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.
I don't think they'd relocate, but that doesn't matter.
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.
It is impossible to immigrate to the US unless your employer is willing to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of sponsoring a visa + green card, which they have little reason to do since they can pay you less over here. I've been designing chips for years in the UK at ARM and elsewhere, haven't encountered anyone moving to the States
Low relative to the US Tier 1 cities only. Just based on a cursory look at levels.fyi London median comp is £96k [1] while e.g. Houston is £103k [2] Toronto is £80k [3]. In fact, the only location I could find outside the US that was higher was Zurich at £126k [4]
First, CoL is miles lower in Houston and other tier 2 cities in America - you can buy a detached house for around $500k/£400k in a posh neighborhood. Not happpening in inner ring London.
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.
New Grad SWE London salary is more realistically 35k to 60k, Small Companies and Consultants are around 35k, Big Banks do 50k, and the bigger startups do like 55 to 60k.
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.
SWE comp will remain elevated as long as there are marginal returns to software development. The capital structure of turing machine programming allows most of revenue to be spent on salaries. The pay is higher because the marginal cost of a new software customer is essentially zero. It's not because programming is way higher skilled than hardware engineering.
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.
Outside of finance, I generally find UK software and hardware comp to be abysmal. Especially when contrasted to the US, and even Germany.
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.
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.
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.
Too little, too late. The list of reasons to stay in the UK are slim; and there’s very little the UK can do about it (other than begging people to stay out of national pride). Even the strong arguments a decade ago, like the NHS, are cracking.
They made a bad bet on the structure of their designs. They were bought by SoftBank last year; they have a new design in the works, but might have trouble delivering it as apparently there's been a bit of a talent exodus. There are several newer companies trying their luck in the area.
they didn't transition to transformers and I focussed mainly on CNN's, which whilst still popular don't have the same financial draw, and weren't easily re-purposable for transformers.
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.
Contracting rates in Paris seem to be much higher - €700-€1000 a day seems common from what I’ve seen.
I suspect a big part of it is labour laws. The UK is similar. Companies don’t want to take on the legal commitment of a high salary person, so they take on contractors instead.
This will depend enormously on the company: a consulting and IT services company like Capgemini will employ Moroccan university graduates at 32K€/year. Apple will recruit the best engineers from telecoms companies, arms manufacturers, research institutes and intelligence services for 120K€/year and the same in share, equity.
France knows how to train excellent engineers and give them responsibilities in major government bodies, but doesn't know how to keep them in France. A glass ceiling is rapidly forming for engineers. French companies only value management.
There's also this constant desire on the part of French companies to go low-cost.
The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to a good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low salary but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss or American company, profit.
> 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:
> French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries.
I know senior engineer at Airbus who don't earn six-figure salaries.
French human resources are cowards and hide behind diplomas to justify pay scales and recruitment. “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM“/”Nobody gets fired for recruiting a polytechnicien”.
I trained as a mechanical/nuclear engineer. It took destroying all the other competitors at my company's internal hackathon, Master Dev France and a project involving several thousand lines of python, for HR at my company to admit that I knew how to code without a software dev diploma.
I agree with this call to action. Sadly, I think there are more fundamental issues in the UK economy.
For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the UK.
While companies do get funded in the UK and are technically "UK domiciled" - in action most of their Engineering and Product teams are located in Eastern Europe or India, or are startups from those markets (and China) who domiciled in the UK to raise from foreign investors.
There just isn't enough liquid capital to invest in the UK compared to other investment classes available.
It's because the UK is so good at financial services.
It's fairly easy to deploy capital in the UK in mainland Europe, the US, India, China, ASEAN, and Middle East, which means there isn't much of an incentive to deploy it within the UK in industries that the UK cannot compete directly in.
For example, Dyson has almost entirely shifted operations to ASEAN (Phillipines and Malaysia primarily).
And AugustaWestland/Leonardo, Rolls Royce, AstraZeneca, GSK, BT Group, JLR, and BAE have largely shifted operations to the US and India.
The UK could make it harder to offshore, but then that also destroys the UK's entire financial and services industry, because most of the capital in the UK exists because it's a connector for global markets and would leave if that is ended.
Rent, taxes and industrial regulation plays a big part. As does power costs. Then there is political costs, it’s hard to rely on UK politicians not doing foolish things and tanking your company on a whim.
Not really. UK salaries are largely comparable to those for a similar caliber of talent in China or India ($30-50k mid-career is doable in both markets).
The difference is countries like India, Czechia, Poland, Israel, Romania, etc all provide competitive tax incentives or subsidizes for R&D work, so you can hire competitive talent AND get preferential tax treatment.
I think "capital" is the wrong word for it. We've got a lot of money lying around, but capital implies something productive can be done with it. We can't eat money, and we can't tax it or else they'll screw off. Perhaps if we stopped acting as the worlds fixer for tax dodging we would end up being better off. I can't help but view the City as a kind of tumour, sucking the life out of the rest of the country to enlarge itself.
I think most folks when say Capital they mean “Finance Capital” which UK is really good at. Even historically speaking UK was at the forefront of financial engineering which complimented their physical engineering and enabled to spread their empire and colonize so much.
But UK post WW-2 and specifically post Thatcher stopped investing in physical engineering and overindexed on financial services the results are for all to see now.
But you are right. I think the financial engineering has reached its limits and we see China’s investment in physical engineering over last couple of decades beginning to pay off.
> I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's supposedly amazing at financial services.
Because it's focused on predatory finance: funds cornering housing markets, money laundering, debt markets (think public debt and CDS), currency/rates speculation, etc.
It's not about predatory or non-predatory finance.
In order to become a major financial hub, UK has very favorable foreign transaction laws.
A significant amount of British-domiciled capital is foreign originated but only parked in the UK because of strong contracts law and linkages to just about every major investable market.
This is both a boon and a curse, because why would you finance a $1M seed in London when you can deploy that same capital for a similar sized seed in Tel Aviv or New York and get a better return on investment by exiting or funding additional rounds.
There is no innovation ecosystem in the UK, and it's too late to build one because other markets are just too competitive at this point - India, Israel, Czechia, Poland, etc provide very competitive tax incentives and subsidizes for foreign R&D investment and have done so for decades now.
You might assume the answer is to add additional roadblocks, but that makes British financial services extremely non-competitive, and puts 2.5 million jobs (and voters) at risk.
This is the exact same trap that Singapore and Hong Kong has fallen into, and both are trying to minimize it by becoming the goto financial hubs for target startup scenes (China for Hong Kong, India+ASEAN for Singapore) and investing in foreign startups (eg. Temasek Holdings in Singapore).
The UK needs to do something similar - it needs to give up ambitions of being a peer of the "big boys" in innovation, and concentrate on becoming competitive in international dealmaking, maybe by making a public-private international VC fund like Temasek.
Baillie Gifford (HQed in Edinburgh) and Index Ventures (HQed in London) are competitive in Tech Growth Equity globally (and especially in the Bay). There's no reason there can't be more Baillie Giffords or Index Ventures in the UK.
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.
I think the large software sector here might actually be part of the problem. If you're smart, want to stay in London (expensive), but don't want to work in finance then it's going to be software. There's no interesting hardware jobs here (FPGA trading platforms do not qualify). These jobs do exist in other European countries so I think the parent was correct.
> The UK has the 3rd largest tech VC sector worldwide - only after the US and China
And as I mentioned before, most startups tend to only be UK domiciled for funding reasons, but majority of their operations and leadership are located outside the UK.
Foreign (read: American) VCs tend to conduct transactions in a handful of very well regulated markets, so a Chinese, Indian, or Romanian startup will often have to make a domiciled corporation in a financial hub like the UK or Singapore in order to raise.
For example, Revolut has around 16,000 employees, but barely 2k in the UK and around 7k in Poland+India - and most of these roles are engineering AND strategy roles.
> London also has the largest software sector outside the US, after the Bay Area, Boston, and NYC
Source? Boston is nowhere near a top software hub - both Seattle and Austin are much larger in the software space than Boston.
And I would be shocked if the net amount of SWE roles in London is higher than Tel Aviv or Bangalore.
A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct.
All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what is and isn't a priority and haven't fixed the problem in question; When these students grow up and go on to work for those same people, we are shocked, shocked that it isn't to do more unprofitable school engineering projects.
Instead: Finance industry stuff. What we really need, and by we I mean the people in charge who are obsessively keeping score of imaginary numbers in an account.
Yeah, yeah, the meme copy-paste problem diagnosis, but what’s the solution?
Rebuild into socialism?
Rebuild into communism?
Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)?
How do you know that those systems won’t also have their own late stage failure? Case in point, the NHS right now.
(Edit, posting too fast: To the person below who suggested 90% tax rates; the US never had those rates. On paper they did, but they had more and larger exceptions than now, to the point the effective rate never exceeded 45% anyway. This is also why the massive cut was politically palatable - it was cutting the rates to closer reflect the reality. At no point did the US ever have anything close, or even half close, to 90% effective rates.)
Cracking down on monopolies and rentierism would be a good start. Followed by tying pension rises to worker's salaries. None of that is actually going to happen because of who votes combined with a government that's scared of its own shadow.
Combined with the fact that those solutions just listed are short term and a surefire way to ensure nobody gets a pension.
You also can’t act against monopolies when China happily won’t act against their own state owned monopolies, which are in an arm’s race trying to surpass us. Falling behind to China is a great way to cause a tech investment collapse.
Well everytime somebody wants to build high density housing or really anything to alleviate the housing crisis we get the usual NIMBY screaming similar to OP about evil corporations coming to destroy the character of their local neighborhood.
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.
Yeah.. no. Have you been to Asian cities? It's rows and rows of 100 floor apartments, it's urban centers consolidated into high density malls and commercial centers. We're talking about dozens of high rises where every floor contains restaurants and shops. I daresay there is more to eat and shop in the 1km Radius around Ikebukuro Station then entire borough of Westminster!
Nobody wants to work in some backwater in the middle of nowhere either, especially if you are young and want to meet new people.
"Reasonably" is doing a lot of work there. It sounds an awful like you're defining the boundaries of reasonability at "Exactly what is built right now and using the exact borders of current municipalities", which is a tautology. Even if we limit ourselves to the current municipal boundaries of London, population density is ~6000 people per square kilometer. Kowloon Walled City survived with 3,000,000 people per square kilometer, Manhattan has 75,000, Dhaka 23,000, San Francisco 19,000.
Their system is a much better one than we tend to have in the US, but "All-in on public transit" looks more like Trantor than London. A majority of the TFL system was constructed more than a century ago.
Nope. London is reasonably full already. The problem is that it's already 9 million people, and the high-paying jobs are focused in a fairly small area.
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?"
In the case of the UK the solution in effect since the mid 2010s is increase taxation, replace the natives completely with someone more desperate, and suppress wages.
The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most foul.
Your question is coupling a matter of our policy preference, our tactical planning to arrive at that preference, and a hypothetical predictive model. If like some supervillain I had come up with a satisfactory answer to all those questions I would have enacted it twenty minutes ago.
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)
The 'Laffer Curve' concept is treated at first glance as some kind of complex model created by experts that Explains A Lot, at second glance as something a bunch of drunk political operatives scrawled on a cocktail napkin in 1974 that doesn't necessarily have any relation to reality, and at third glance as a tautology whose dishonest core is the labelling of the x axis.
Academic attempts to identify the optimal maxima of tax receipts, which conservative political operatives will always implicitly assume is "half whatever the current rate is", suggest something on the order of 60%.
> In economics, the Laffer curve illustrates a theoretical relationship between rates of taxation and the resulting levels of the government's tax revenue.
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.
Point 1 tends to fall apart when the government can't control its own coffers and after a few decades of mismanagement decides that privatisation is the main way to reduce their debt burden. So I think this one ebbs and flows over time generally.
See South Africa for an example. Power production is slowly opening up to market forces as an alleviation to the extreme mismanagement and corruption of the last 2-3 decades.
On the other hand, there are also some alternatives, like "devolution" of state services to the provincial or municipal level. The local Cape Town government is busy trying to gain control over the city's train lines from the government org that owns them, to provide better service.
There's no substitute for competence and integrity, but private entities are just as capable of being inept and corrupt. Look at companies like Enron or Comcast.
Putting more layers of privatisation between the government and the service it provides will decrease the quality and increase the costs. Sewage is now in our rivers and we pay more for water. Trains are obscenely expensive compared to Europe. Energy is expensive. All of these things cost boatloads because we sold them off and drag the rest of the economy down with them. We wouldn't be spending so much today if we'd invested more in the past.
Socialism isn't the solution, it's the problem. People deserve to be paid for work and the better the work that they do, the more they deserve to be paid, even though that can be much more than the average person earns.
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)
I don't think you understand socialism and capitalism.
Suppression of wages is very much a feature of capitalism (the company's mission is to acquire capital for shareholders; technology that lowers costs by reducing the need for labor, or reducing the payment for labor, is a goal); whereas socialism holds that those who do the work should benefit from their labor (workers should own the means of production).
A "socialist" company in the U.S. would be an employee-owned company or a co-op (like REI) though they would never call themselves that because Americans don't understand what socialism is (and have been taught that it's "evil").
Capitalism is not the problem so much as policies that promote trade imbalances and outsourcing of jobs. If there are people somewhere willing to work for much less than you are, there are far fewer opportunities to do anything. It is not normal to get a ton of cheap imports forever, and a reversion to the mean is not a sign that capitalism is failing.
Unless the whole world was to demand the same standard of living (which is impossible), or global trade is limited, there will be nations where the wealth of the average person is on the decline.
What we are seeing is a great levelling out of living standards across the world. Poor countries are unquestionably getting richer, while rich countries are stagnating and decaying. It's a period of readjustment, but self-limiting.
There's no need for the West to stagnate like this. We could let the rest of the world develop itself while we continue to be self-sufficient. That requires tough decisions like choosing to limit imports of foreign goods and labor. But that is unfortunately not how it's going. Some people have been selling out their own countries for decades to make a quick buck, or perhaps to defend some economic theory that the plan with the highest cost efficiency is always the best.
This is spot on. All the smart and ambitious people I know who studied (non-software) Engineering at university in the UK have ended up going into software engineering via self-teaching or finance/consulting because the only hardware engineering career paths seem to be working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay, or alternatively working at Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay
Preach. My friend is a gifted passionate Aerospace engineer (top in his specific stream at Cambridge) and basically is withering away working for the above 2 firms. The location is grim being far from others and generally far from other young exciting people. Additionally in his org, there just isn't a sense of excitement/ urgency which leaves him with little to do. Prioritising career for a career that's not there
Whilst others working in software (myself included) can have a far greater quality of life and salary working in London.
Or maybe he’s just tired of a specific kind of life which might be fun in your early twenties but is less appealing when you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway.
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.
you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway
Having kids while living in the centre of a large city is great, as there is so much culture that is aimed at parents and children. When my kid was small we went to museums and concerts and events all the time that were aimed at kids. There were also several different parks, playgrounds, pools and similar activities to choose from all within easy access. Plus once the kids get slightly older they can use public transport to get around and you don't have to drive them anywhere near as much as if you live in the suburbs.
You have to earn (much) more to have the same standard of living as outside of it. Therefore you pay more income tax and the cost of living is higher anyway.
Absolutely. No public transport, almost no culture, and housing anywhere nice is even less available than in London. For a young person working at one of these firms, where can you live? Where could you meet someone to date? What can you even do at the weekend?
JLR is based in the metro area of Britain's second city. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere. Rolls Royce is in Derby, on the edge of the Peak District with much to offer. Much cheaper housing with more space available. And unlike in London, driving a car isn't hounded by terminal congestion.
JLR Gaydon is not in the metro area of Birmingham. It's in nice countryside and near a motorway which helps, but it's a fair commute out of Birmingham at rush hour to there. The nice surrounding towns/villages are expensive, and even the shitty ones aren't cheap (hello Banbury) as they're on the edge of commuter distance to London.
Derby I haven't lived in but know people who have. It's an old manufacturing town and hasn't much to offer graduates. Or anyone really. The Peak District is great, and if you can live out that way and commute in then do it. But again, you won't have similar people for local friends.
Sure, but at that point you're having to buy a car (which is much harder as a young person - car prices have gone up, insurance has gone up faster, the driving test is harder than it was and lessons cost more...), you'll need somewhere to park it which adds to your housing costs, you still can't go drinking, and in general you're cut off from a lot of what young people are doing.
It would be very expensive to take a taxi (of any sort) out of London to a scenic place, but it's easy to take a train to plenty of them, or hire a car for the day through an app.
Even tiny UK towns have excellent walkable mainstreets and are small enough to walk from field to field on the other end in no time. It is a far cry from the american obligatory car experience where it might be a 2 hour walk to your nearest grocery store even in a city suburb.
There is a culture there. I am not sure what people mean when they say there isn't a culture outside of the London. If you mean things like events, art exhibs etc. We have those here. If you mean bars, pubs and restaurants we have those here to.
Is it as glitzy as London. No. But saying there is "no culture" is just absolutely asinine.
UK people are so god damned spoiled. Sometimes I will pull up street view imagery of a random town in scotland or wherever in the UK that I see locals from there on reddit make a seething comment about. Then I will look at the town center and its basically greenwich village: walkable, pubs and shops all over the place, bus network goes everywhere, actual regional rail potentially, everything the american urbanist dreams about. You know where you actually meet people on a date in 2025? On an app, which they have users on all over the UK.
The UK is two countries, you can either live in/around the prosperous one with high cultural capital, good quality public services inc transport, or you can live in the other one.
Depends what you mean by "Quality of Life". I literally won't go to see friends because that would mean travelling to London. I hate the place. It is expensive, hostile, dirty and everyone is rude.
I live on the outskirts of the peak district. I can walk/cycle less than 30 minutes out of town and be walking along the old canals, through old villages and get amazing views of the countryside.
