for the same (no more favourable "family home" treatment relative to cash or pension assets) and, more difficult this, legal and planning instruments to encourage suburban densification, get streets that are largely full of decaying HMOs knocked down and replaced by mid-rise which is fit for purpose.
It has nothing to do with what I read on the news. It is simply numbers. You can come up with all these crazy schemes to increase supply which probably won't happen, or you could reduce demand that could literally be done tomorrow if they wanted to.
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
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.
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.
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
Most of those new-builds with tiny, astroturf-and-slabs gardens and wooden fence panels would be better built as apartment blocks with a shared park. Or, if your cultural aversion to apartments is too strong, as seems to be the case in much of Anglo culture ("my own roof over my own head"), row/terrace-style housing again with outdoor space provided in the form of a shared public or private park.
It seems to work well in parts of Inner London anyway, the Georgian garden squares are way nicer than a garden almost any individual resident would have time to maintain. I don't know why we can't have more of that.
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.
* 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?
Do you think it is possible for an Embedded SE to find work in Japan?
The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings. It's horrid.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not been the case for a generation so no one under 70 even knows what we've lost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Even with extremely generous FAANG salaries in areas with cost of living less than a quarter of Cupertino.
For example, consumer electronics, industrial machines and robotics, telecom and medical devices.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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... ...
Same with using a 3D printer to print a rigid arm, or saying “imagine if I built a swarm, that would be so cool”
There’s definitely a delusion among rich children that they are geniuses. Poor schools can’t afford participation awards.
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
So I went interviewing in the engineering firms to the west of the country. Aerospace, materials, that kind of thing. Someone offered me £12K/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. £15k, 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. £37k/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.
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.
How do you quantify this?
But also, profit margins of major industries; amount of wealth held liquid; and so on.
You might have a moral idea of 'effective' in mind, which may not be realised. I mean only that one does not find cash lying around the vautls of the ritch -- as in pre-modern times. People do not bury gold as jesus advised. Rather they dont keep gold, it is a line item held by a business doing something with it.
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)
What did you measure to come to this conclusion?
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.
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...
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.
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."
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.
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.
I want to see some decent analysis of the situation, not stories about how the system is supposed to work.
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.
The banks profit margins would suggest that they are not really facing the fierce winds of competition.
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]
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.
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.
A consultant gets £100k -> £140K ish from the NHS. However, many supplement that with private work and therefore make significantly more.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
Horn and Hardart pioneered the automated restaurant concept and while they were popular during the great depression when belt tightening was a sheer necessity, once growth and good jobs returned they died out.
Now that wealth inequality is back with a vengeance wait-staff automation is back with a vengeance.
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.
That bottleneck is unrelated to the baumol effect.
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.
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
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).
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.
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...
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.
If your focus is money then higher education is the wrong path anyway, it’s oversubscribed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree on this cause, FWIW, and would say the cost is driven entirely by the constrained supply you mention. It's a very, very politically difficult problem to fix, because if you increase the housing supply, people who already own houses see their net-worth decrease. I am sure there are some smart solutions, but most MPs and many voters already own homes and don't have much of an interest in fixing it yet.
I see what our engineers are paid and its genuinely concerning.
Mostly the US is an outlier. Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.
The depressing thing is that it'd rise a lot more if supermarkets weren't using their weight to squeeze farmers.
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.
From a very quick search, a litre of milk is 20% cheaper in the UK compared to France, Germany and even Poland.
Food was cheaper. It's not that UK is cheap, it's more that eastern europe has gotten more expensive.
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 £70 a week, £85 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because it's focused on predatory finance: funds cornering housing markets, money laundering, debt markets (think public debt and CDS), currency/rates speculation, etc.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
They really are, if you're prepared to work for $BIGCO
I get a lot of recruiter spam on Linkedin for roles at retail banks, outsourcers, consultancies, SaaS companies, startups, etc. etc. in the £90-110k 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.
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
Thats a big if. Big tech has enshittified everything its touched for a long time now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said, setting up a new thing in Cambridge, offering £40k starting salary (with intention for it to go much higher) has shown: 1) exceptional talent on my doorstep, 2) plenty of people to choose from, 3) immediate impact.
