UK's hardware talent is being wasted

I can tell that you've read the Wikipedia page rather than going to Peterborough.

Only if you place no value on the land simply existing as it does now and providing aesthetic value. Most people privileged enough to sit on a planning council coincidentally also trend towards valuing peace and quiet and are hesitant to approve projects that may disrupt their assumed way of life.

From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is one reason why London is becoming a super hub (among other reasons). London broke the ice and now they are trying to keep progressing but physical distance is becoming a limiting factor. Other municipalities will need to embrace change if they want to keep developing into a place where people want to live and work.

Industrial production is in decline since 2018: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2025/01/PE25_008_421.html

their energy policy has essentially crippled their economy

New Zealand took away local control over land development, and then promptly elected a right-wing central government that hates land development. :/

Fast internet, communal office space, and a fast cheap train to London is just as good as a factory. Build new towns.

Get a grip of bat and heritage protections which slow everything down by months or years.

It'd be better than not having them.

Major problems are rarely solved with one fell swoop, but instead thousands and thousands of small improvements.

A younger me would see this as too radical. After seeing some of this up close, now I tend to support this course of action. It would be a shame, but I think we’ve all collectively proven ourselves to be shortsighted and cheap with the great privileges we’ve been afforded.

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

As someone said recently, abundant energy is the basis of prosperity. There are no poor countries that use a lot of energy per capita, and no rich countries that use little. (China is a "middle income" country, not a poor one.)

https://energyforgrowth.org/article/how-does-energy-impact-e...

it's not only the area of land but the material's used in the housing, as well as when the housing where built.

The stagnation in other countries housing markets like the us is interesting, I don't know the answer but have they ever had social housing on the scale of the uk?

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.

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 UK did not choose austerity:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...

but still has worse growth than the US.

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.

I agree they were also badly governed - that is my point.

Which regulations exactly you find burdensome or overwhelming and stopping you from attempting the become wealthy, change your life and the world maybe?

Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest? Up until 1960's rich Americans payed %91 tax, and yet they kept their entrepreneurial spirit - why you can't do the same at the stated %50?

When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.

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.).

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?

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.

What is this spirit we retain that US looses ?

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.

Exactly. Half the population are saboteurs and vote to suppress success

> it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous

I don't think I've ever seen this claimed anywhere except as a criticism.

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.

> 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.

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.

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".

EXIST in particular targets universities, though, so not every founder is eligible.

Great that the German government makes some of the most start up unfriendly employment laws and funds these doomed start ups at the same time.

This is really ridiculously and needs to stop.

Do you know any equivalent for the Netherlands by any chance? Everything I see is tiny amounts.

"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.

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.

Right, but that would mean not moving.

Why downvotes? This is my real world experience.

What do you mean by that?

> there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in the world anymore

There is the US not-an-Empire [0] though, that'll probably count when the history books reflect on the present era. WWI/II can very easily be interpreted as a transition of power away from incompetent British leadership (indeed, European monarchies - the change pre- post- WWI is striking) towards more capable US-based leadership.

It isn't clear UK public ever really grappled how insufficient their leadership theory is. Their acceptance of poor performers over the last 20+ years has been striking although it is mirrored by low standards in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_inst...

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.

Not greatly different from Germany or Nordic countries, or EU average, and better than France or Japan.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

Its a Europe wide problem.

>USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either

The USSR moved all its industry eastward, as the German army advanced, waiting for the very last moment to do so. Quite an incredible feat that allowed them to beat Germany at industrial efficiency and secure victory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_in_the_Soviet_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.

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'.

It's thought that most European colonies actually stymied growth in their home countries.

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.

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.

They would have been better off losing. Crazy when you think about it.

Better if they had let the Nazis won and ruled the UK? WTF?

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.

You didn't read what I quoted and replied to. Please do so before responding with "false".

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.

The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2]

Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturi...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufactu...

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.

>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.

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.

> I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines

Growth of the software industry isn't constrained by the cost of capital

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.

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?

What makes you think QoL in London is bad? I grew up in a rural farming town and much prefer London. Housing is expensive but that's about it.

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.

When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.

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.

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.

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....