To be fair I live in Zone 2 and I can be on old canals and villages (albeit now subsumed into London) in ~20 minutes walking. I grew up in rural Wales, and as nice an upbringing it was, there's a reason I have a single family member left, who's trying to move away!
I lived there as a graduate student and then as a non-finance software engineer for about fifteen years. I liked it, as did dozens of my friends. It's absolute fantasy to call it a shitshow.
Been here for nearly 8, not working in finance and still quite liking it. Housing is expensive, but that's about it. Everything else (jobs, amenities, transport, people) is fantastic.
motorsport is similarly low salary, at least specifically F1. It is like game-dev in software in that there are far more people who want to do it than the number of jobs available so they can afford to pay you in the cool experience of working on F1 rather than in cash terms.
To some extent, this also applies to software. Except for DeepMind and a few other select places like Altos Labs, getting past £100k is hard, especially outside London. Unless you go into finance, of course. But then, you have to stick to London. Finance is like a black hole that sucks a big chunk of the mathematical, CS and statistical UK talent. They have very proactive recruiters trying to e.g. connect with Oxbridge students when they are approaching graduation.
It’s shocking. Software engineers in the UK are treated like engineers in the US were in the 1960s. Low respect, low pay, while city boys strutting around in shiny suits snapping their fingers to get anything they want.
That's a weird statement considering I'd have guess the greatest amount of respect
and adoration (not necessarily money) (non-software) engineers have gotten in the US would've been during the Space Race and Cold War years.
It was real respect for the trade as well, not some secondhand respect that people who make a lot of money and wield a lot of social influence get.
It was respected in the sense that there was a need then in american manufacturing for engineering. But the compensation was nowhere near other professional class jobs. So really the respect seemed a bit false: to get people into the door pigeonholed so they can’t leave for higher compensation. Then when manufacturing was outsourced after the 1960s, many of these jobs disappeared. Now people in Guanzhou are designing the factories and process controls.
This isn't my experience at all, and I've been in London tech for 8 years now. I'm not entirely sure what "low respect" means here, but anywhere I've worked the company is pretty wary of knarking of their developers because we can just up and find another job basically immediately. We get paid a fair bit too - not sure compared to finance, but not hard to hit the 95th percentile or so.
Glad to hear it’s working out for you. I’ve talked to too many UK devs who feel handcuffed when they get even 50% of the US equivalent, because it’s a pay cut to go elsewhere. But, as you say, it’s all relative.
I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs.
The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!
Then they are very few and far between. Generally the absolute limit is £90k. I've never seen any role for more than 90K unless it was a company in London and those are typically hybrid and not remote.
So like I said originally these jobs are few and far between. The point is that in the UK the salaries are much lower than those in the US and this is across all experience ranges.
I only have the figures for end of 2018[1], but meta employed around 2300 people in the UK, if we assume the same distribution of jobs as elsewhere in the world about half will be engineers, so 1150 engineers. There aren't that many of these jobs. At goldman its a lot higher, aboutn 10,000[2] globally, but they only have around 3,300 employees in the Uk so if its the same ratio as global (25% tech), then that means around 800 developers. Again you'll note this is a very small number compared to the number of top graduates a year, with class sizes of 100-200 per university.
I am not a top software engineer( (otherwise I'd be working fang tbh) and I earn 85k up north. Hybrid role that's local as well.
I know people that earn a lot more than me.
It's just the recruiters are a joke and advertise silly salaries from local companies that are out touch. You have to know what companies are serious or not, and just apply direct or via recommendations.
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.
We are comparing salaries of Software Engineers between the US and the UK. A Senior Developer position won't pay more than 90K in the UK outside of London. In the US I see well over that for a Senior Developer position.
Even in your examples (which are higher position than what was being discussed) they didn't top out past 90K (just like I said). Whereas in the US you can earn much more quite easily.
> You've moved the goal posts. You said 60k if your lucky.
No I didn't. I suggest you re-read the thread. I said 75K-90K max.
> I just found multiple jobs that pay more than that easily.
There are always certainly outliers. However most of those places usually have a bunch of iffy things going on e.g. you have to live at your workstation/laptop, or they are in the middle of no where. Enforced pair programming (fuck that btw), or have a stupid interview process (no I won't go through the humiliation rituals anymore).
However the vast majority of positions are paying max 65-70K for a Senior Dev.
I am glad that you managed to find something. But the rest of us haven't been as lucky.
That bad? Huh. Last time I was a permanent employee in the UK was nearly a decade ago now, and I think I was on something like £37k, I think some of my friends (Cambridge graduates and slightly older than me), even back then, were on £65-75k.
I kinda assumed inflation would have raised all of those by about 50% since then.
That is indeed very rare. A simple sanity check you can look at how many people earn about 100k in the UK, we know the figure for above 125k is 500,000 [1]. We can subtract the number of other jobs that we know for sure pay above this for example lawyers at magic circle firms which start on >150k for newly qualified lawyers, consultants in the NHS, directors of large corportaions, and we end up with a very small amount of people in other industries that earn these figures. Even before that we know the median is about £50k, and I can tell you from experience you can hire very very good software people on those wages, even in London.
From personal experience, I also know of software guys making that, but I also know far far more people earning below that, and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads....
> and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads.
There are many bad things we can say about software hiring, but one of the good things is that (outside the US at least), it's much more concerned with what you can do than the name recognition of the institution where you studied.
Just want to echo the other replies and say i think this is rare. It happens, but it's rare. I have >15 years experience, and currently work in finance making plenty. A while ago, i spoke to a recruiter about opportunities outside finance; everything he had topped out at ~90k for engineers, a bit higher for team leads.
But then, i also have friends working at a few non-finance companies on 100-150k. Small places, willing to pay for quality. Seems to be unusual though!
Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I’m a SWE. Even here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don’t get me wrong, you can make enough to be “comfortable”. But anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid handsomely to be in tech and are “Product Designers”. Even then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute their product. Admittedly, it’s really hard to do hardware in this economy when one country has 60% of the global manufacturing output and can copy your design, make it cheaper, and make it better. Ironically, the biggest dividing line that makes a hardware product better is good software.
That's what happens when there is not much manufacturing in the country anymore, and everyone is encouraged to go to college. I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines. Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
>Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
This is easily confirmed by checking public financials of publicly listed companies. The profit margins are much higher, and the liability is much lower. The only exception is for those hardware manufacturers at the cutting edge whose products cannot be commodified, such as TSMC and ASML and the ilk.
The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2]
Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff.
I don't think we make a lot of stuff but we do make some of the most expensive stuff. So a lot of stats really don't reflect how unbalanced our trade is in real terms.
I've been told that acceptable software margins are around 75%. Hardware focused yields closer to 20%-40%. Hence why there is such a strong push towards software-only.
Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. There are no assembly line workers in software (and the very word "assembly" means a different thing). A software engineer very often brings in revenue many times their salary.
Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing. Production of each physical item costs you. Production of every physical item has a chance to go wrong. Production of each physical item requires a number of humans (often a large number) to do repetitive, high-precision, high-skill work, as fast as practical. You can augment or replace some of them with robots but it also costs you, and you can't replace all the humans with satisfactory results.
So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.
Of course there can be situations where the workers are highly paid, and produce very valuable things through their skilled work. Ford in 1950s famously paid the assembly line workers very well, so that they could buy the cars they produce, and valued their employment. But this does not always occur; people doing work that does not add a lot of resale value also want to live well, especially if the society does not want a flood of immigrants who are willing to work for much less. Check out how much the work of a plumber costs in Switzerland. So only high-precision, high-margin, low-volume manufacturing remains in Switzerland, such as precision optics, precision industrial and medical equipment, or premium mechanical Swiss watches. The US is in a somehow similar situation.
> Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost.
> Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing
Totally. And if you think deployment errors are bad, wait until you see how many production errors exist and how many items out of your line come out working and within spec
For a PCB it’s called a rework, and it’s very common for first spins of boards to have to do one.
Also common is to patch around issues, when possible, in firmware. This is often lower cost/effort, but can’t fix everything.
There are similar kinds of fixes for purely mechanical parts. Depending on the part and problem, mechanical can be easier than a PCB rework (eg: modify a part in CAD and 3D print or get your local machine shop to do a run).
Or require a particular type of motor oil with a particular type of metal-based lubricant additive when you realise 100,000 cam shafts have shipped made of metal you’d assumed was to a higher spec but isn’t, just so the engine will make it through warranty period with insanely long service intervals.
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
In NATO, this is frequent and normal. Many, many "recalls" are issued by military manfacturers, then local support staff spend X hours to replace the defective part. It is not so different from automobile recalls.
Yeah I remember one of my friends working for a German auto company during the 2008 financial crisis and having insane stuff routinely happen like an auto manufacturer having to buy truckloads of sensors from a subcontractor that had nowhere to go as car manufacturing lines were stopped.
Failing to do so would have meant these manufacturers would go under, (along with their own subcontractors) and once demand shot back up, cars would be literally impossible to manufacture as key suppliers went out of business.
This all resonates very strongly with me. We have tons of automation - the proverbial "economies of scale", but we haven't managed to solve the last mile.
Auto assembly seems like a poster child. There's wild automation going on, but the typical plant still requires thousands of employees doing things by hand. Musk tried to automate a lot more of this away with newer/better robotics, but failed. (Tesla has still achieved a lot here, but it's been more towards creating designs that are more amenable to the current state of robotics).
IMO, this problem should be solvable now. I.E. we don't need "new physics" to reach another step-function in automation. We need more investment. We're still largely in the mindset of "special-purpose" automation.
>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.
Interesting that you say that, my understand of the data is that manufacturing output has never been higher - ignoring lingering Covid shocks - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMANSICS
But because productivity is higher https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0100CUSM070NNBR - which doesn’t mean the workers are working harder: a man with a shovel can work as hard as he likes, but he’s never going to compete with the business owner who invested in productivity and gave his worker an excavator.
Therefore employment in the sector is down due to increased productivity, not decreased output.
But increased productivity is a radically different thing from decreased output. A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
Eh, well, this is a bit embarrassing! On mobile, I can’t local a chart that covers the post war until now, best I can find is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS which shows late 80s onwards BUT shows a drop at 2008 onwards which goes against my argument (notwithstanding the big gap between both charts)
The nominal value of highly automated processes has never been higher. Meanwhile, ordinary people are not able to find as many good jobs as they once did. Wages in almost every industry are stagnant at best, at least when adjusted for inflation.
>A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
It is a complex claim but I'll make it really simple. We import most of the things we rely on. Everything from plastic toys to car parts to critical medicines are all imported. Letting yourself become totally dependent on other countries while our STEM grads are underemployed, and would-be manufacturing line workers are forced to do bullshit like driving for Uber, is no way to run a country. It is going to backfire one day unless there is a major reversal in the trend.
You can't have so many engineer jobs unless you have manufacturing, and if you did have manufacturing then there would be "common man" manufacturing jobs too. It's all connected. Every job market that is really critical for national security is depressed by this outsourcing and importation of cheaper goods and labor.
Sure, but when you don't even have the automated process within your country then there are approximately zero jobs created of any kind. The Chinese own their own factories and make much of their own manufacturing equipment, even exporting some of it. We should be producing more of our own stuff and creating meaningful jobs for our citizens. Working on an assembly line or as a maintenance worker in a factory might strike some people as menial, but the alternatives for people with the same level of education are mostly worse.
I’ve drove a laser cutter for ten years, I wouldn’t call it engineering, more glorified dump truck driver, with a temperamental dumb truck that is more art than science to operate.
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.
It seems like the salaries quoted here haven't changed much in the past couple of decades. It's a shame. I know in the past there was a brain drain of talent from the UK to Canada due to the salary disparity. Here's an example:
Been there, done that. I still frequently get sent Linkedin specs for companies where the hardware team lead is earning junior SWE money. UK junior SWE money.
I am a former Mech Eng who trod this path. Started at JLR, moved by self teaching into software. Engineering in the UK felt like it moved at a glacial pace that only made sense in the days of final salary pension schemes. Senior management really struggled to get their heads around why young people were so impatient, but we were not competing for the same rewards.
> 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.
Fair enough, looks like the non-stop train doesn't exist any more. Shame, it was 1hr and 5mins when it existed! Still, 1hr 29mins is still not 'middle of nowhere' territory, so I'll stick with my original point ;)
> working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere
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.
Not that I disagree that Brexit was an awful idea, but this was a problem even before Brexit. The reach of European companies just isn't what it used to be in the face of American and Chinese giants, and the EU is failing to be a truly single market where companies can grow to that scale.
It's practically very difficult to move to the US. Getting a visa is hard even in the best case (with a helpful sponsor). And if you're in any way settled in the UK (partner, house, possessions, etc) then you've got multiple other problems to solve.
Immigrating to USA is hard, probably one of the hardest because competition is so high. Tbh I'd recommend going someplace like Hong Kong whose government is starved for talent and pays similar when balancing for tax but similar social services.
My cousin (an American living and working in France) married a guy originally from Morocco. After eventually realizing that they might want to move to the US, they couldn't, because he couldn't get a visa.
It would have taken quite a bit of time- my cousin would have had to move back to the US first, established residence, and gotten a job and some other requirements. Only then could they have qualified to apply, and the wait time for the application to be approved would be in the 9-14 months range.
Once they applied, he could have moved here with her, but not gotten a job, I think, until the application for the visa was approved.
> It would have taken quite a bit of time- my cousin would have had to move back to the US first, established residence, and gotten a job and some other requirements.
That's strange. A spouse green card doesn't require the residence and there is no wait time for the spouses of US Citizens. However, the processing time (especially via consular processing) is ridiculous, around 2 years now.
Some people don’t focus primarily on the money. When that’s the case, many things (love, pride, comfort, dreams, fears, etc) might keep someone from moving.
Ironically, other countries (former British colonies) have more access to US "specialty occupation" working visas than the UK does -- none of these are H1-B.
Canadians and Mexicans have TN, Australians have E3, Singapore and Chile have H-1B1 (a subcategory of H1-B but with its own quotas).
I have to correct myself slightly -- the Brit engineers I do meet in the US often come here on an L1A/L1B intra-company transfer from a British subsidiary. So that's one path.
But yes, the visa path for UK citizen to accept a direct job offer is much more limited.
Hardware engineer here, from a qualification perspective. I worked for a large American defence company and was invited to work in the US. I declined.
The work culture, social and economic stability are terrible. Education is expensive or poor. Regulation and standards are poor. Not a good place to bring up a family.
I'm a British-American hardware engineer, I've lived in the UK nearly all my life. I've a home, and a family with kids here, I'm very settled. I've had plenty opportunity to move to the US, even before I had a family (with my current employer or under my own steam as a citizen) and I've no interest. I visit the US every few years and by the end of the trip I'm very much done with it all. Other than the much larger job market, I don't think there's a single US thing I want. Everything we have here is either better, or I'm sufficiently used to it. American is an unappealing place to live for many social reasons, I'd much rather move to France or Germany if I had to leave (and wasn't worried about the language barriers).
I'm under the impression that tech people working in the US on visas are exploited. The end of year review / firing round which is so popular in the US means you can lose your job, which means you lose your visa, and you get something like 4 weeks to land a replacement or have to move out of the country.
At 20? Sure, who cares. If you've got a house, kids in a local school? The level of stress about being abruptly thrown out of the country seems untenable.
I would expect that dynamic to suppress wages for immigrants (as you have fear to keep them in line instead). Healthcare seems to be similarly set up to frighten people into staying in their current employment.
This perspective might not be accurate, but it's why this British engineer is unwilling to move to the US.
You're not wrong, but immigrants from other places are willing to take that risk with their families. This insecurity, for better or for worse, selects for a type of hungry immigrant who are also risk-takers, for whom the push of their own country overrides the risks.
(Don't get me wrong -- I'm not condoning it -- US immigration is really wanting. I'm just remarking on its 2nd order effects).
If you grew up with European norms, it might feel like exploitation. But for others seeking opportunity or fleeing poverty, it's a good trade off.
I've been studying the history of early emigration lately. Seems to me that outside of those who didn't have the means to leave, the Brits who were more upper class stayed home because they were happy enough with the status quo. It's the more blue collar Brits who had less to lose that went over to the new world. And America was built by the latter group.
(Canada OTOH was initially populated by the Brits who went over to the new world, but were happy with the status quo of being Brits i.e. the United Empire Loyalists. That's why Canadians today are just a little more risk-averse than Americans. Source: I'm Canadian).
Fair enough, I'll add some nuance. The government that I am a citizen of is a special case of a non-human entity, they do have entitlement to my property (which includes my attention).
Traffic signs put up by my government are different than billboards put up by a company. The former is to protect me, the latter is to exploit me.
The UK as a society doesn’t care about anything related to industrial production because it is ideologically opposed to anything resembling an industrial working class.
Skilled jobs are anathema to the ethos of the people in charge of the UK’s industrial policy - who have never held a skilled job in their life - as they would prefer everyone to be a backbiting, striving social climber like them, either moving money around of gumming up the system with endless bureaucracy.
This trend is exhibited in many of the ‘developed’ economies but it is particularly strong in the UK, a country fooling itself with delusions of grandeur while, like Wilde’s picture, its foundations gnarl and ossify and crumble, like dust into the dustpan of history. Next…
I don't think the UK is allergic to industry, it just got worse and worse at manufacturing relative to other countries after WW2.
Just look at the UK's automobile industry... terrible quality.. terrible reliability, particularly in electrical components until the whole thing collapsed.
The general attitude that manufacturing is only for people who suck at school is the driving force behind this decline. You are indeed left with mostly not-that-bright guys who don't even consider themselves skilled workers, and definitely don't go the extra mile to produce quality stuff. A guy half-assing his work earns just as much as the guy who puts his heart to it, that's the harsh reality of modern industrial work. If anything the guy who cares too much is ridiculed and considered weird.
The exceptional craftsmen still exist but they mostly work for themselves, for obvious reasons. They really don't want to be "managed" and bossed around like cattle.