The downsides are real though - industrial space, while cheaper, is hard to find and significantly out of the way. There's also a lower ambition level and a lot of red tape.
I really think compared to other places in Europe the UK is in a far better place to start to excel. Things like aria, works in progress, renphil and more have such a presecence and it feels like people are excited about reasearch, progress and hardware.
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.
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.
> "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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...."
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).
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 naïve 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.
It'll get there.
Only China has produced a stable flow of hardware startups, and they have generally been very impressive.
they could be figuring out how to get people to click on ads
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.
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.
Er, I hope not.
> The government that I am a citizen of is a special case of a non-human entity
What about a private company that puts up a parking charge sign?
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/unit...
Visas. US has a very very weird visa system that really hates skilled workers.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Genuinely baffling. What is talking about? Most hardware jobs involve sitting in front of Design and simulation software.
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".
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.
If we want higher salaries then the uk needs to start creating meaningful and impactful products that other countries want…
I can't be bothered to wade through it all but if you're interested his (old) stuff is here: https://dominiccummings.com
The US has achieved this numerous times through start-ups.
[1] because the implied higher margins mean this attracts more investment
> 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
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Companies are already taking advantage of that and are outsourcing there.
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.
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.
"Your brain's worth billions. Build empires, not apps."
Cost of life in the UK is only high in London, and remains lower than California.
I remember working as a software engineer on £32k, and I could still afford a 3-bedroom house with a garden, garage and a car.
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.
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.
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.
But yes, the visa path for UK citizen to accept a direct job offer is much more limited.
I get the intent, but this made me laugh
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.
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.
(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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Pay engineers billions, then, not CEOs, VCs and shareholders.
> 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 £1600 budget you will struggle to find somewhere. On a £25k salary, losing £5k 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.
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](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/01/thermal-...) means concerns about periods of low wind will likely become less of an issue over time.
It ignores its strengths and uses its weaknesses.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I'm ignorant on this topic; do you mind elaborating?
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.
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.
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.
So if you increase the population density, the transit to that focused area will have to carry more people. And it's already at capacity.
If you want to increase the density, then London will have to create new business areas outside of Canary Wharf, City, and Westminster. At which point, the question becomes "why even bother with London?"
Nobody wants to work in some backwater in the middle of nowhere either, especially if you are young and want to meet new people.
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.
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.
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
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%.
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.
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.
I think this wouldn't be bad.
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.
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)
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").
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.
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).
So do brand new software grads
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.
May be a bit of a stretch though.
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?
Ideas are worth nothing. Even if they shine
>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.
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...
I mean, not really
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.
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…
Just look at the UK's automobile industry... terrible quality.. terrible reliability, particularly in electrical components until the whole thing collapsed.
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.
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.
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?
The onset of anti-vaccine sentiment will do far more damage and shouldn't be bracketed in that same category.
PS. I've never needed a filling so far :)
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.
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).
* 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.
Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it.
On the flip side though, the educational/academic landscape for the upper quartile of young adults is hugely more competitive. Nobody is making it to a 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.
Not really. I am talking generally about this notion that we need to keep importing people.
> Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it.
That is often repeated but I don't think that is quite as 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
>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.
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
The people who were jailed were generally jailed for rioting and incitement to riot
>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.
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
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.
And when challenged you decide to produce your own definitions of things… when are you deporting Melina and Barron?
I don't need to live in Britain to have a clue what's going on there. In fact, given the censorship your people are subject to, I think I could plausibly know more about what is going on than you do. There is approximately zero risk of me going to a British prison for calling it like I see it.
>And when challenged you decide to produce your own definitions of things… when are you deporting Melina and Barron?
It should go without saying that these people are legally entitled to be here for many reasons and also well-adjusted citizens. They are fluent in English, which is more than can be said of a lot of other immigrants. Most importantly of all, they aren't taking anyone's jobs or welfare benefits, or committing any crimes whatsoever. Even if they were, you can't revoke someone's citizenship even for being a criminal. That's why people need to be carefully vetted before letting them into the country. If someone is from a place that is radically different from your country, maybe they need to be scrutinized a bit more.