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-incomes-st...

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!

They are almost always contractors. If you work permanent it tops out max at about £75,000-90,000.

> 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.

This...but a twisted, bloated, incompetent, and malevolently self-serving version of it.

Actual efficiency would dictate that there be only a relative handful of finance jobs, let alone very well-paid finance jobs. And that the vast majority of the money go to actually productive industries. And that the financial markets understand the principles and timescales of other industries, so they don't screw everything up with decisions equivalent to "Fiscal quarter ends in June, and Farmer Jones says he can harvest zero corn by then. Shut him down."

> The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.

How do you quantify this?

> Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side effect of the finance industry, but of the state.

For markets to exist, monopolies must be avoided. As you can't expect large companies to police themselves, this was generally the role of the state. The states must strike a balance between keeping large companies happy (that want monopolies and have cash today) and true markets (which are efficient on the long run).

The finance industry is probably just a side effect of everybody focusing on short term (both public traded companies and politicians/states)

I've heard this many times, but where is the proof? How would you apply it to the story of OP?

> The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.

What did you measure to come to this conclusion?

But in the case of OP the value creation does not happen because they are working in finance instead of in a job creating value.

I want to see some decent analysis of the situation, not stories about how the system is supposed to work.

We only allocate to value creation if there is a functioning free market.

The banks profit margins would suggest that they are not really facing the fierce winds of competition.

>>A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school graduate.

Yes, because the number of med school places in the UK is limited by the government (because they have to fund the extra cost of the course over what students pay in tuition fees). You don't really need to be that smart to be a doctor.

To be fair though, they work for it. A consultant I saw recently did a full day with the NHS and they 3 - 4 hours of appointments in the evenings privately at a different hospital.

Yeah, 100k is starting pay band for Consultants, 140k is after 14 years of service _as a consultant_.

To get to the starting line of Consultant they have to go through the Residency gauntlet which start you off at 36k and hideous hours.

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

top 5% nationally is £81k

The Baumol effect is paying more for the same productivity, which can feel like a disease when you have to pay more and more for the same in some area for services relative to goods to the point where you end up pathologically preferring goods over services.

The JFK-popularized term defending a special interest project trickling down benefits to a wider community isn’t really what it feels like to someone in a coastal US city and who is trying to hire an electrician or baby sitter and finding they are priced out of the market.

Personally I'd prefer it if good quality healthcare were cheaply available to all without having to be bottleneck on expensive-and-time-consuming-to-train human labour, even if it did mean that the 0.5% of the population that are doctors might end up working differently (and not necessarily for less -- it's not as though the industrial revolution has impoverished society).

> This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London

I disagree on this cause, FWIW, and would say the cost is driven entirely by the constrained supply you mention. It's a very, very politically difficult problem to fix, because if you increase the housing supply, people who already own houses see their net-worth decrease. I am sure there are some smart solutions, but most MPs and many voters already own homes and don't have much of an interest in fixing it yet.

US is an outlier. You can look at self-described data for front-end engineers from the annual State of JS survey for an indication (try clicking on USA vs World): https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US/demographics/#yearly_salary

> Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier

Mostly the US is an outlier. Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.

Inflation in the 70s was caused by oil price shocks. Much of the physical economy relies on oil in an unhealthy way.

If you're looking for a culprit, I'd suggest a closer look at that.

Meanwhile industrialisation has been off-shored to China, which is now the tech and industrial powerhouse the US was in the 50s and 60s.

The former industrial centres in the US and UK were largely left to rot, because the people doing the offshoring simply didn't care about former workers. (In fact - in Thatcher's case, and probably Reagan's too - they actively hated them.)

Once you lose an industrial culture it's very hard to rebuild it. It's not just the factories, it's the investment, infrastructure, and education pipelines that feed them at all levels.

Only for simple pcb. If you are making multi-layer pcb with complex stacks, pcb manufacturing and soldering (with associated tooling setup, validation and so) are easily 2 months of turnaround

Some of us write software for embedded devices where a mistake in programning means a critical machine in a remote area needs someone to physically go there and thus spend months in test before we dare deploy. Some of us care about quality and won't allow a customer to see bugs thus even though we can deploy in seconds our reputation won't allow it. There is also software that bugs can kill people so again we won't deploy without evtensive testing - much of this is regulated and we would go to prison for deploying at will even if it works.

those who work in any of the above react in horror to stories of how the web deploys to production so fast. we know we are not perfect and don't understand how you would risk it.