I'm not sure I agree with the tone of this, but imho it's definitely true that British culture views STEM people as just a bunch of nerds ('boffins') to be told what to do, and not really trusted, wheras the 'important' serious people are all 'media' types; politics, sales and marketing, people-people.
Probably true to some extent the world over, but especially malignant in UK, as you say. It wouldn't be so bad if the UK's executives had a track record of excellence, but they are generally abysmal.
Not that bad. Engineers in "flyover country" where I am seem to easily exceed six figures.
My town has, ironically, a formerly British-owned firm (since bought out Berkshire Hathaway) that not only has six-figure engineering jobs, but shop floor jobs that are union and starting pay is $25/hr for unskilled - electrician and so on start higher, $30/hr, and only go up from there. The UK operations are still going, but engineering has largely moved to the U.S. (which is a bit of a puzzle, since apparently engineers in the UK can be had much more cheaply).
New "software" grads? Easily? Today? In flyover country? I'm not seeing it. Salaries got a nice bump over the last few years, but hiring has slowed down and new grads are the first to suffer. (and some of what you see when people on forums like this one talk about what they're paid is bullshit, for some reason)
Maybe? If you're in the area - would it be fair to characterize entry level software development jobs in Des Moines as "easily exceeding six figures?" I took a quick and lazy peek at a job site and I didn't feel like there were enough jobs to even make a judgment. (my filter brought up some Epic Systems jobs with no salary listings and some other stuff that is well below six figures)
As a Brit, when I was raising the seed round for my startup, UK and European VCs would consistently try to haggle you down on price while the American VC's were exclusively focussed on trying to figure out whether this could be a billion dollar business or not (in the end we raised a $5m seed led by Spark, and have done extremely well and raised more since).
The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.
There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
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).
Very true, although I suppose a significant fraction of the decline at that time might be a result of the end of the Empire, which given that there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in the world anymore was almost certainly inevitable.
By comparison, the performance of the UK in the last 20 years vs the US or the Nordics is a singular tragedy.
> there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in the world anymore
There is the US not-an-Empire [0] though, that'll probably count when the history books reflect on the present era. WWI/II can very easily be interpreted as a transition of power away from incompetent British leadership (indeed, European monarchies - the change pre- post- WWI is striking) towards more capable US-based leadership.
It isn't clear UK public ever really grappled how insufficient their leadership theory is. Their acceptance of poor performers over the last 20+ years has been striking although it is mirrored by low standards in the US.
I think it was more about economics than competency.
By the end of WW2 the UK was bankrupt and completely ruined economically, while the US had become the industrial powerhouse of the world thanks to abundant resources, manpower, and the fact that the war largely took place far from its borders (a few tiny islands notwithstanding). By the end of WW2 the US owned nearly all the gold that Europe previously owned which led to the US Dollar the worldwide reserve currency.
If the UK wants to pretend that WW2 (or, indeed, WW1) happened like a shock storm, unforseen and unforseeable, with no involvement from them they are welcome to do that. The result of that attitude was that the UK parliament was only allowed to govern a small and increasingly irrelevant island with lousy weather and steadily worsening economic prospects instead of a global empire.
There is a lesson for people governing global empires here - don't allow major wars to blow up on your borders. Or, ideally, anywhere. Maybe spend some time promoting peace and prosperity. Train the diplomats in diplomacy.
You'll notice that the US solution at the end of WWII was completely different to the European settlement at the end of WWI. And the US approach to warring was a lot more staid than the UK's. These are basic matters of competence.
Nothing important Sudetenland, nothing important in Austria, nothing important in Poland. They tried your strategy in the 30s and it was not a success.
Also, family ties. European monarchs were a really tight bunch. For instance, the tzar of Russia and the king of the British Empire at the time of WWI were brothers.
Some fair points, but remember that the US had the benefit of knowing that post-WW1 settlement was a failure. Of course, Wilson did object to the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, so it's fair to say the US had a better perspective from the start -- though one can argue that the US' own failure to ratify the League of Nations was a contributing factor to WW2.
Another key factor is that the US had no empire to hold together, and, to its credit, wisely did not seek to expand its territory after WW2 in order to create one (which it could have easily done, and which the UK had done many times before).
British weather is great. Enough rain to keep the land green and pleasant, temperatures that don't get too hot nor too cold - the very definition of temperate.
We aren't without our annoying and extreme weather though. Eg in the north of England last week it was -10c for a few nights and a week of 0/1c daytime temperatures with a biting wind chill. Before that was heavy snow and ice.
Heat waves up to 35-38c aren't unheard of. Our houses aren't built for this so a heatwave is quite uncomfortable as houses stay 20-25c overnight
Plenty of flooding in various parts
This autumn and winter has seen a lot of storms
The south fares much better of course and without as much flooding
It's interesting that incompetence ... Fabians started in 1884 and a lot of insanely destructive ideas seem to defend from those circles. We don't have the great leap forward it's slower but something as bad on a longer timescale
Yep. UK had post-war rationing longer than Germany did! Fabians were largely to blame for this state of affairs. UK caught back up, just about, in the 1980s, but the Conservatives went to seed at the start of the 90s and never really got fixed. It's the oldest political party in the world so it took a long time for people to give up on them but that's now finally happening.
Unfortunately the smear tactics against Farage over the years have been quite successful especially against the older generation that relies more heavily on TV for news. UK might face another election where the right splits their vote and Labour walk in again. Many decades of decline would be compounded at that point, putting the UK into more of a second world position.
> Their acceptance of poor performers over the last 20+ years has been striking
How many PMs has the UK been though in that time? _Way_ more than the average Western country. We don't accept poor oerformers more than anywhere else, we kick them out of office - but the talent pipeline is abysmal so the next one is usually awful too.
I'd say ruin - in great part from the costs of two World Wars - came before the end of the Empire. Wikipedia notes of WWII - "Britain was left essentially bankrupt, with insolvency only averted in 1946 after the negotiation of a US$3.75 billion loan from the United States". Vs. the Partition and dissolution of the British Raj were in 1947.
Most of the world's gold was in the US by the end of the war.
The flow of gold into the US starting in 1933 is thought to be why the Great Depression was moderating so much there and then: the money supply was inflating.
That is a better graph, but the conclusion I would draw is much the same.
The EU gets a boost from the inclusion of Eastern European economies that have been fast growing from a lower base.
If you compare the US and the UK to the four biggest EU economies, the US is doing best by far, and the UK is doing better than three and worse than one:
If that's adjusted for cost of living and inflation then isn't that hiding the actual economic changes? If GDP falls then cost of living would likely go down and vice versa.
Just so everyone is clear, the Nazi plan for what to do with an occupied Britain was to enslave large parts of population, to completely erase Britain as a country, and they also considered mass deportations of the native population. "Better off losing" is not really supportable under any reading of the historical evidence.
Yes, "winning" as in not being completely destroyed, occupied, and maybe even enslaved. Check out what Poland looked like in 1940 when it lost, or what Germany looked like in 1945, or, well, 1949.
USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either; I'd say both parameters were much worse than UK's. But it managed to remain a large empire with a high economic potential, and UK could not.
>USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either
The USSR moved all its industry eastward, as the German army advanced, waiting for the very last moment to do so. Quite an incredible feat that allowed them to beat Germany at industrial efficiency and secure victory.
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.
A truck without a driver has no value in a war. Lend lease was important but the ambition and drive to defeat Germany required huge sacrifices on all sides that are impossible without shared cultural ideals.
Those "shared cultural ideals" amounted to very little beyond "conquer the Nazis, before they conquer us" - as late-war and post-war relations between the USSR and the Western Allies showed. Or, as pre-'39 Western policies showed. The '30's saw the Nazis as an evil...but a useful and "not too" evil, that would (mostly, in effect) protect the West from the greater evil of Soviet Communism.
You’ve watched too many Hollywood movies. Yes, Lend-Lease was very helpful - but only about 5% of Soviet GDP. For example, the Soviets produced more tanks than all other allies combined, and that was while under massive active attack and invasion - even moved entire factories.
The real myth is that the Soviets just threw meat waves and would have lost without Uncle Sam. Most of that was anti communist propaganda and any serious (ie non-narrative driven) historian knows the truth about the industrial and military achievements of the Soviets in that war.
"the Soviets produced more tanks than all other allies combined"
For such feats, factory equipment mattered. So did trucks. Studebakers were relatively cheap and probably wouldn't move the needle on your GDP-based meter, but they were very important to Soviet logistics.
Lend lease included food and industrial equipment which was critical for Russia through the war not just tanks, aircraft, and ships. The value was more in covering what their economy struggled with than simply total output.
“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.
The USSR also gained de facto control over relatively developed places like the Baltics, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and exploited them.
Czechoslovak industry in the early 1950s was producing a shitton of products sold under their real price to the Soviets, or bargained for cheap agricultural products.
Exactly this. Great Britain colonized huge parts of the globe and had an empire. They were kings of trade and the world. Now they are just a surveillance nanny state and hollow shell of their former self.
I regularly see opinion pieces in the British Press advising young Brits to get out. In 2022 one writer wrote 'Britain is fed up, bitter, and practically broke – and it’s all going to get worse' and indeed it still is and getting worse. One basic problem: an unsustainable welfare and health system and overwrought bureaucracy. Today I learn that one major bank is considering leaving the UK in view of excessive 'red tape'.
Interestingly people, especially poor people, were better nourished during the WW 2 rationing than before the war. Also e.g. universal healthcare was establised post-war.
Is number of war ships, or billionaires, a good measure for a country?
I have not drilled down into the data, but I think it highly likely poor people did not benefit.
I have read that the Empire was a fiscal net negative. That was offset by it being a free market area with policies that favoured the UK, the benefits from that went primarily to a small minority.
> The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google.
Deepmind is still in the UK. And more, including foreign, bidders driving up prices for acquisitions and investments, will lead to more people making the jump.
Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and rich UK people to invest in new UK companies. It's the same problem with many of our companies being sold to foreign investors: profits are taken outside the country (as we did to other countries in the 19th century and earlier) so our labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.
> labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.
in reality, the UK isn't poorer than before. It is about the same - no growth. It is only poorer when compared to the US's growth.
One's labour, when being paid market rates, does not make one's country poorer. And those profits from said labour was paid for by the acquitition of the capital - money was invested.
So in essense, the "poorness" that the UK feels right now is not a result of these companies getting foreign ownership, but the UK gov't lack of industrial policy and investment. Brexit is the last straw probably.
> [...] but the UK gov't lack of industrial policy and investment.
That's a weird conclusion to draw.
Governments aren't generally known for their ability to pick winners ahead of time. How about instead of trying industrial policy (again), the UK could try to remove roadblocks that keep them from having successful companies?
They could also try to leave more money in the hands of taxpayers, so they can invest.
> Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.
This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.
Correct, but the tail of VC being fat is unique to the US. Pretty much the rest of the world is like the UK in all but a miniscule percentage preferring stability rather than moonshots.
Yeah but if it's not a moonshot SaaS factory they don't want to hear the reality.
For example, Ireland's state VC - Enterprise Ireland - ranked first in the world of venture capital investors by deal count in 2020 by Pitchbook. The average size of the deal compared to a Series A was laughable in context, but the ethos is there.
False. Even good jobs with American companies and what not are subject to ridiculous tax problems in the UK. You give you employees equity but then they have to raise vast sums of capital just to hold on to it to afford their taxes when there is virtually no real liquidity pre IPO.
It's anti success. And there is garbage everywhere, people keep voting for antisocial housing and bad cultures. It's a failing state.
Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue. It is one of things that europeans can learn from Americans.
My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse because all they care is preserving their wealth and the working class don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well functioning systems that don't have disruptors and we indeed benefit of it as having good lives but unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and tear down everything and rebuilding again will eventually get ahead on everything and won't let us just be as we now see with US billionaires having impact over Europe.
Americans feel more pain but are also rewarded, Europe has no option but to become progressive - otherwise tere will be no more Europe and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
Oh, BTW, America is also struggling. The latest political developments are an attempt to change course - they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and class based politics holding roots. They say they are anti-regulation anti-discrimination(of whites specifically) but the core MAGA movement is all about putting barriers and preserving old ways for the benefit of a subset of people. Americans are too in soul searching. Their MAGA literally means fixing what is no longer great but their demands are actually quite conservative and they already begin falling off with their accelerations partners.
>Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well functioning systems
Current EU is definitely not a stable and well functioning system. Look at economic conditions, political outcomes, illegal immigration, wealth inequality, societal and political trust, homelessness rates, birth rates, free speech suppression, welfare austerity, etc Everything has been going downhill since the 2008 crash. It's a powder keg.
>they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and class based politics holding roots.
What are you on about? Europe doesn't have much race based politics, that's a thing America keeps pushing.
Yeah right, Reform AFD Rassemblement national Fratelli d'Italia and other risings stars have nothing to do with race and even if they do it's Americans behind it.
Everyone knows that Europeans are much more racist than Americans, it's just that we are much less explicit about it and its issues are different than the issues in the USA.
Illegal immigration is a BS term, make immigration legal if you don't want illegal immigrants. It's not like people choose the hard, dangerous and expensive ways instead of buying a Ryanair ticket. When the illegal immigrants BS doesn't hold they all start complaining about legal immigrants as with the UK and their core Brexit reason.
I can understand this might make sense if race (or ethnicity) were the only factor in the world to consider, but since it's not, is there value in thinking as though it is?
What makes me think that it's about race(loosely speaking. IMHO it's more about xenophobia and feeling like losing privilege o identity as a nation etc) is that once you make the immigration legal they start complaining about numbers like in Britain.
BTW I don't disagree with the people who don't want everyone be welcome, I just think that their solution ideas and demands are misguided. My observation is that people from various ethnicities can function in cohesion and are about the same when they are from a similar educational background and rarely have ethnical or racial issues among themselves and IMHO all the problems will be resolved if you let people naturally find their appropriate group they belong to instead of having BS like country borders and visas and DEI or race based positive discrimination etc.
Thanks for your reply. I think I agree with at least some of it, but it is still solely talking about race.
The worries people have, especially in somewhere like Britain, is it's a country with a relatively small population compared to the level of immigration, and housing is an enormous problem. One outcome that I think can be to a considerable extent[0] attributed to high net immigration is that housing has become smaller (many houses divided into flats), and housing has become much more expensive. So anyone who already owned a house is sitting fairly pretty, as they get bouyed up by the housing market, but anyone looking to buy for the first time, or buy into a new market for the first time (e.g. moving to near schools for kids) is going to have a massive problem, as the competitive pressure has up-bidded housing and made it worthwhile to subdivide and sell/rent smaller dwellings.
This could be all white people doing it (somewhere like Cornwall in the UK is mostly annoyed because other Brits buy holiday homes there, driving up prices for locals and their kids who are coming up) - it doesn't matter. The housing costs are what matter. And they, a bit like fuel, drive up everything else: NHS workers need higher salaries to just be able to live in many places, which drives up taxes.
This isn't to avoid actual race/ethnicity-related tensions. But there's a giant clump of people who are just fed up with their money going far less far than their parents' and grandparents' money did when it comes to one of the fundamentals of life: housing yourself and your family. And their parents and grandparents are equally upset that their kids/grandkids have in a major sense a harder life than they did.
[0] definitely not fully; there are multiple factors. But if you net import the equivalent of the population of Liverpool each year, and you aren't building a Liverpool each your to house them, it's obvious that prices will start shooting up.
Well no, its not. Specifically in relation to Asylum Seekers contravening the EU Dublin Regulation and tearing up their passports on an intra-EU flight so they can claim Asylum and the associated social welfare in Ireland rather than France or Germany due to our much higher rates.
Basically economic migrants - predominately young men from the middle east - disguising themselves as Refugees and taking social supports away from the families fleeing warzones.
That is one subset of immigration crime that is rightly frown upon and can be completely avoided abolition of the country borders concept that was introduced in the last 100 years or less. Want to help people in need? Instead of confining them into areas and then impose restriction on those and give some of them some money, help those in need. Or don't help, but at least don't pretend that you are bringing justice to the world without addressing the core problems.
In other words, this is actually welfare fraud that happens to have a travel component.
I don't support illegal immigration, I say that people traveling and seeking better lives should not be illegal.
I think we are done here since I don't feel spending time for positions I never claimed. I despise this type of argumentation, its a known fallacy and its useless.
You can count yourself as won an arguments if you feel like that.
That's a ridiculous way of thinking about it. Anyone who says they don't want illegal immigrants isn't objecting simply because of the legal status, they think the process should be upheld which prevented those people from immigrating legally.
It's the same reason we don't seek to improve crime rates by legalising theft. Sure, there'd be fewer people labelled as "criminal", but the original problem would remain (and in all probability would become worse).
And why the process of immigrating legally is more than buying a ticket and a security check at the border?
Obviously, it is the reason that matters and the reason is not benign.
People want other people to like people in certain way they and then castrate Alan Turing for illegal love. People want to have slaves then they have illegally free slaves problem.
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.
That's quite the conservative talk-radio shopping list.
Illegal immigration is a metric of the EUs economic success and social stability compared with North Africa, Eastern European Accession States, and the war-torn middle east. If America shared land borders and direct migration routes with Islamic caliphates and the like, they'd know all about it.
Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty sane and tolerable for all but a select group of (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher on the US side.
Societal and Political trust is still quite high - despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining the political capital necessary to instigate significant change outside of Hungary.
Homelessness rates are a factor of illegal migration - and are laughably low compared to the US on a per capita basis; ditto whatever warped contention you have regarding 'welfare austerity'. We just call it social security. During Covid and in the period afterwards it was hugely ramped up across Europe - and not in a giveaway budget with a check personally signed by an Oligarch.
Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what you're aiming at. The current cultural friction regarding things like gender-identification and pronoun usage are uniquely american exports. On basically all other counts other than venue-shopping defamation cases, it's a moot point for any normal person.
Finally re birth rates - they tend to go down in wealthy and advanced societies outside of select religious groupings (looking at you Salt Lake City) so I'm not sure what your point is there.