Your view of Britain and what life is like here is very wrong
As for your interpretation of insulting they’ve probably been arrested for breach of the peace or aggravation of some form
Those are all fair… and about safe and civil societies
At least we can’t be arrested for crossing the road in the wrong place and we can drink at a reasonable age
Oh and I ain’t you bruh
>Those are all fair… and about safe and civil societies
Nothing safe and civil about denying people the only means possible for them to fend off a group of attackers, or denying free speech to people.
>At least we can’t be arrested for crossing the road in the wrong place and we can drink at a reasonable age
Haha yeah the drinking thing is stupid in the US. Jaywalking is rarely enforced unless you are suspected of a serious crime, or else running across a high-speed road in plain view of cops.
Totally agree
They always take the extreme part of your posts, find a minor counter claim, then imply we have total free speech
yea, give me fucking CNN every day of the week and twice on sunday
I can hardly watch any MSM now because they are all obvious propagandists. What really surprises me is that anyone takes them seriously after all the banana republic stunts they tried to pull on Trump and the rest of us over the last 12-15 years (or more).
What have I done to make the country worse off?
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.
I graduated ~15 years ago with a degree from a decent UK university, and the job situation for an electronics engineer who could program and was willing to move anywhere in the country was essentially:
* Electronics graduate job, salary £25,000
* Programming graduate job, salary £40,000
Programming jobs think their competition is London fintech companies and Google with its free food.
Jobs designing switch mode power supplies think their competition is Chinese OEMs who pay experienced engineers £15k
So a lot of the electronic engineering graduates get diverted into software. They'd like to be able to own a house some day, after all.
You deserve the wages you can command in the market. If the labor pool is limited companies will have to pay more. Maybe AI will change the dynamics. But otherwise hardware will always struggle to compete on pay.
For reference, I hold a doctorate in Engineering and a Class 1 MEng both at Oxford. I was offered £40k to work as an engineer in my niche (photonics). My lab partner who went to Germany sits on a ~€90k salary doing similar to what I would have done.
Due to the limitations of hardware career options in London, I opted for software engineering post-DPhil, but I ended up earning £42k. After two years of work, I am sitting on £52k. I don't regard myself as an "under achiever", I own a significant proportion of the product I work on and am a top contributor.
I don't think that level of comp is appropriate given the amount of work I put myself through / how much I contribute, and I think it's reflective of the UK as a whole.
Irrespective of your self perception of value, I am not sure you are fully grasping the disconnect between the growth in cost of living and the (lack of) growth in wages of the past 50 years for the average human in western economies.
By many standards we actually need that 125k just to live what we would consider a middle class life in the 1980's.
UK's pay is extremely low. And you know that it is VERY difficult to earn beyond £80k/yr as a SWE outside of top foreign employers in the UK like Google or Citadel. More likely, you'll stagnate at £50-60k.
And when factoring the UK's CoL being comparable to some of the more expensive American cities (SF, NYC, Boston) yet salaries being a fraction of those available there, it makes sense why engineering isn't well regarded, and plenty of people either switch to finance or immigrates to the States, Australia, or Canada.
That’s not correct at all. There’s a ~130k job going for lead engineer of a data team at a home improvement store.
It’s not “VERY difficult” - it’s not easy but it’s definitely achievable.
The 100k is pretty much the elite prop trading, that's the whole LC hard grilling that 99.9% of candidates aren't going past.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-... [2] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... [3] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... [4] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
Secondly, I've noticed issues with Levels.fyi ranges outside US/Canada and top tech hubs like Tel Aviv and Bangalore. Most markets don't have the same awareness of the tool, so salaries tend to be overestimated.
ARM is already somewhat relocating - some of their newest cores, like Cortex A78, were designed in Austin.
They most likely will pull an ARM and hire almost entirely in the US and India instead of in the UK, because competitive British engineers would immigrate to the States, and you can get top tier Indian chip design talent across the spectrum for $30-60k.
I just don't think this is very true, some perhaps but not many.
Secondly, if "the salleries are too low in the UK" is the argument then why would companies be interested in shifting hiring to the states?
The majority of the gains in the S&P 500 come from tech companies, with a large part of their value being embedded in their software assets.
Easier said than done, Europe doesn't have the money for that (partially because all the exit money circulates in American VCs).