It isn't a "conservative talk-radio shopping list". It is reality in quite a few areas in Europe and the UK.
> Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty sane and tolerable for all but a select group of (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher on the US side.
This isn't true. I know many people that have moved from Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where politically fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right or centre-left. I speak to people from all over Europe regularly and many of them do not feel the way that you are describing.
> Societal and Political trust is still quite high - despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining the political capital necessary to instigate significant change outside of Hungary.
That isn't true. I know many areas of Europe where the electorate keep on voting for further right parties. The same is happening in the UK. Labour only won because the Conservatives lost and the Reform party did extremely well for what is a relatively new party. I know the same is happening in Belgium (I speak regularly with Belgian nationals). Areas of Spain that are most affected by immigration have voted for further right parties. So I know this isn't true.
> Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what you're aiming at.
Just look up the hate speech laws enacted throughout Europe and in the UK and some of the cases that have been prosecuted. We do not have a right to the free speech in the UK and the majority of Europe doesn't either.
>>This isn't true. I know many people that have moved from Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where politically fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right or centre-left. I speak to people from all over Europe regularly and many of them do not feel the way that you are describing.
The plural of anecdotes is not data, nor does your select social circle represent a cogent sample group.
Orbans stated position is to pivot Hungary from a democracy into an illiberal state, modeled after Putin's Russia. At the EU summit in mid-December, for example, he refused to agree to the extension of the Russia sanctions that expire at the end of January.
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.
Freedom o expression does not guarantee you freedom of consequence in Europe. If you make fun of a politicians they or the state can come back after you for it.
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:
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
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."
> Police searched Much’s house and removed and confiscated the posters. The public prosecutor imposed a penalty order of €6,000 for “criminal insult to politicians”.
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.
NGL, I can't really argue with that. Thankfully it's not the same across Europe - Germany is just a basketcase when it comes to laws. It's like getting fined in Switzerland for falling off your bicycle. They're not even remotely consistent in how or why they're applying them.
"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)."
> The plural of anecdotes is not data, nor does your select social circle represent a cogent sample group.
When something isn't easily quantifiable there is no data. OK sure then, but there wouldn't be anyway.
The fact is that people are talking about moving either out of Western Europe / UK to somewhere else and it is a common sentiment amongst many professionals.
> Orbans stated position is to pivot Hungary from a democracy into an illiberal state, modeled after Putin's Russia. At the EU summit in mid-December, for example, he refused to agree to the extension of the Russia sanctions that expire at the end of January.
Can you point me to a translated policy document or a more credible news source from like Hungary that I can translate? I don't take American news sources seriously for European issues as they frequently get basic things incorrect.
> Citations needed.
You can look up the laws yourself and the cases. They can easily be found. They are numerous. The law around speech is quite easy to find on the .gov websites.
> Well no, not explicitly, as they have a different legal and basis for law as the US - e.g. they don't have a codified constitution either as they came from a common law system based on the French Courts. Instead they hold the same proportional right as a negative right to freedom of expression under the common law.
In the UK we literally don't have the right to free speech. I have actually read the law on this issue several years ago. Only in Parliament are you allowed to speak freely. There is nowhere where it says we have these rights, there are no cases that have decided that has ruled we have these rights. This is neither explicitly or implicitly.
> Its a moot point anyway as since 1998, freedom of expression is guaranteed according to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights across Europe.
Freedom of expression != Free speech. They are not the same thing and that is why hate speech laws exist in the majority of EU countries and in the UK. Time and time again people erroneously equate free-speech with free-expression. The UK government have themselves come out and said something to the effect of "You have the right to free expression, but not saying things we don't like" essentially.
You either are being wilfully ignorant or you are horrendously naive. Go and read the law yourself if you don't believe me.
>>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.
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.
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.
>>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.
>>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and
tear down everything and rebuilding again
A notion of "bare progress" is the elephant in the room. Progress is a
vector. It has magnitude and direction. People talk of moving "forward
or back", but science also has a steering wheel.
> and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
This very notion of "progress" as a totalitarian force is also
dangerous. The boot is on the other foot from 80 years ago. When
Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more
measured minds had to extinguish that fire. I see many similarities
today - people seeing "progress" simply as dominance.
I liked the brain-dump in TFA, but I think it's over-complex and too
tied to a contemporary interpretation of capital investment.
We've been spooging away our talent for generations here. Look at how
we treated Turing. We mismanage or sell-off everything cool we invent.
What Britain still suffers from is class disloyalty. We still have a
strong but invisible class system which is now international
financiers. Those sorts "float above" the ordinary economy, they are
disconnected from UK interests and don't give a toss about
engineering, science, knowledge, education...
> When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire
A lot of the measured minds were saying eugenics was a good idea. It took the horror of seeing experiments and concentration camps to make it so deeply unfashionable the idea couldn't even survive in academia.
I believe you're right. Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust" and
Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" both played their part in
revising my naive ideas about simple narratives of WW2.
But look at this post made here a couple of days ago [0]. It's
absolutely back in fashion. I think technofascism really is a thing
now - you can feel certain people getting quite giddy with thoughts of
power.
Power's always in fashion. Academics seem to love socialism, because it (in practice) centralises decision-making nationally to a group of smart people (and the academics might imagine themselves to be these insanely powerful people).
Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of thinking, if I remember correctly.
> Everyone wants to imagine themselves "insanely powerful people" now. It's part of the sell.
I'm not sure this is true. Socialism does have a surprising foothold, but I think that's largely due to the larger number of people flowing through academia.
Leisure, that is, truly retaining time to encourage and develop the spirit that is not just work
> There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work - the characteristic vice of the New World - already begins to infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading over it a strange loss of spirit (Geistlosigkeit). One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually "afraid of letting opportunities slip." "Better do anything whatever, than nothing" - this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. And just as all form obviously disappears in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself, the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also disappear.
Quality of life, if you define an actual proper life as something happening outside of work hours and sleep.
We don't worry whether my insurance will cover the next health issue that will happen to me, be it broken leg or lifelong costly treatment. I don't have to desperately try to save maybe 1.5 million $ to put my kids through decent university, if they desire to do so. I am not brutally tossed on the sidewalk when I am fired, both employer and state gives a LOT of support to not fall off the societal cliff and end up as typical US homeless person. We have way more resting time to recharge via holidays (this fellow from 1.1. is running on 90% corporate work contract and thus sporting 50 vacations days per year - now thats QOL improvement, I've already planned 6 week+ vacations for this year). We have on average simply healthier lifestyles and it shows literally massively.
I could go on for a long time. But you can ignore that - compare usage of mental health medication, from what I've seen its much more massive in US, manifesting the additional stress that US population is cca exposed to.
Its a balance - you add more money, you remove more 'humanity', and the additional stress is there and very real. Everybody has different ideal spot, and this also changes a lot during life. Isn't it better to have 2 systems next to each other, and everybody can pick how they want to live your life? Focus purely on money is stupid, their added value in life quickly diminishes once a person is not poor, then other aspects of life become much more important. The complete opposite is same, 0 progress. Something in between, as always, is the best road for most.
You also get your defence and healthcare advancements mostly paid for by Americans, either as taxes or healthcare costs that funnel into R&D spend. It's easy to give things away when you mostly only have maintenance costs to bear, and not very much risk.
In Germany, you can typically finance the first 1-3 years of your start-up through government gifts like "EXIST". That's why you don't need early seed investors.
Idk about the Netherlands, but in France you can take your unemployment benefits for 3 years upfront as a capital investment in a new business. And there are various grants and aid you can apply for.
I think recently there's been a change which says that you can if you start a new company right away. But do check with an accountant for the inevitable pitfalls.
In CAC40 company, It is possible to take unpaid leave with the possibility of returning to the company to set up a new business. The idea is that if the project fails, the original company recovers an employee who has learned a lot (free MBA).
If you're already unemployed, it's possible to keep your allowance longer for a business start-up or takeover.
It's also possible to sign a “rupture 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.
> In CAC40 company, It is possible to take unpaid leave with the possibility of returning to the company to set up a new business
It's not only CAC40, it's part of some collective bargaining agreements which apply to whole sectors (e.g. SYNTEC which applies to all consulting and most IT companies).
I see this misconception a lot for resigning France.
First, there are some "protected classes" of resigning that allow you to be eligible for unemployment right after you resign, for example: moving to follow your spouse, resigning less than 3 months after having been laid off, going back to study or... creating a company!![1] :).
Second, you are entitled to unemployment benefits even if you resign without "a good reason". The issue is that you can only request your benefits 4 months after having resigned. This leads to many people believing that you just do not get anything if you resign; because who wants to eat the 4 months of no income?
This 4 months waiting period is not advertised at all, and my complotist self believes it might be on purpose; if you don't know about it and don't request it, that's less money for the government to spend :^).
[1] Conditions apply (having worked uninterrupted for the last 5 years)
It's more complicated than that [0]. The fact that you have the right to claim unemployment benefit does not mean that it will be accepted, that it will be accepted quickly or that the benefit will correspond to what you would have had if you had been laid off.
This is true; I can only speak from my experience and that of my peers but the hardest part every time was the "accepted quickly" section of your comment. I am also thinking the process is cryptic and uncertain on purpose to discourage people from even trying. Even though I have not personally seen requests get outright rejected, just drawn out to months.
Correct, that was meant as an example. There's also "Existenzgründungszuschuss" for the unemployed and various other EU funds for craftsmen and others:
Your sentence is not true as you present it. There are _a lot_ of constraints. Time wise, topic wise, biased wise. No typicality start-up will ever get the EXIST "gift".
"The grant covers personal living, material, and coaching expenses over 12 months, allowing founders to focus on developing their founding idea. While graduates receive personal funding of 2.500€, students can receive 1.000€ a month, additionally up to 30.000€ material and 5.000€ coaching budget that can be used to develop the founding project further."
So, 30k EUR (gross) with a maximum funding period of one year? Laughable. Also probably a little bit tragicomic.
Early seed rounds are usually measured in couple of USD millions. I wonder how these brilliant minds in the EU think they will attract the industry talent to leave their ~5x salary (outside FAANG) for such a pocket money.
EXIST is very narrowly tailored to technology start-ups founded by graduates based on their research.
Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of the latest YC 24 Winter batch at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST if they lived in Germany.
> don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
And/or don't think that more is better/desirable. I wouldn't consider myself working class, but I was definitely raised with the idea that making obscene amounts of money is actually pretty selfish/immoral and not something one ought to strive for. That doesn't preclude going into business. But it is pretty antithetical to the VC funding model and the creation of billion dollar businesses.
In general, it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful (consider that variants on socialism are still mainstream political ideologies in Europe).
> it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful
Isn't this due to different types of Christian traditions? AFAIK In some, it is considered that the wealth is given by the God to the virtuous ones and they are merely guardians of it and responsible to use use the wealth in a virtuous ways and therefore getting rich is encouraged and the rich are treated with respect?
There's something similar among some Muslim sects too, in Muslim majority countries it is not uncommon to believe that the God chose someone to be rich and there's more to that person that the eye can see therefore must be respected. Some religious communities even get so obscenely rich and you can see poor servants having a religious experience when their leader arrives with an a luxury car.
The way I see it, at least in France, it's not really a question of religion. "The rich" are thought to have acquired their wealth doing dubious things, mostly by "exploiting the poor".
There's also a very strongly egalitarian way of thinking, as in pretty much everybody is interchangeable. So, if someone does better than somebody else, it's likely because of something "unfair" (or luck) and not thanks to being more competent.
I've never personally known any "very rich" people so I can't comment on them.
But the perception I'm talking about applies even to "reasonably confortable" people. Think your random engineer making 100k a year (which is a "good" salary in these parts). Basically, someone with some form of STEM degree.
I doubt most of these people are doing anything shady. Plus, this kind of income doesn't really give them any kind of financial independence: they wouldn't be able to afford not having a job.
> I doubt most of these people [random engineer making 100k a year] are doing anything shady.
I guess it depends what your level of "shady" is - I know a bunch of people in that kind of range who were all about "optimising their tax" (which I would consider to be "tax evasion" - morally wrong even if it is legal at the time.)
You know "optimizing" means different things for different people.
For example: France offers specific saving deposits with guaranteed interest rate and non-taxed. If a normal saving deposit would be taxed and has similar interest rate, "optimizing their tax" means just using the that specific deposit.
There are many other schemes that I can't believe they exist (example: in France if you create an investment account, after 5 years of the account existence you are not taxed on the gains! So what you can do is "create account with 100 euro", "wait 5 years", "invest more / potentially do gains" - and you will not be taxed!!!)
You will tell me "that is morally wrong!". I could agree with you, but I see nobody demanding better laws/regulations, probably because they don't know/care about details.
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.)
My experience is that "common people" try (or were trying) as much to "game the system" as "rich people". Examples (not from UK): shops not giving a receipt (this improved probably with cards), people avoiding paying fines for small things, people asking for benefits they were not entitled too (this improves with digitalisation) etc.
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".
But we're not talking about obscene amounts of money. Just making enough to have some savings so you can do things like a career break or retire early is discouraged (and mostly impossible). Europe wants you to work, and keep working, forever.
Considering the differences in living prices in major capitals and other cities, I would claim you can do that (career break/retire early) even today in multiple countries in Europe.
But that would mostly mean changing places. If you go and work 10-15 years in an expensive/high pay city, you could retire in a less expensive city.
On the other hand if you expect that everything will be as when you were working (place, expenses, etc.), I am not sure it is the case even in the US for early retirements ...
Success is viewed differently by some. Being educated, having healthy lives, having access to many public servicesnare seen as a successful healthy life by many.
It’s not something that Americans in general explicitly believe, but you can see it in their attitudes and behavior towards the rich and successful. For example, HN (being somewhat weighted towards American cultural norms) collectively believes that people who have made lots of money are especially wise and hard working, and therefore have special insights to offer to the rest of us. True or not, this is a culturally specific belief.
I think this is just a bias. I've not seen much that makes me think Americans think rich people are more virtuous, at all. Certainly not enough to create a stereotype out of, even if I thought stereotypes were a good idea.
Yeah, I was raised with that idea. I did make some nice businesses, but I don't care for growing because of growing. If I catch a few 100k a year for everyone in the company (yep, it is the reason I like tiny companies: we can just decide to all make the same), I don't really care about the rest. Doing that for 10 years (even shorter but he) is enough for anyone to live out their life in comfort out of the (etfs etc) interest here. I keep on doing making new things as I like it, but need no more money, so that helps.
People need examples of success in their network. Most people have frankly never met or heard of anyone who founded a successful startup- and therefore would never think of taking on such a risk. I agree that in some places there is a sense of malaise, but if we are to believe founders are a 1-2% outlier of the population, I don’t see why America’s 1-2% should be so much more ambitious than the UKs. I think it’s more a cycle induced by lack of funding.
>Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue.
You can change mindsets with regulations that reward taking risks in new businesses/innovations, and punish rent seeking and sitting on inherited real estate for example.
But as long as EUrope is focused on maintaining the status quo of boomers and gentrified dynasties of billionaires that you probably played against in Assassins' Creed, nothing will change.
Let's make simple calculations. In California, near the start of the 20th century there were more than 34 million native Americans living in what was their land. Now there are in California 300-700.000 native Americans.
They were exterminated and replaced by a very small European population. Like sterilising a Petri dish and letting bacteria grow, the opportunities that population experienced were the biggest any population in the world ever had. Just look at a graph of the population growth of US OR California in the last century and compare it to others.
Now there is in California a population of near 40 million people.
That is not a "mindset", this is real growth that they could experience and the rest of the world could not.
These numbers are at least two orders of magnitude higher than typical estimates. What are you talking about? It's even higher than the typical all time max which is on the order of 10 million.
Regulations often stem from a particular mindset. However, they also serve to perpetuate that mindset.
As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it. Instead, we focus our energy on other pursuits, such as family, sports, or friendships.
This shift in focus isn’t inherently bad—a life balanced between family, friends, work, and leisure is often a recipe for happiness. However, societal progress relies heavily on the efforts of a small minority of individuals who are bold (or perhaps crazy) enough to pursue their ideas. When 90% of those individuals are discouraged from taking entrepreneurial risks, society’s capacity for innovation is severely stifled.
In short, it’s clear that excessive regulations and high taxes are holding Europe back from achieving its full potential for growth and innovation.
Which regulations exactly you find burdensome or overwhelming and stopping you from attempting the become wealthy, change your life and the world maybe?
Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest? Up until 1960's rich Americans payed %91 tax, and yet they kept their entrepreneurial spirit - why you can't do the same at the stated %50?
Does it? How many people skipped getting rich because they could have been richer? Any factual examples?
BTW, rich don't actually pay much taxes. The luxury life they live is usually not taxed, most of the things they do is considered business expense.
When a worker flies to Ibiza they first pay social security and income taxes, then they pay consumption taxes like VAT.
When a businessman flies to Ibiza they deduct whatever they can as an expense so they don't pay income tax and VAT. For whatever they can't claim that it is a business expense they will pay with a cheap loan against their assets and avoid paying income taxes. Since they still have those assents, they pay just the interest later when the assents increase in value. If their business fails those assets fail, the bank takes the assets and no taxation happens.
What the OP is trying to say is that to grow from 50k euros earned per year to 1 million euros earned per year is very, very cumbersome and, yes, mentally challenging and very stressful, and that a lot of people actively choose to stay/remain at the 50k euros per year level and they'll not take the risks of trying to get to more than 1 million per year.
Once you're at more than 1 million per year there are other challenges and you can probably afford to hire someone to take part of that burden off your shoulders, but until you get to that point you're on your own and it's very damn stressful (and by stressful I mean that that includes the possible inflated but all to real fear of getting to prison because of that tax-thingie that you didn't fill the 100% correct way or because some work your company did broke some municipal regulations or whatever and now you're on the hook for damages and, yes, personal liability).
Actually your VAT-skimming thing at the end is a very good example of that mentality, i.e. the innovators here having to have the Tax man front and center in their minds, before innovation and trying to build something useful off the ground, because if you don't know how to play the Tax man (at the limit of legality, as your example is) then you're toast. That "playing the Tax-man" thing consumes a lot of people's energy in the early stages, energy that would have been way better spent trying to actually make something new and innovative.
[the 50k and 1 million figures are just used as examples, maybe it's not 50k but 70k or 80k and maybe it's not 1 million but 5 to 10 million, but the idea stays the same]
Those problems are universal. Or do you honestly think that American startups don't need to hire an accountant and consult with lawyers? You either find the risk/reward proposition worthwhile or you don't. There's nothing wrong with not pursuing the riskier avenue but don't pretend the US makes it easy.
There are levels and levels of enforcement, and, yes, from the across the pond it does look like the IRS is not breathing as menacingly each and every time you may want to do something different.
For example a company like Uber could have never taken off here in Europe because the tax authorities (and not only) would have never let that happened, i.e. Uber (the company) playing the "they're not real employees" game with the authorities. Yes, Uber eventually made it into Europe, but only because by that time it already was a big and established company in the States so it had lots of money to spend on lobby activities.
For a married couple in Germany, they reach 40% in effective tax rate somewhere above 600,000€ in combined annual income.
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.
I’m 33, in the U.K. and my marginal tax rate is currently 66.7%, because the support you get for having children gets withdrawn between £60000 and £80000. If a promotion came up I would take it but it’s also at a point where I’m considering already dropping down to four days a week because of this. I don’t live in London so my life is very affordable. Save myself money on children’s nursery for a few years too…
What makes you think anything has changed here? Certainly in the UK, there are plenty of "loopholes". Outside of PAYE, there are plenty of ways to legally lower your tax burden, and plenty of wealthy business owners and shareholders make full use of those loopholes.
This is true and I believe it doesn't make sense to compare tax burdens of the people who are already wealthy.
It makes sense to compare tax burdens of well-paid employees, a favorite cash cow of most governments. These are the people who sometimes start new businesses, and use their savings to do so.
And there is a meaningful difference to the volume of their savings if their top tax bracket is 30 per cent or 55 per cent.
> Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest?
No one's making that choice. Most businesses fail, even in somewhere entrepreneur-friendly like America. Why not just work for someone else, given the rewards are capped even at relatively low level of success? Why take the risk, when taxation has failed to price risk into reward?
We have global commerce; you are not only working on the creation part of something new, but also competing with similarly skilled people working with different more advantageous start conditions.
Nobody is talking about the difference between 1 and 2 billion, they are talking about the difference between 50 and 100 thousand, while competing.
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.
This is very interesting anecdote because it resonates with something that a friend of mine said when I pressured him to explain which regulations exactly are causing him problems in EU.
As it turns out, he also complained about excessive documentation he needs to get public funds for his project.
So both of you are actually complaining about accessing public funds and not actually doing private investment or starting a private company with private funds.
this is not what most of the Americans do and this is not what they mean by startups or business. Mostly.
Sort of. Accessing private Canadian financing is a lot harder for the most part, our financial sector is notoriously risk averse for any sort of personal or business loans unless there's a path of guaranteed returns and you have a track record of getting those returns. Last time one of my bosses tried to get something like $2 million in raising funds with Canadian investors, they said that we needed to show I think at least $2 million in net profits for 4 or 5 years at least.
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).
> Sort of. Accessing private Canadian financing is a lot harder for the most part, our financial sector is notoriously risk averse for any sort of personal or business loans unless there's a path of guaranteed returns and you have a track record of getting those returns. Last time one of my bosses tried to get something like $2 million in raising funds with Canadian investors, they said that we needed to show I think at least $2 million in net profits for 4 or 5 years at least.
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.
You've fallen into the classic trap of thinking about the very very very tiny of people who are billionaires. Very few people are billionaires. Very few startup founders will ever be even if they succeed.
Life changing money is going from $50k/year to $1m/year. Not from $1b to $2b.
The vast majority of tax burden and complexity hits the middle class.
In Europe the capital gain tax ranges from %37 in Norway, %34 in France, %26 in Germany and Italy, %10 in Bulgaria and %0 with conditions in many other places. Tax heavens are a European invention anyway.
And no, millionaire or billionaire doesn't matter much. Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires. Europe is full of small businesses and by small I mean millions in profits and revenues.
In Europe %99 of the companies are small or medium sized enterprises, which is not different than the USA. In USA however, large companies have slightly higher number of employees which is an indicative of concentration of power and that's how you get your "USA has 5 unicorns in top 10 but EU has only 1" lists.
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.
With enough inflation the millionaires supply will increase, but that's not the point. Toplists and arbitrary round numbers doesn't mean anything. Let's stick with stuff that matter, like concentration of wealth.
Having less is different than lacking of. Europe lacks billionaires that can make large scale investments at whim like Elon Musk does. A more equal society has its positives but negatives too.
Thats not an entirely fair comparison because GDP/capita is different, and the base assumption would be that millionaires/capita increases with GDP.
That assumption appears to hold in general (Luxembourg and Switzerland have higher GDP and significantly higher millionaire percentages than the US), but there are a LOT of exceptions, like Ireland/Norway (way less millionaires than you would expect from GDP).
This is very interesting, I would not have expected to see such significant differences between countries...
From what I can tell the millionaire discrepancy existed in 2010 as well when the per capita GDPs between Germany/France/UK and the US were fairly close. The gini index for the US is much higher so it's not surprising that there's more millionaires per capita. And a lot more poor people per capita as well (once you account for the US's weaker standard for what constitutes poverty).
I never said people were better off in one or the other nor is this a discussion about that. This is a discussion of the societal differences driving startups and risky investments.
The US has a pension, it is called Social Security, and it is relatively generous among developed countries. 401k is in addition to, not a replacement for.
The 50% tax being a roadblock is exactly what the lack of ambition is about. There's an implicit assumption you're only ever achieve just over the tax limit rather than hundreds of thousands or milllions over with share options etc.
I think this is a combination of a lack of supportive environment and a risk averse mindset. Employers will likely scoff at a CV with one or more entrepreneurial stints. The way I see it is this: if the prohibition era was implemented in the UK, people would still acquire alcohol against any and all barriers. The same drive doesn't exist for entrepreneurial goals. Regulations make things difficult but the critical problem is that the entrepreneurial mindset is not there
> As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it.
I find it ironic you mention "classes" (regarding "as a member of the working class"). There are problems everywhere (either as an employee or as an entrepreneur). Feeling overwhelmed is just a feeling, does not say anything about how much you can do or if you get a reasonable workload.
I think what is holding Europe back is the people not trying and understanding various things without having lots of fears (of being overwhelmed, of large tax, of what people will say, etc.).
A balance must be stricken also between what you can do (leisure, family) and how many resource you produce/consume. The purpose should be for more of leisure/family but that is ONLY IF we (I am also European) produce/consume enough. Too many smart and capable people want to "just be an employee", which results in gaps in other places (entrepreneurs, politicians, etc.).
Should individuals routinely risk their own livelihood to benefit a select few capitalist? Does this improve the life of the average American? Seeing how they vote it seems generally it does not?
Havent FAANG companies improved the lives of the average American? They definitely did, and all these companies were created by ambitious individuals with a bold vision and prospect of making lots of money!
By taking big risks, one might ascend to this capitalist class if they succeed.
"FAANG improved average lives" is by no means a safe assumption. It needs to be very carefully demonstrated for each individual company, with consideration of the worsenings as well. The forgotten sixth, Microsoft, is probably easier to make a case for.
EU drone regulations ban autonomous drones from being flown. This made me stop work on them, this is not a mindset problem. It's actually a corruption problem as Google wanted to sell their software to coordinate drone flights and the EU people were "persuaded" to enact regulations to make this happen.
This is interesting, can you give a bit more details maybe? Which regulations are not allowing you to do what? I wasn’t able to find the ban, is it maybe more about safety and privacy requirements rather than outright ban?
It's a case of what is not explicitly allowed is banned, that is the difference between European continental law and English law where things are allowed unless explicitly banned. Here is a quote from the email I had from the CAA -
"At present the CAA do not allow for these types of flights as there has to be some degree of collision avoidance in that the aircraft must be kept in visual line of sight at all times to avoid a collision.
The CAA does not regulate the use of drones indoors and there is a short section on indoor use at the following web page, about ½ way down the page.
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?
He means a safe wage job pays a third less in the UK than Germany.
Not sure if it's true so let's look at some stats:
Germany median for software engineer: €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.
You said that UK's salaries are 2/3 of the Germany ones, but this doesn't mean that the Germany ones are 1/3 more, they are 1/2 (or 50%) more. That's pretty far from 10-15%.
10-15% in the opposite direction. That is I stated they earn 10-15% more.
33% less equates to them earning roughly 50% more. The difference between 10-15% and 50% is huge!
(trivial example, if someone is earning £100,000, then someone earning 33% less makes £66,666. But Someone earning £100,000 makes 50% more than someone making £66,666)
Something not talked about - you probably won't be able to lease suitable property if you are doing anything other than apps.
Doing soldering of prototypes? Good luck finding a landlord that would let you do it. The moment they hear "fumes" is a nope, fire hazard, safety risk and won't let you...
I lived in Ireland for 10 years. It's not the same as the UK but there _is_ cultural overlap. Every time you shared a new idea with _anyone_, even things as simple as "I want to buy a site and build a house on it", the first thing you hear is how that's a bad idea, you will fail, it will never work, and you need to leave it to "professionals".
Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" and should be sneered at.
Edit: To compare -
Me: "I want to build a house"
Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."
California/Oregon friends: "Fuck yeah I'll bring a nailgun"
(UK resident, born and bread) Yes this drives me absolutely mad. I'm a poor risk taker and can come up with all those reasons something's a bad idea, but when I've made up my mind to take the risk I want supportive people around not people who would rather you never tried anything outside their "comfort zone".
And the problem runs in families. This is not therapy but every time I talked to my parents about an idea it would be dammed with faint praise or I'd be told I'm wasting my time. It's taken 20 years to work out that the more they dissed an idea is the better it actually was.
I don't know what the regulations are in the UK, but in many European countries, building a house isn't just about knowing how to build a house, it's also about knowing all the DIN requirements. These are necessary for insurance to pay out if something happens to your house. Let's take a simple example: You're wiring your house. Because of a mistake, the house burns down.
Insurance: “Okay sir, who did the electrical wiring?
you: “Me”.
Insurance: “Are you a professional?
you: “No"
Insurance: “Have you had your work certified by a third party?"
you: “Do my buddies count?”
insurance: "Have a good day sir"
There may never be a problem and you may have figured out everything that's required to get your butt covered (good for you in this case), but the fact is that a lot of people don't know about these things, do their own thing and get royally screwed if there's a problem and, God forbid, someone gets hurt.
I suspect that in any of the big cities in America you can't just buy a plot and start building, for exactly the same reasons. See also the complexities of CA fire insurance.
Circa 80% of world trade is done in USD, and the US literally creates it out of thin air, and it will all bleed into the economy somehow, someway.
Without sovereign protection you just can not compete with that, ever. It's really that simple.
Simply look at China they may export loads of goods but it's predominantly priced in USD, and what do they do with all that excise USD, the only thing they can do, buy US debt. It's truly perverse.
Or look at every UK company that was bought up with those very same magic dollars.
Quite frankly, it's cultural and the thing I hear a lot is simply: fuck that for a job!
I could quite happily get on fine at one of those big American style startups but I don't get excited about hype, I don't have the work culture it demands and I don't have a price on my soul. I'd rather earn a lot less, have extreme stability, have better family time and balance. On top of that there's something tasteless and unethical about a lot of the big startups. Do they really bring good things to society? Do I really want to be part of that?
If I can walk away with half the money, live a modest life and stand with my principles intact, I will take that over twice the money.
I don't think this is political at all. It's not a race either and we have no innate responsibility to build things like this.
The part about that plan that worries me is the ageism in software. I'm mid-forties and it's something I think about a lot for when I have to get a new job.
Anyone young should go make as much money as possible, as early as possible, so they can have the same outlook you do in later life.
Not really had any problems with that and I'm older than you are. And quite frankly I didn't have any money really until I hit about 35. I just lived within my means.
Same. I grew up in Canada and my country didn't fund my dreams. The US did. It is a shame and the amount of loss that Canada has every single year because the dumb VCs who exist in Canada cannot look at that big picture.
For example, right now there is not a single VC in Canada who does large pre seed / seed investments based on an idea and the founding team.
In the US you can get a 1 million cheque within a week.
That is the real reason Canada is failing on a macro scale.
In the UK’s case, feudalism is alive and well. The entire tax system is designed so parasites descended from thugs like the Duke of Westminster or Charles of Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg und Gotha never have to pay property taxes on their extensive land holdings.
That was worse in the 18th and 19th century, and yet people were willing to ground new corporations back then.
I think the answer is something the left won't like - we (Europe) are killing ourselves with bureaucracy, often environmental bureaucracy. A road to hell paved with good intentions.
The documentation to the Lower Thames Crossing, a planned highway tunnel, already exceeds 360 000 pages. This is just crazy.
It is often accomplished enterpreneurs who complain of bureaucracy.
I remember reading a German enterpreneur's complaint that he was unable to build an extra electric connection between his two industrial buildings in Germany in less than a year, due to endless rounds of permiting for that single cable.
He contrasted the situation to Poland, where his application on a similar site was processed in two weeks and it took two more weeks to actually build the connection.
If you think complaints of bureacracy have no merit, maybe you never faced any. It now takes about 10 years to get all permits for a regular block of flats in Prague, Czechia. It used to be 3 years or so back in 2000, and it takes only about 9 months in Denmark.
These are experienced developers, and they are still stuck.
Since Europe is to the left of the US, whatever the US is doing right (pun intended) is bound to be something the Left won't like.
The US also has plenty of bureaucracy, and what's worse, a lot of it stems from Common Law and capricious courts that interpret it, which is partly why large civil engineering projects like upgrading the NYC subway cost 4x more than the equivalents in Western Europe (minus the UK) or Japan.
I think the biggest factor is the sheer size of the unified US market and its economies of scale, and a second one the fact the US Social Security is limited compared to European retirement systems, and thus people have to save in their pension funds, freeing up a huge amount of capital for investment, while at the same time creating enough competition that they don't have the sense of entitlement that British feudals or continental bankers have, leaving entrepreneurs with crumbs.
Source: I'm from France but I moved to San Francisco to found my two startups, because I'm not a glutton for punishment. Then again I moved to the UK (for family reasons), so I guess I am a masochist after all.
Yeah, when you think of it, the US economies of scale are huge.
In the European single market, you still don't have, for example, an affordable parcel service. For a Czech e-shop to send a package to France, as I did a few days ago, is something around 12 eur postage fee. It would be 4 eur within Czechia.
American e-shops can send packages from Florida to Alaska for peanuts, and they don't have to bother with translations into 20 languages.
I think the second part of your second point is the critical one. Europe has also a lot of free capital, but if it’s invested it flows to the US. Why? Because returns are outsized. But I wonder why?
That's because risk-aversion and laziness are the smart things to do. Yes, it would be cool to come up with the next Facebook, but most financial advisors will tell you that the actually best thing you can do is some form of "SP500 and hold 20 years" because from the perspective of an individual, the safe option provides the best expected outcome.
Similarly, why work yourself to the bone for a miniscule chance of success, if you can... just chill instead? I used to be a highly-motivated go-getter, but then I realized, this shit ain't bringing happiness, and I turned into a work-avoider who spends time in the office mostly talking to coworkers and playing games in the toilet. My overall life satisfaction skyrocketed.
Yes, the society at large does need people to do the needful, but this ain't gonna be me.
The us generally would do 95% in the safe s&p500 and the other 5% in high risk things. The exact numbers varry of course but that is a good rule of thumb for good future growth.
> As a Brit, when I was raising the seed round for my startup, UK and European VCs would consistently try to haggle you down on price while the American VC's were exclusively focussed on trying to figure out whether this could be a billion dollar business or not (
Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
I do not know the truth of it, but clearly its not obvious.
> Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
I commented on this earlier. The UK's economic outcomes have been similar to comparable European economies (like Germany) and better than some (like France). Whatever the problem is, its not unique to the UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766107
I do not think the UK is well run, but I think the west in general is badly run. Poorly thought out regulation, short termism in both politics and business, a focus on metrics subject to Goodhart's and Campbell's laws, and a poor understanding of the rest of the work (leading to bad foreign policy).
For the last 20 or 25 years the UK has been coasting on the North Sea oil&gas money, I'd say that worked up until the early 2010s, and then on the almost complete financialization of its economy and on selling out whatever pieces of the economy could still be sold out (that includes part of their beloved NHS).
But that can only work for so long and is beneficial in the medium to long-term for a very limited number of people (basically the owners of said financial capital), at some point you have to produce some real wealth, wealth produced from real stuff via resources of the Earth + human ingenuity and, yes, + human work.
I agree, but my point is that the France, Germany, and other comparable European economies have the same or similar problems. The UK is not some exception, it is a typical western economy. The US is an outlier (doing better).
> that includes part of their beloved NHS
A more severe problem is that the NHS was debt funded (mostly through off balance sheet debt) in the 2000s. The government kept their promise not to increase national debt by disguising running up disguised debt in the NHS
Its also worth noting that a large chuck of NHS services, GP services in particular, were always subcontracted to private providers.
Germany was quite fine until a couple of years ago, mostly thanks to very cheap Russian gas. About France I agree, they have the same problems as the Brits do, maybe because they lost access to cheap African mineral resources as a result of Francafrique [1] ending? I couldn't tell, to be honest.
But at the end of the day the point remains that if you want to have a world-beating economy you need to have access to relatively cheap inputs (which includes energy), in large enough amounts, otherwise your economy will just not make it. The Americans have that (people forget how much of an economic boom gas fracking brought with it), the Chinese have that (thanks to its very large population and access to natural resources that is reasonable enough, they're no 1930s Japan), India has that (thanks to its very large and young population), even Russia has that (thanks to its natural resources), meanwhile Europe has almost no demographic advantage and almost no natural resources left to exploit. "Innovation" (which is also lacking) and financialization alone can get you only so far.
Germany's number one economic problem is energy costs. Blaming the increase on Russian gas hits only a tiny slice of the problem.
The real problem is a completely botched "energy transition", which deprecated very important energy sectors, which were still absolutely needed.
To be clear, I am in favor of renewables. One benefit is that they create independence from the whims of the US and Russia. Nevertheless the transition has been completely botched, driving up energy costs and making certain industries essentially non-viable.
The government focused on two things, increasing renewable peak production and deprecating nuclear. What they completely neglected is how to actually have a sustainable grid, which can cheaply deliver energy even with little sunshine and little wind. What was needed was easily regulated power (e.g. nuclear) and sufficient storage. Nuclear was completely abandoned and most government incentives were focused on increasing peak production, neglecting the storage of energy.
This is obviously harmful to the German industry, which is electricity heavy. This problem has also been consistently ignored and actively made worse in recent years, by continuing to shut down nuclear plants, even if it was clear that more energy production was needed.
While legislation restricting innovation is a problem, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, all have the same bigger problem of expecting smaller and smaller working populations to support bigger and bigger non working populations.
In the long term, the level of wealth transfer in these countries is not sustainable, and each year it incentivizes those who produce to seek greener pastures where they get more rewards.
You could outgrow the problem, by increasing individual productivity or you can stop the wealth transfer. It will stop sooner or later anyway.
I made some comments elsewhere about the long term. It is delusional to think that it is possible to continually have jobs that pay significantly more than identical jobs elsewhere in the world.
Yes, but the two are related because increasing earned income tax and other taxes to fund non workers on people who do work sap the incentive to work in a manner that increases productivity (either via working more hours or working on hard problems).
Absolutely, definitely those two problems can only be solved together. Although right now I see very little effort going in that direction. If anything social benefits and taxes are increasing.
Germany's progressive tax system also directly incentivizes working fewer hours, as the more you work the smaller your hourly wage becomes.
It's not a surprise that EU countries perform similarly as they have to abide by the same laws and therefore are all restricted in the same ways. For example EU drone regulations prohibit the flying of autonomous drones therefore killing innovation in that area.
> Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
HN has a very wide range of economic opinions, and some people are extremely uninformed about what it takes to do hard things that can't be grown organically, and what it takes to maintain a business running when it's done the hard thing in the face of competition.
Most of the issues here relate to scale and actual quality of the idea/business in the first place. Hard things can really be split into, challenging but a problem to solve, or this never should have become a business. The former will work well with the right sort of investors. The latter will eventually sink, the investors simply provide money and poor ideas such as trying to incorporate AI into every business model.
Under-rated comment. This is basically the whole explanation. 2008 did a huge amount of damage, not just immediately but to long-term mindsets. Ironically I think it's even entrenched the meme that the only real way to make money in the UK is property. We're all Georgists now.
(this includes property as an export industry! Leaving increasing areas of the UK owned by overseas absentee landlords.)
The problem is that people think property is a risk free way of making money - even if they borrow heavily to invest. Maybe what we need is a property price crash.
I'm not sure a property price crash would achieve this goal.
You will have to decide for yourself if I'm speaking from experience or have motivated reasoning, as I'm saying this as an overseas absentee landlord who bought a UK apartment around the tail end of the previous price crash, initially as a place to live in until I decided the UK wasn't for me any more, and was rich enough to do so without a mortgage.
(I left the UK in 2018 due to a mix of Brexit and technological incompetence in the form of the Investigatory Powers Act. Would have left UK sooner but for parent with Alzheimer's).
Reason being: the income from housing doesn't have to come from reselling houses (which a price crash would impact) — I'm collecting rent, not flipping property. Forecasts future increases to rental rates suggests it won't keep getting worse (relative to general inflation) than it already is for renters, but it's already obviously quite bad.
In 2018 the UK had not officially completed the process of leaving, so I found a spare room in Berlin, got on a plane and flew, did the initial paperwork for registering with the various things that need to be registered in Germany, and went job hunting.
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.
In the UK it more or less is a risk free way to make money. The government's hand is always seen when a danger to the property market prices hoves into sight.
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.
In Germany lifelong renting is seen as a normal and acceptable thing to do, not a temporary stepping stone which will hinder you from achieving your life goals.
The Conservative party used austerity rhetoric as a way to win votes, but they did not cut spending other than reversion to the mean after the high spending around 2008.
See here for international comparison of government spending as % of GDP (the second figure showing trends over time), UK is not an outlier:
> Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
Most of those are people complaining about a business having to make changes because it took $50+m in funding and now needs to justify it. The business was only "good" because it got $50m and didn't need to do things like charge enough money. If it hadn't gotten that $50m then those people wouldn't consider it such a good business or even know about it.
The safe job earns much much more unless you are the founder. Equity pay for start-ups in the UK for devs is very poor, or non-existent, and the base salary also very poor (and not even guaranteed to be paid if they go under). You can instead work for a company like nvidia, google or meta and get a huge base, and nice equity on top.
If UK startups paid equity to their devs, I would work a lot harder when I've worked at them, but startups require working hard and long hours and if I've got no skin in the game, what incetive do I have to make sure the company is successful.
I've been shocked in my career in the UK by just how much founders will rip people off on equity
In basically every UK startup I've worked at they've done 1 or all of the below:
1. Offered options in numbers with no valuation/percentage of ownership. "We offer you 40000 stock options!". When asked to clarify numbers, they delay and never tell you. Inevitably they have a value of a few pence each
2. Withdraw options unilaterally when you leave the company with no option to exercise
3. Never get round to filling in the paperwork so you never actually receive them
I was _shocked_ when i worked for my first US startup and they just...gave me the options. And I could exercise them whenever I wanted. And they expired 10 years after I left the company
> The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google.
You're focusing on one success story out of thousands.
90%, or more, of US startups only exist to be sold to the highest bidder or to coast indefinitely long in infinite investor money, and never turn a profit.
There's still expectation in Europe at large that your company should have an actual business plan and a path to profitability.
Not just in startups. Feels like Arm lost almost their whole software division over a few years. This was an extremely stable high-profit-margin business, and it was obvious that it was uncompetitive on the labour market. But something in the culture stopped management from increasing salaries, so everyone buggered off to foreign companies.
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
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.
Brit / American checking in and agreeing. My first startup was a B2B SaaS and hiring in the UK was fantastic - the arbitrage was just silly. Experienced software developers (10+ years) @ GBP 70k / year - and that was close to non-finance full-market pay. The same people were averaging $250k in NYC / SF.
And yet, the UK hires were often better off after all expenses than the US hires.
Largely due to housing being slightly cheaper (other posters have pointed out, London is on par with SF / NY - the big difference being London expands, NYC and SF are both "islands" - yes SF is a peninsula, but commuting up 280 or 101 is not a pleasant experienced).
Also, even offering private healthcare (BUPA) - the UK hires were cheaper. I'm in my late 30s and reasonably healthy - my all-in, gold-plated UK policy was GBP 2k / year - I was at $2,000 / month in the US.
*However* - salaries in the UK are unsustainably low.
Three reasons:
[1] BOMAD - The Bank of Mom and Dad (parents paying / lending the deposit for a house so the mortgage is at a low rate) is effectively exhausted. This means that current entrants into the housing market are either renting (which is nearly as expensive as NYC, especially after the inflationary / interest rate jump), or saving to "buy" a house (I enclose in quotes because at a 95% mortgage you don't own much of your house).
[2]
Professional salaries outside of finance are way too low. My fiancee works in a highly skilled, professional field and her salary in 2024 was, in nominal terms the same as my starting salary in NYC 17 years ago working for a large investment bank IN THE BACK OFFICE - where salaries were decidedly blue-collar. My unproven hypothesis is that the UK professional world is still largely geared towards those with alternative assets, private incomes (especially high-prestige non-professional jobs, especially around politics). This makes it impossible to compete with US venture backed startups, even post-ZIRP, because the offer is always going to be better. And yet that private-income driven base has largely been eroded through capital gains, inheritance tax and general downward social mobility (or, perhaps, less doom-and-gloom - averaging towards the center. The difference in wealth and income between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class has narrowed significantly).
[3] There has been over the last 5-7 years significant negative messaging and tax policy against economic success. A confiscatory top-tax band, an erosion of a "job perks" friendly tax regime and a political climate that is very anti-success, even prior to the labour govt (largely started at the same time, though perhaps not by, Theresa May's 2015 speech and focus on "Just about managing").
VC in the UK is hard, largely because the majority (though by no means all) VCs are focused on aping mid-market pension managers. Their ambition is limited to businesses that already work (and yet anything transformative by definition does not work yet) - and are interested mostly in post-revenue companies with linear or lightly superlinear growth.
This, IMNSHO, is largely caused by the fact that, given state expenditure and the corp and personal tax burden, there simply isn't enough capital for US style VC - the portfolio approach requires capital to absorb failures. Most VCs here cannot afford failure.
The closest we get is the EIS / SEIS tax policy, which allows the offsetting of losses in failed businesses (by the equivalent of Accredited Investors) - as well as a friendly Cap Gains treatment of successes. But these are largely made as common stock investments by individuals - and limited to a very small scale.
Which brings me to my final point - the SAFE note is not only not ubiquitous here, it's rare. Even pre-seed investments are either common stock or (more rarely) convertible notes. This requires a level of diligence (even on small tickets) that m...
Going through our pre-seed round atm and it is incredibly frustrating. I haven't raised in the US so it may be similar there, but the amount of time wasted for a relatively small amount of money is painful.
I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a great scheme, but the SEIS limit of £250k feels almost too small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally later stage or re-investment from SEIS.
I agree and it's a real shame, we used to spearhead some of the most initiative companies in technology (Acorn, Arm, Sinclair, Sage, Deepmind). Now it's just a shadow, while places like Silicon Valley or Stockholm have jetted ahead the UK just sort of stagnated - it's kind of embarrassing.
My view is that the US startup culture exists because of wealth inequality at the $1-$20m net worth level. Wealth inequality is socially incentivized at that level because of the lack of a decent social safety net. If you don't save money then at 50 you may end up homeless on the street due to bad luck. But if you don't get bad luck then you end up at 50 with a large amount of money that you don't have much to do with. So you start investing some in riskier things because who cares.
US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.
There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so be careful what you wish for.
I was also trying to raise recently. It's interesting to me that the UK has an absolutely incredibly generous startup investment scheme (SEIS)[0], and still hasn't managed to make this work. SEIS is ludicrously generous, and should make getting funding a breeze in the UK, and yet ... somehow it isn't.
0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who gives you £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.
Set UK/EU tech salaries at maybe 30%-50% of US, and factor in higher taxes. Then integrate over 40 years, resulting in a number from which investments can be drawn. Add to the corresponding US number all the profitable exits from previous ventures. There's just so much more US investment capital available.
It can be argued that a responsibility falls on EU equity companies, pension funds, and so on, but they do not make seed investments.
As a former founder (formerly living in London) trying to raise VC funding in London this is exactly what my experience.
I once did a pitch contest and they required we put together a business plan with financials. You want me to...what? Who on earth can read a pro forma for a pre-revenue SaaS business and say "ah yes this is worth of investment because this pro forma looks great".
Ad services, once it was monopolized by Google and Facebook really warped the value of the software engineering profession over other areas.
Software is incredibly valuable, but there are other technology areas that are much harder and equally as valuable (if not more so when augmented with good software).
A lot of software engineers who only know the last 20 years have inflated egos as results.
How many technology experts suddenly became public health experts overnight when COVID-19 hit? And how many of these same people continue to parrot the same bullshit after over 1 million American deaths?
To be fair, a lot of European countries and localities do not treat their water with fluoride at all. Some have better dental health purely due to better healthcare/dental coverage.
The onset of anti-vaccine sentiment will do far more damage and shouldn't be bracketed in that same category.
As a British person, I only discovered that water fluoridation was a thing a few months ago. We usually have chlorine in our water, but almost no fluoride - we get that in our toothpaste.
God, this place is such a sh*thole (literally if you count the sewage in the water). It's depressing. Every week, X is going downhill, Y is failing, we're out of money. I am so hopeless about my country's future. I feel that this is our century of humiliation.
This seems to be the case for most European countries, particularly here in France. We’re experiencing stagnation, or perhaps even a decline. Launching a product in Europe is significantly more challenging due to the market’s high fragmentation.
I don’t have much hope for the future of tech companies in Europe.
The problem is policy is oriented to growing GDP and not GDP per capita. Large corporations benefit from GDP growth and lower wages, so they incentivize the political class to grow the population artificially (wink-wink).
The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success. What percent of the UK is effectively civil servants or people receiving benefits? What percent are net takers? A lot
Most of the benefits bill in the UK is paid to people who receive the the state pension
Of the others it's split between those who don't earn enough from work i.e. their employers don't pay them enough to live on so those benefits are essentially subsidising companies
And the other large chunk is people who aren't fit to work, this increased as a result of Covid but also the underfunding of health / social care by the previous government
The civil service isn't that big but the largest influx of people was caused by Brexit and the need to duplicate many of the things that didn't need to be separate when part of the EU
The people who've been living off printed money as those with assets, almost all the gains from the cheap money supply over the last 15 or so years has gone to the well off
> The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success.
I see these uninformed comments all the time, and to be they suggest that the person in question has an intense ideological bent, but an aversion to evidence. As another commenter pointed out, a large amount of UK benefits spending (~£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.
> Presumably some starting points would be working out how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food.
Britain has implemented a sugar tax, but I despair when even a right-wing governments attempt to make walking and cycling easier falls victim to culture war nonsense.
It’s exhausting trying to explain this to American leftists. They believe the UK / EU is rich, their healthcare is amazing and “free”, and no one has to work more than 35 hours a week. They visit London and Paris once in 10 years for vacation and think they understand the economic order.
European corporations and political class are rich and benefit from high GDP stimulated by mass migration and foreign funds cornering the housing market.
But European salaries are stagnating and job security is dropping like a stone, while the cost of living is steadily rising. And public healthcare is getting terrible with months of wait for an appointment.
Spain is now used as example of a growing economy in EU but youth unemployment is high and rising and wages are peanuts compared to housing. A lot of native Spanish kids are just checking out. I guess the Spanish corporations and foreign investors are having a blast. And the boomers with their fat pensions and renting their real estate portfolio.
Of note, the same is happening even in China. I feel really bad for Gen Z.
Sounds like the non-existent British NHS where getting an appointment to see a doctor is about as likely as meeting the Loch Ness Monster for a spot of tea and crumpets.
Ironically when we were living in Ireland and my daughter was going to have to wait 16 months to get a suspicious growth checked for cancer it was the UK that made it possible for us to go to a private clinic near Belfast and have her checked in a week. And it still wasn't even expensive. Free healthcare isn't actually free if you die waiting.
It used to be the jewel in the crown of empire though.
Thatcher and the more recent 14 years of UK Conservative government seemed to have kicked it bloody and senseless like Alex and his droogs from the Korova Milkbar.
Only the Conservatives? You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country? Give me a break. The whole political class is rotten. And the upcoming "Reform UK" is a joke, to say the least.
> You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country?
No, but apparently you think that I think that. Perhaps you might like to work through that again ...
Leaving the state of the UK as a whole to one side, the NHS was actively kicked like a dog prior to Blair who did at least stop kicking it and attempt to reverse the decline with some, albeit limited, success.
The NHS and the Empire don't really overlap. It was founded right at the end of the war, shortly before the UK started having to divest from its colonies, and of course it was never a thing in any of the non-UK colonies!
I often think the NHS was only founded as a result of the war, as an extension of the military and civilian healthcare needs for injury care. German bombers didn't respect the British class system.
You should understand that the American situation is, in fact, much worse than ours in many ways. For instance, the average American pays a 40% tax rate compared to our 25% once you account for healthcare.
American leftist discourse about Europe is always hilarious. Apparently someone forgot to tell them that the "free" healthcare just means that it is forcibly deducted from your pay and only "free" if you don't work (Free meaning the people who work pay for you). Also they forget to mention that the actual health care system is chronically understaffed and that you should avoid the hospital if at all possible and that you might wait months to see a specialist.
Car discourse is another very good one. Apparently Europeans just really hate cars and take bikes/busses everywhere. They seem to genuinely believe that the US is the only country in the world with a car culture.
A few here have commented on different aspects, and they have their part to play but I agree with you, market fragmentation is the scale killer.
From an outside perspective it might appear like Europe is a true single market like the US but it isn't. Scaling to a European level isn't impossible but it is difficult. Some of that will just be difficult to do anything about, language, different cultures, etc.
On the political side I'm sure there is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.
Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes. The language barrier is just the cost of a translator. Is that cost prohibitively high in Europe? I hear a lot of explanations of why Europe has fewer tech companies than America, but they are almost never backed by statistics. The most obvious answer continues to be the Bretton Woods system, by which large amounts of money are funnelled into America, seemingly without reason. China inverts this flow by debasing its currency, and Europe does not.
> The language barrier is just the cost of a translator.
Is it?
> Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes.
Market fragmentation isn't about language fragmentation – the EU has no single market for services currently, which means if you want to launch a product EU-wide you are effectively launching a product in 27 different countries. There is some harmonization, but not much. If you launch a product in the US you have a large fully harmonized single market.
The most bizarre thing is that the loudest critics of EUs market fragmentation are usually the most aggressive blockers of integration that would mitigate these issues.
Well specifically for engineering-related products (both software and hardware).
How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid ecosystem and generous support from the government?
I am specifically worried about the future of European engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy built by your predecessors.
If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds, or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.
The good news is that a relatively small amount of aggressive planning reform (namely, firing everyone involved and never calling it "planning" ever again) will fix most of the (fixable...) worst aspects of modern Britain.
The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be.
We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places.
What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of our university cities at the edges without much better transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.
And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.
BUUUT MuHHH PAAARRRKiiiiNNNGGGG!! (And house values). And we can't _possibly_ make the town look different than it did in 1972 because "heritage".
We're talking about a bunch of crusty old church biddies who will literally force you to put the most godawful, hideous house covering in the history of man BACK on your house because they're terrified of being reminded it's not the 70's.
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.
Ah yes, it's a delight that the pavements are now covered in SUV's too because they're too big to park legally. Very in keeping with the distinct cultural heritage of the area.
But build a bike lane or even a bike shed, and they'll drag the city council all the way to the EU Supreme Court, even though half of that demographic voted Brexit.
Yes there are ridiculous rules like that are enforced. However tbh she should have checked first.
Rules around how the area should look, should be decided by people that live there. There are many better examples where it makes a lot of sense for the locals to be strict about rules about what can be erected.
I used to live near the Village of Corfe Castle. Generally the argument is that the place would lose its character and it won't be the same place anymore if it didn't keep its distinctive look.
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.
But it's _good_ when houses look different. Growing up my family would drive around new developments and say "ugg, these cookie-cutter houses all look the same, I miss when you we built unique and individual houses" and then it's jarring to move somewhere where people value conformity above all else and being different is considered bad. God forbid your house has eaves.
Explains a lot, actually.
I'm not talking about knocking down thousand-year old houses. I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally. But "locals" (aka old people with enormous amounts of time on their hands who bizarrely feel the right to tell other people what their home should look like) insisting that everything stay mediocre forever because they grew up with it this way is a bit much.
I think it is perfectly fine that people that actually live in an area get to decide what it looks like. If people don't involve themselves in that process and it is monopolized by people "with too much time on their hands" that is their fault. If they don't like the busy bodies then they should make time and actually go to the meetings.
You decide you own level of involvement in the community.
> I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally.
It is very interesting that whenever you bring up an example where it illustrates a particular point well, they will try to find anything they can point to so they can dismiss the general point being made. Guess what, a place in rural England that you can only travel easily to via car or coach will prioritise parking.
BTW I suspect knowing that area, you probably couldn't build anything other than parking in those places.
The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.
The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.
Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B
Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A
Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.
Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.
It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.
And I just meant that the car park is butt-ugly and shows the council's true priorities. They could at least put it on the edge of the village.
> The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.
Okay so what? I think that is perfectly fine. It isn't necessary for everyplace to cater for everyone.
> The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.
>
> Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B
>
> Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A
>
> Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.
>
> Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.
>
> It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.
These seems like a fantasy scenario to me. Typically people are either moving to a particular area, or out of a particular area, not swapping one nice affluent area for another equally affluent area (which is somewhat assumed in your scenario).
The reason btw housing is expensive is because housing became an investment vehicle isn't because of nimby's and we have about 600,000 (net) people entering the UK every year.
Not at all. It is quite clear that you are doing the "lets take this to the logical extreme". That might be fine in some sort of debate club tactic but it isn't what I was suggesting should happen at all and you know it. So I think we will leave it there.
That's fair when it comes to villages, but it's mostly the edge of small cities, and within larger ones, that growth needs to happen - because that's where infrastructure exists or can be added on.
Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to get work done.
The usual suggestion is to build cities more like Berlin (for example) which has an inner city with many 4-6 storey buildings — much denser than London's terraced houses, but without the isolation of skyscrapers.
These are all solutions that ignore the main problem. They literally cannot build enough properties (whatever they are) to fill current demand. Even if they relax the regulations that we currently have in place. Even there were enough properties built the infrastructure for utilities can't be scaled easily. There are issues building new properties right now because the electric grid cannot handle the combination of that and large data centres.
Since supply of house cannot be increased to solve this problem, you need to lessen the demand. The most obvious way to do this that I can see is to put a cap on immigration that is much lower than the number of people leaving (about 400,000 people leave the UK each year). However for various reasons this is seen as absolute verboten.
BTW, I know exactly the type of buildings you are talking about (we have them in Manchester) and they are typically look awful and usually start falling apart after shortly after construction. They are also not very nice to live in (I have lived in one for short amount of time).
Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long 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.
> Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.
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.
Hold on though, that's not 1970s pebble dash, that's 1920s pebble dash, that was on the house when it was built (ish - seems that area was built up between 184 and 1914). The house is in a conservation area, which means you've got to keep it looking original. If you don't want to do that, just don't move to a conservation area!
It's also the quality of the build… most new build houses are shit because the house building companies are more interested in their profit than the quality of the product
If we made cars like we make houses there'd be a long queue outside every car dealer as people returned them to get their money back
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.
I think the new builds also highlight the problem in that we're mostly obsessed with building these weird not-quite-a-town clumps of houses rather than actually growing patterns that we know work.
That and people have no taste. I like Poundbury, but I would also accept some modernist Foster-ville if someone actually did it and was prepared to put their foot down to make it consistent.
Oh, I’m not saying old houses are better (although many of them have more generous sized rooms and plots)
I’m saying as an absolute that the quality of most new build houses in the UK is shit from both design and construction perspectives
A key test for me is look at the back of a new build house and see how ugly many of them are - they literally design them to have curb appeal but no appeal when you’re sitting in the back garden.
They fit them with smaller windows so they don’t have to add as much insulation… the list of shitty things the major housebuilders do is pretty long
The garden thing feels like a cultural bug. Sort of, everyone thinks they ought to have a garden, but most people don't actually, in practice, want to do the work to maintain one, nor do they want to pay the extra for the amount of space that makes a good and useful one.
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.
Like Brexit, there's a huge overhang of misinformed old people who hate change, but have no vested interest in the real economy because their pensions stay the same even if they block growth.
> against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.
Quite. It's time for a campaign of bigging up the second and third cities. Of course, this immediately fell to a victory of Starmer Labour keeping HS2 cuts instead of Burnham Labour (who has done great things for Manchester).
This. London can't grow much more - it can densify up to a point, but you can't build much more on the edges of town without some enormously expensive infrastructure upgrades through the middle. Which they should probably do anyway, a tube line, a Crossrail line and a new HS line every decade or so, but neither Labour nor Tories are into that politically, because of London-envy in the rest of the country.
Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and the larger university cities on the other hand, masses of scope, and on a much smaller budget and shorter timescale.
Yes, so destroy the current system, then we can do all that. All we basically need is a system that can properly facilitate "Yes, but" rather than "No" and has a mechanism for bartering.
Also I don't think you're right about university cities. Taking Cambridge for example, it's completely strangled, and not by a need for buses. The causality is backwards.
The problem is the institutions are unaccountable and can't be easily made controllable by the electorate again. Bank of England, the judiciary etc. These control the country not the MPs. Blair onward
Judicial review at the moment is just completely insane.
If you want to do anything it takes the best part of a decade of planning and environmental review, in large part because there are a small army of charitable organisations (often with their fees capped) waiting to challenge absolutely everything.
A government consultation was recently blocked! A consultation!
We need to completely destroy this system, they can do something useful instead. Angels sing whenever a Quango dies.
Exactly. It's not merely the Fabian state, being ruled by lawyers, by socialist agitators, it is the vast swathes of proles who cheer every time they crush success or do wealth appropriations. It feels like you are always just two steps away from being rounded up in a pogrom for merely having savings.
The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings. It's horrid.
How much savings do you have? Is it used for rent-seeking behaviour? I think that's the key issue the country is facing.
If you have a little padding no-one will be coming for you.
Everyone in power is desparately trying dance around tax reform. When you tax productive work much more heavily than unproductive work (looking at our etf holdings grow and crowding out home/business owners with buy-to-lets), you are going to get stagnation.
It's not, its just that you are swept into the news cycle of doomerism where engagement is established with FUD. The UK is fine compared to many of its peer nations in many areas.
It's not quite that bad - the news obviously makes it seem like it's worse than it is. Also we finally got rid of the Tories, so at least things are heading in the right direction. I made a list of some positive changes Labour have made already:
* Allow onshore wind
* Means tested winter fuel allowance
* Inheritance tax for farms
* Assisted dying bill (controversial but I think generally people are in favour of this)
* Scrapping the public footpath registration deadline
The only stupid thing I think they've done is the porn site age testing thing, but that was also a Tory policy.
IMO the big problem is the right-wing media. Take something like the winter fuel allowance. Very obviously the right thing to do, and even pensioners were generally in favour (check this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gegy4r9ndo ), yet it still somehow a huge controversy with disingenuous articles even on the BBC like this one fuelling the faux outrage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80l9lde5yjo
How can we make any improvements if such obviously good changes meet such an irrational reaction?
Keep importing skilled workers. I'm sure it will work out for you eventually. /s
Seriously, I feel bad for our British bretheren. The UK government is seemingly out of control and actively working against the people. There are also long-running geopolitical trends like outsourcing to contend with. Talk too much about these things and you're probably getting sent to prison. It's time for the US to bring some democracy to the UK lol.
that’s like a US election, eh? you drunk at 2:00am and there’s two of the ugliest people on Earth at the bar but you know you taking one of the home :) I’d still pick MSM over fucking Elon :)
“cool but somewhat flawed” is interesting way to describe a person who was balding in his 20’s and could not get laid and who now has more complexes than just about any human that ever lived…
yea, give me fucking CNN every day of the week and twice on sunday
That dude who was balding in his 20s has had more kids and screwed more supermodels than you can shake a stick at. He is overseeing R&D on some of the coolest products of our time as well. Everyone was cool with Elon until he dared be a little bit conservative, and they thought they could bully him into going with the Democrat program. He single-handedly demolished the propaganda empire that was in place before, ushering in a return to sanity.
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).
> Talk too much about these things and you're probably getting sent to prison.
This trope is getting a bit ridiculous. For the record, the event that inspired the notion that complaining online could get you sent to person involved individuals encouraging the public to burn down council offices[1] and a hotel[2].
Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious offences in English law for centuries, and that's even before you add the murder part to it.
>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.”
This gaslighting is getting a bit ridiculous. The oppression did not start in the wake of Southport, it has been in place for years. But I'm going to talk about Southport first. People were arrested for pointing out that the Southport murderer was a Muslim terrorist. Well guess what, he was: https://news.sky.com/story/southport-stabbings-suspect-faces... The media said it was all disinformation and put forth many straw man claims to smear people who are fed up with their government covering for the crimes for immigrants.
>Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious offences in English law for centuries, and that's even before you add the murder part to it.
I'm not defending conspiracy to commit arson. It is a fact that people have been jailed for far less serious things. I heard some reports that people were jailed for recording the riots or even posting about the existence of the riots.
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.
Just because someone was "brought up as a Christian" doesn't mean they are one. And he WAS a terrorist or wannabe terrorist, as evidenced by everything said in that article. You're over here whining about Breitbart as your neighbors are being jailed for merely talking about these issues in a way that displeases your overlords.
He was at least Muslim-adjacent, I think we can agree. Does it matter? Immigrant with ties to Al Qaida plots terror attack and actually murders people, comment section screaming "Ackshually he was not proven to be a Muslim" for real...
>The people who were jailed were generally jailed for rioting and incitement to riot
And I'm sure that given that officials gave many of them a year in prison, just a week after arrest, and after letting real criminals out to make room in the prisons, and after promising to make examples of them, means justice was served. Give me a break. Obviously the authorities can claim that anything calmly painting immigrants or even known criminals in a bad light is inciting a riot. It means nothing when laws are as screwed up as they are in the UK.
>And he wasn't an immigrant, he was born in Cardiff!
Minor children of immigrants count as immigrants as well IMO.
>Rather than casting vague assertions about the role of the authorities you can go read why people were jailed as it's public record
I've seen enough examples of BS to not trust your system, the reporting, or even most court records. I also don't have time to go read a ton of legal transcripts in other countries. The fact that many people that have been arrested for being perceived as rude online or in person is all I need to prove my point.
I'm not making up new definitions, I'm merely pointing out that first generation offspring of immigrants are likely to not be fully assimilated. In fact, the Southport event more or less proves that. Try to understand what I'm saying instead of being so pedantic.
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.
Bruh I've seen videos of people being arrested for merely insulting other people in Britain, or for carrying simple knives. Perhaps it is you that has very wrong ideas about the degree of freedom you actually have in Britain.
Carrying a knife in a public place without a lawful excuse is a crime in the UK so it’s not surprising you’ve seen videos of people being arrested for carrying knives
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
Yeah I know carrying a knife is a crime in the UK. It's stupid as fuck. You can carry a knife, sword, or full on rifle down the sidewalk the US. You might get harassed by curious cops but it's legal nearly everywhere.
>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.
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).
There is a constant narrative that is pushed on everyone that immigration is necessary because people won't do the menial jobs. There is a huge number of problems with this this narrative.
* Menial jobs were/are normally done in the past by younger more inexperienced people. These were usually done part time while in education. This allows younger people to build basic competency and money management skills. They aren't supposed to be jobs for life and everyone knew this in the past. By constantly importing people from to do these jobs, you stop younger people from building up this basic competency. This stuff is important btw, as I know many people who never had these jobs and had the bank of Mum and Dad pay for them for far too long, they don't know how to manage money.
* A lot of more menial jobs are done by people that are part retired. When I was younger I worked with many part retired people that had a stressful job and moved away and part retired and were on the checkouts out the supermarket, cleaning, pushing trolleys or delivering things.
* A lot of immigrants seem to do jobs like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and other zero hour contract food delivery jobs. If you don't believe me, go to your local McDonalds at 8am on a Saturday morning and every driver picking up food will be a immigrant of one sort or another. These are jobs where people are literally too lazy to drive 5 minutes to the McDonalds drive through on a Saturday morning. I am normally very pro-free market however do we really need to immigrants to do these jobs? I don't use Uber Eats and I have no idea how much it costs, but I think the guy up the road that has a small mansion a Jag and Two Teslas can probably afford to pay a bit more for delivery.
* I am from the South of the UK. If you aren't from London or another big city, London is one of the most horrid places to visit, work. I spent maybe a 4 months working as a freelancer in London (travelling in). People are downright rude, everything is a ripoff. I'd rather be slightly worse off and live here than be "better" off an live in London.
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.
On the cashier jobs - the thing is that they can rely on fewer and more trained/experienced staff. This may not be a bad outcome for those in the jobs, but it means less availability of casual work.
Which is not the same thing as no availability, but there used to be plenty of this kind of work to go around, such that it was the norm that 17/18 year olds could get it without particularly trying. That is not the case now.
Trying to bring skilled labour into the UK, or trying to get residence as an apparently useful and self-sufficient person, is actually quite difficult, so I'm not sure how all the low-skilled labour ends up here, other than large agencies in areas (social care, farm work) with known skill shortages.. being large agencies, the bureaucratic overhead isn't too bad for them, whereas for an individual or small company, it's more trouble than it's worth. There's no way you can just bring a cleaner over from abroad because you want someone to clean your house/office.
As to shouldn't be happening. Yes. But as for so many other things in the UK and its gradual slide towards a low-trust society. So it becomes a case of figuring out which battles to pick, which ones are genuinely impacting peoples' day to day. And I think collectively (not particularly a left vs right thing), the country has forgotten how to prioritise that.
> Trying to bring skilled labour into the UK, or trying to get residence as an apparently useful and self-sufficient person, is actually quite difficult, so I'm not sure how all the low-skilled labour ends up here, other than large agencies in areas (social care, farm work) with known skill shortages.. being large agencies, the bureaucratic overhead isn't too bad for them, whereas for an individual or small company, it's more trouble than it's worth.
Most of the skilled labour that I've encountered in the UK from immigration was Indians etc. that Accenture brought over. It is a gold ticket for the Indian developers and it is cheaper than paying people like me. So they do the same thing from the most skilled to the least skilled if the company is large enough.
> There's no way you can just bring a cleaner over from abroad because you want someone to clean your house/office.
I wasn't claiming to. I was saying that I know roughly what the costs are.
> As to shouldn't be happening. Yes. But as for so many other things in the UK and its gradual slide towards a low-trust society. So it becomes a case of figuring out which battles to pick, which ones are genuinely impacting peoples' day to day. And I think collectively (not particularly a left vs right thing), the country has forgotten how to prioritise that.
This feels like a false dichotomy. Many things can be done quickly if the bureaucracy wills it. The fact is that they don't.
Could you elaborate further? I am a skilled immigrant in the UK. I pay my taxes and have not used any benefits. I even pay for my medication; the only free service I have used is a GP appointment or a hospital scan, which was likely covered by the IHS (Immigration Health Surcharge).
It's nothing against you personally. I'm sure many immigrants are good people and some scarce skilled workers must be imported. But there seems to be a desire from the top to import too many foreign workers across the West. This contributes to the low wages and lack of opportunities described in the article.
The UK also has outsourced a lot of manufacturing, which further worsens the job market. I don't know how many hardware engineers are imported unnecessarily or else part of "offshoring," but by all indications I've seen personally the number may be significant. This is from an outside US perspective, so take it with a grain of salt.
If you are opening your job market to the entire world, the average salary for your workers will become the global average salary.
It is pretty trivial to see that this is exactly what is going to happen and the weighted average of UK and Indian wages are pretty close to Indian wages.
I left the UK after graduating at 21, fully intending to come back within a couple of years. Its weird watching it from the outside for 10 years waiting for a "good time" to move back and realizing that time isn't coming more and more each year.
The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the quality of life and how far my money goes is so much better than if I lived back at the UK. Every time I go back it seems more and more people are struggling to pay for basic expenses - and even if I moved back it seems get a great salary I'd have to live in London, which I dislike.
I imagine lots of people far more talented than me must also be feeling the pull to not stay in the country too. Its festering politically and economically. Besides family there really is no benefit to remaining.
>The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the quality of life and how far my money goes is so much better than if I lived back at the UK.
In a similar situation to you apparently. Every couple of years I'll take a look at UK as well as NZ and Aus (all places I can legally work) and Japan is still the better option. Even with the yen situation and despite all the doom and gloom others write online, life is still pretty nice here.
As an NZer, jobs in Australia pay wayyyy better and everyone here seems to agree that the lifestyle is better there. Lots of NZers move to Oz to improve their life and opportunities.
The NZ economy isn't doing great.
I'm personally worried that demographics and an incoming Labour government will mean that if you have saved for your retirement our next government will simply tax your savings until you have nothing (they keep talking of a 2% wealth tax: if we go back to a 4% annual return environment that's 50% tax of your savings over time). Plus they are slowly introducing means testing or equivalents.
In the meantime, it seems your parliament is quabbling over (the limitation of) Maori rights and so on. I guess the end goal is to improve the economy but is the chaos worth it?
Not worth it. Maori rights are an intractable problem - the only way to win is to avoid the topic and punt it to a future government. I'm sure you've worked on projects sunk by a non-technical distraction so you surely understand the mechanics.
National says they (and ACT) are the business party but they seem to be mostly windbags. The NZ government traditionally screws over businesses and founders - they certainly fail to encourage businesses while producing a lot of ineffectual programmes.
I don't recommend anyone try and start a business here. Plus NZ society generally cuts down tall poppies - especially capitalists (sportspeople is the main way to achieve without approbation). Be an employee or leech on the welfare state are the usual alternatives.
It's a political issue. There are things the UK is good at - finance, culture/media, software and yes hardware innovation, legal services, tourism. But since the GFC especially, none of these things are considered "right" by the electorate.
Instead we romanticise unproductive legacy stuff, and an NHS which, while its staff are in many cases heroic, spends most of its vast budget cleaning up the mess of a population who thinks eating a sensible diet and enacting basic public health policy is "woke".
It's a good thing we banned indoor smoking in public buildings in the early aughts, there's no way you'd get that through in today's political climate.
You're not thinking like an economist :) Here's something I saw on Twitter (no source):
The bicycle is the slow death of the planet.
General Director of Euro Exim Bank Ltd. got economists thinking when he said:
"A cyclist is a disaster for the country's economy: he does not buy cars and does not borrow money to buy. He does not pay for insurance policies. He does not buy fuel, does not pay for the necessary maintenance and repairs. He does not use paid parking. He does not cause serious accidents. He does not require multi-lane highways. He does not get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor useful for the economy. They don't buy medicine. They do not go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing is added to the country's GDP (gross domestic product). On the contrary, every new McDonald's restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietary experts and nutritionists, and obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself." Choose carefully: cyclist or McDonald's? It is worth considering.
P.S. Walking is even worse. Pedestrians don't even buy bicycles.
Vast majority of NHS expense is keeping an aging population alive. A lot of the rest of government spending (nearly 80% of my council tax for example) goes on social care for that same aging population.
The NHS spends less per capita than the US spends on medicaid. Not less per person covered, less overall.
It’s a black hole money-pit everywhere. There is no return on spending money for people who will never be productive again.
The only way that kind of wealth transfer works is with a growing proportion of workers, but that has long not been the case in many developed countries.
The solution for all these countries (even the US) is to dismantle all wealth transfer to old people. It might be the only way to incentivize production of families that raise productive children. Or tell old people to expect declining quality of life (faster than it already is).
The west is caught in a web of its own creation. We have basically incentivized the countries to get older by taxing the young to subsidize the rich.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way for democracy to correct this. older people vote and are wealthier. Both of those mean they have large political power.
Doesn't this create a situation where the old rely on their own younger generation to support them?
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.
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?
Not necessarily on that last point as it's something other than a linear relationship.
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 UK cannot just "be Singapore". What happened in Singapore was a specific, unrepeatable combination of its geography, the needs of the region, the size of the country, and the culture.
To maintain its wealth today, Singapore relies on a large underclass of underpaid non-citizens. Around 40% of the country are non-citizens.
In addition, London sort of has its own Singapore(s) in the form of the City and Canary Wharf. That's great for those who work there, but it's not feasible for a country of nearly 70 million for everyone to just work in finance.
Final comment:
> Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty
Singapore's wealth is built on trade and foreign investment. To assume that without other countries it would be equally successful is absurd.
This is true but there are many policies that the UK could copy from other countries like Singapore that would work much better than what they are currently doing
From the top of my head, might be incorrect but this is what I remember from reading about it:
1. Some of the least bureaucracy in the world to start a business. Simple + fast.
2. Some of the simplest/least laws in the world (law in general) to allow for business to succeed/be efficient. They actually started out with British law and then modified it where necessary to get to where they are now.
3. Some of the least political corruption in the world, due to a deliberately designed system against it: paying politicians very high salaries from taxes (on par with industry) instead of from bribes/lobbying (or legalized insider trading like in the US) + a dedicated secret service department tasked with keeping an eye on politicians and their corruption. Very high fines/imprisonment if caught. There's other stuff they do that could be copied.
4. Simple tax laws and low taxes in general.
5. Relatively simple worker protection laws (easy to hire and fire).
6. The best public transportation system in the world (based on my own experience and extensive travel around the world, I'm from EU).
7. Some of the best public housing in the world. Basically similar to what the UK used to have (based on a legacy UK system) before Tatcher killed it, except better thought out. It's all connected to their "central provided fund" (CPF) where everybody can save tax-free for housing, healthcare and other important stuff.
8. Tons of trade agreements with other countries. UK choses to just follow EU, which is relatively complex and limited (Brexit never happened in any practical real sense). "fort Europa"
9. Access to highly educated talent. Both local (some of the best uni's in the world) as well as from students all over (South East) Asia who can't wait to come to Singapore (highest income in the region).
This is some very general examples, the TLDR is that they went from third world country to first world within 1 generation thanks to the best leadership there can probably be.
I often hear the same non-explanations repeated about how Singapore got to wealth. "they use cheap labor" (literally every country in SEA does), "oh it's their location", "they just got lucky", "it's because they're an Island", "it's because they're on a trade route", "it's because other countries helped them", "it's because they're small". None of these make sense to me and don't explain anything. There are tons of regions and countries around Singapore who fit (some of) those criteria. All of the countries around Singapore started out as 3rd world countries when Singapore was a 3rd world country and all of them still are now that Singapore is not. The difference is leadership IMO.
Thanks for being fair-minded and giving credit where credit is due. I'm so tired of reading comments trivializing Singapore's achievements and mischaracterising it as a country.
> it's because other countries helped them
Also, this is not true. Singapore never received any handouts, save a meagre sum from Japan as compensation for occupying Singapore during World War 2. Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, understood that such monetary gifts always came with strings attached, and that accepting them would increase Singapore's vulnerability to the caprices of its benefactors. He was adamant to avoid having Singapore held hostage.
> Singapore relies on a large underclass of underpaid non-citizens. Around 40% of the country are non-citizens.
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
> 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.
Implementation is what takes that raw R&D and uses it to solve problems real problems, which is where it derives it value. Armies of people slightly modifying slightly different saas is how those foundational ML models end up in the everymans workflow.
Reading all this negativity about the UK made me wonder: is it possible that the UK throwing in the towel and asking to become part of the US could actually become reality? It's an admittedly outlandish idea, but suddenly it didn't seem entirely preposterous.
Why would the US want the UK? The UK does not seem to have natural resources that the US would want. The main resource is intellectual talent, which is already free for the US to obtain via immigration and a common language.
Possibly the UK's worldwide military bases / islands to build bases on or mine the oil and some restricted technology. Maybe a 'Hong Kong' style outpost in Europe.
No way. There would be a much bigger loss of "sovrinty" than people were prepared to put up with in the EU and that's in the miraculous case that the US wanted it.
You'd need to change the basis of JV and IPO in the UK, the nature of chartered engineering, and probably the laws on being declared bankrupt. America has a financial regulatory environment which is somewhat unique, and encourages this kind of innovation. The UK has a different view both of the financial risk management, and of the consequences of engineering.
The history of canals, bridges, roads, railroads and lighthouses in the UK is littered with people blowing wads of money up. Speculation was rife. I think it led to caution which has stayed with us across the victorian era into the modern day.
If you want an object lesson in "god, could we do this better" -I was told Australia had world-class optics industry, at the end of WWII due to the need to diversify the supply chain and get away from European sources now in the Axis. Russia and Japan seized the day, while Australia basically _shut itself down_ and gave away any market lead. People laugh at russian cameras but the glass was excellent, they got half of German tech at wars end.
I left the UK for the USA in 2020. It was only last week that another HN commenter finally opened my eyes to the fact that since I have left the UK, I have become someone with the ability to take things from 0 to 1.[1]
I do not believe I could have achieved what I have in the last half-decade if I had stayed in the UK. There is something deeply rooted in the UK's contemporary culture (which I cannot yet fully explain in words) that serves to crush the individual ambitions of the working and middle classes.
So good to read this and feel...validated, somehow. The UK is culturally a very difficult place to start and run a business. There's a crabs in the bucket mentality that I didnt have words for before I'd left the UK for a few years, but now when I visit or do business there is absolutely everywhere.
One business thing that really strikes me is that people in the UK treat bankruptcy as a moral failing, as if you cheated your investors, and not a strictly financial one, as in, you ran out of cash before achieving product market fit. It seems rooted in an unusually Victorian ethis, which is ironic, because in that era, businesses started and folded all the time.
Depends on the bankruptcy. Nobody is going to shed tears over investors losing out. Speculate to accumulate, risk and reward.
But IDK how it works in other countries, UK bankruptcies also means customers, unsecured creditors (often other small businesses), and the State (payroll taxes) also lose out.
And it leaves a bad taste when a company run at high risk of bankruptcy ("oh but we're a Start Up") screws over their suppliers which are often more traditional businesses (whether that's print designers, lawyers or tradespeople) by carrying on trading far into insolvency.
That implies a kind of arrogance ("You just have a business which pays it's bills, I have a vision) which UK culture is allergic to.
In the US, most of those suppliers understand the nature of startups and are accustomed to working with them, fully aware they are likely to fail. The deals are structured appropriate for those realities and some suppliers specialize in or have a preference for startups.
In the UK, many suppliers still treat startups like an exotic beast, or worse, a corner shop. US business has a familiarity and comfort with startups, due in no small part from being an increasingly prominent part of the American business landscape since the Second World War. It is the water they swim in.
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.
Anecdotally, the British people I have interacted with in a business setting seem to have a dearth of ambition. These people weren’t depressed, but I sensed a kind of defeatist cynicism.
As an American I realize our culture encourages taking risks and we are remarkably forgiving of failure. In fact, we seem to congratulate people for the fact that they tried in addition to overlooking the failure. I’m not sure if this comes from “the frontier spirit” or if this mindset used to exist throughout the Anglosphere. In any event, I do feel bad for the UK as a whole. It just seems like things keep getting worse and at some point the national mood becomes a self fulfilling cycle.
American parents:
"You can do anything you set your mind to! Anyone can be president! If you fail, pick yourself back up and try again! Your cousin with the big house started out washing cars and built an amazing success from nothing!"
British (and Irish) parents:
"The whole system is rigged so don't even try, the guy in the big house up the road got it through shady government contracts, my uncle can get you a job at the council so you'll never, ever get fired, the only reason to ever save money is for retirement or a house, your cousin who tried to start a company thinks he's better than us...."
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).
Spot on. I’ve met several foreign exchange students during my time at university. A simple observation from one of them really stuck with me: “You Americans really like to help strangers.”
The “happy go lucky” observation squares with what I have been told by my Eastern European friend. Any stranger, or mere acquaintance, who is friendly and offering help is likely trying to obligate you into repaying the favor later on. People who for fall for this are 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.
A theory I've heard of why this happens is that Europeans are generally suspicious because there is a lot of international trauma considering Europe was the center of two World Wars, both relatively recently. The US on the other hand didn't have that imprinted in its collective memory.
It's the UK's aristocracy, most likely. They own nearly everything in the UK, haven't earned any of it, and the last thing they need is the invasion of rich self-made entrepreneurs.
1,154 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 380 ms ] threadUK'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.
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?
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody wants to work in some backwater in the middle of nowhere either, especially if you are young and want to meet new people.
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?"
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?
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.
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").
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.
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.
Whilst others working in software (myself included) can have a far greater quality of life and salary working in London.
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
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.
It's also one of the wealthiest areas outside of London. But house prices in the really nice parts of Solihull are also high.
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.
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...
Is it as glitzy as London. No. But saying there is "no culture" is just absolutely asinine.
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?
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.
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!
[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.
I kinda assumed inflation would have raised all of those by about 50% since then.
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!
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.
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...
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.
> 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
It’s just a lot more expensive and labor intensive to apply.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Growth of the software industry isn't constrained by the cost of capital
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.
> "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)
I get the intent, but this made me laugh
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?...
Better if they had let the Nazis won and ruled the UK? WTF?
https://www.quora.com/What-was-Hitlers-opinion-of-the-Britis...
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
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.
And i'm not saying it matters - i'm saying that the OP is lamenting that the UK is no longer owning innovative companies.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-crime_hate_incident
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735539
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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/...
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/start...
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.
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.
This is really ridiculously and needs to stop.
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).
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".
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 ...
I don't think I've ever seen this claimed anywhere except as a criticism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.).
By taking big risks, one might ascend to this capitalist class if they succeed.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"At present the CAA do not allow for these types of flights as there has to be some degree of collision avoidance in that the aircraft must be kept in visual line of sight at all times to avoid a collision.
The CAA does not regulate the use of drones indoors and there is a short section on indoor use at the following web page, about ½ way down the page.
https://www.caa.co.uk/Consumers/Unmanned-aircraft/Recreation..."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As if a search and rescue, or crop monitoring drone would be useful inside a building, complete madness.
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?
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)
A lot of people choose to start businesses near their friends or families.
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...
I’m curious, if you think the issue is cultural.
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.
There is an element of truth to that, self build projects seem to go about was well as the typical software project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Who says those countries were well governed though? IMO they are all run by idealogical morons
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7afrique
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/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2024/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/spain/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.
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.
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.
The conservatives ran austerity-based policies for the last 14 years. Is your argument that they did not have a choice?
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/...
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.
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
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.
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
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.
I'd be interested to hear more about this.
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 m...
US vs UK investors are night and day. UK investors only want to see profitability to protect their cautious capital
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.
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.
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.
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.
It can be argued that a responsibility falls on EU equity companies, pension funds, and so on, but they do not make seed investments.
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.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_unemployment_in_Spain#....
Yes, cost of living got worse. This does not in any way make the EU poor.
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.
No, but apparently you think that I think that. Perhaps you might like to work through that again ...
Leaving the state of the UK as a whole to one side, the NHS was actively kicked like a dog prior to Blair who did at least stop kicking it and attempt to reverse the decline with some, albeit limited, success.
eg: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1871752/
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.
Admittedly I did phone the surgery at 0800 to get it. But this is awful hyperbole.
Seems to be a postcode lottery
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
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.
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.
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%
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Found a non-Mail link BTW: https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/planning-inspecto...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
* 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?
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.
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).
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.
Totally agree
They always take the extreme part of your posts, find a minor counter claim, then imply we have total free speech
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.
Weapons don’t allow you to defend yourself… if that was true the number of gun deaths in the US would be lower
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The NHS spends less per capita than the US spends on medicaid. Not less per person covered, less overall.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. Some of the least bureaucracy in the world to start a business. Simple + fast.
2. Some of the simplest/least laws in the world (law in general) to allow for business to succeed/be efficient. They actually started out with British law and then modified it where necessary to get to where they are now.
3. Some of the least political corruption in the world, due to a deliberately designed system against it: paying politicians very high salaries from taxes (on par with industry) instead of from bribes/lobbying (or legalized insider trading like in the US) + a dedicated secret service department tasked with keeping an eye on politicians and their corruption. Very high fines/imprisonment if caught. There's other stuff they do that could be copied.
4. Simple tax laws and low taxes in general.
5. Relatively simple worker protection laws (easy to hire and fire).
6. The best public transportation system in the world (based on my own experience and extensive travel around the world, I'm from EU).
7. Some of the best public housing in the world. Basically similar to what the UK used to have (based on a legacy UK system) before Tatcher killed it, except better thought out. It's all connected to their "central provided fund" (CPF) where everybody can save tax-free for housing, healthcare and other important stuff.
8. Tons of trade agreements with other countries. UK choses to just follow EU, which is relatively complex and limited (Brexit never happened in any practical real sense). "fort Europa"
9. Access to highly educated talent. Both local (some of the best uni's in the world) as well as from students all over (South East) Asia who can't wait to come to Singapore (highest income in the region).
This is some very general examples, the TLDR is that they went from third world country to first world within 1 generation thanks to the best leadership there can probably be.
I often hear the same non-explanations repeated about how Singapore got to wealth. "they use cheap labor" (literally every country in SEA does), "oh it's their location", "they just got lucky", "it's because they're an Island", "it's because they're on a trade route", "it's because other countries helped them", "it's because they're small". None of these make sense to me and don't explain anything. There are tons of regions and countries around Singapore who fit (some of) those criteria. All of the countries around Singapore started out as 3rd world countries when Singapore was a 3rd world country and all of them still are now that Singapore is not. The difference is leadership IMO.
> it's because other countries helped them
Also, this is not true. Singapore never received any handouts, save a meagre sum from Japan as compensation for occupying Singapore during World War 2. Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, understood that such monetary gifts always came with strings attached, and that accepting them would increase Singapore's vulnerability to the caprices of its benefactors. He was adamant to avoid having Singapore held hostage.
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
> Is it just me or is UK’s hardware scene really kicking off again?
> Founder friends have just raised millions, moved into massive warehouses, imported CNC machines and some started metal casting.
> Even SaaS VC friends are talking about hardware now
[1] https://x.com/joseflchen/status/1881058447946391848
[1] because the implied higher margins mean this attracts more investment
> 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.
May be a bit of a stretch though.
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.
I do not believe I could have achieved what I have in the last half-decade if I had stayed in the UK. There is something deeply rooted in the UK's contemporary culture (which I cannot yet fully explain in words) that serves to crush the individual ambitions of the working and middle classes.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705792
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.