That's what I meant by prototype turnover time, your iteration cycle.

It's because hardware developers don't take the software side seriously and either assume they can just do it themselves or don't think it's worth a decent salary

Not to your competitors in Shenzhen, they can get basically any part within one day or can get any prototype made easily.

Investors are generally wanting to see little existing competition so that’s not really the issue.

They’re more concerned with factors that will cause the company to self-destruct. Running out of money before hitting PMF and growth is the most common failure mode for any startup, and is much more likely with any hardware startup, due to the dramatically slower iteration times.

There's very good simulation tools available but scrappy startups can rarely afford them. You also need to people who know how to use the tools appropriately.

My grandfather got a lathe and pillar drill as his retirement gift from work, he also taught me how to etch PCBs and build radios.

Land is expensive in the areas people want to live. But yeah, tools are much cheaper, esp if you slowly grow over time.

It's insane how much space there is in America, and most Americans don't realize this beyond a simple "america big".

Blame the Thatcher Revolution and the sell-off of the council housing estates. Councils used to actually make money from housing, however, the revenue went back into building more homes, so more revenue. Rents were not extortionate or subsidised, however, if you were on benefits then you would get your rent covered.

The council housing provided an option at a base price, private landlords could not compete if they also had to pay for the mortgage, at a time when interest rates were a lot higher.

Once the council housing was sold off, there was no longer this base price, unless you wanted to spend five years on the list for a housing association, as in the privatised council housing estate.

This change meant that the best place for your money was in property. Property was no longer a near-depreciating asset, house price inflation went through the roof, but was not part of the inflation index.

Since then the economy has been that of rent-seeking. There is no point making stuff as you might as well sell the premises to a developer to convert into luxury flats, which then get bought by rent-seekers and rented out to people that would have had a full-feature council house in previous times.

When a rent-seeker has income from one property, they can remortgage to buy another, then use leverage to buy more and more.

Rent-seeking is not adding anything to the economy, no product is made. However, rent-seekers vote Conservative.

In an economy where everyone has to pay more for the parasites that are the rent-seekers, the cost of labour goes up. This is just because people need more money to pay to have a roof over their head, not because they want gold taps.

This is the root cause of the decline of the West, you are probably old enough to remember how this capital from rent-seeking spread out from London to even the slowest seaside town. Wherever it went, businesses stopped making stuff and started importing instead. Once that business of making stuff has gone, it never comes back.

The real value is in making stuff even though there is plenty of profit in retail, 'no product is made'. Furthermore, it is not possible to stop someone from doing the same as you, buying widgets from China, marking them up and flogging them with an English manual.

In the USA the situation is the same in the big cities. In the flyover states there is a different Ponzi scheme afoot, with vast tracts of suburbia built but without the long-term tax base to maintain the roads and other infrastructure indefinitely. So long as there is cheap oil and the dollar is the reserve currency, it all works with printing money, with the world taking the inflation hit, not the USA.

The sheds you see full of toys are not in New York, they will be somewhere such as Florida or Texas.

Or… Bob makes bread, Alice grows flowers. Alice needs bread; Bob likes flowers but can go without if he wants to. Who’s going to come off worse if they have an argument?

>Bob bakes bread, Alice grow apples. Everyone is better off because of specialization.

America is 300 Million. Europe is almost a Billion. These populations are more than large enough to specialize in everything.

>Everyone is better off because of specialization.

Why?

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

comparative advantage is disproven at this point, because economists are failed math majors who don't account for the innovation flywheel effect and general network effects. Silicon Valley software industry happened because of the proximity to the existing hardware industry there. Same thing for other forms of manufacturing and the US gave it away in the name of short term profits

Realistically in order to prosper the UK needs to join up as part of a "greater NAFTA" trade bloc. But the UK no longer has anything that the USA needs so they'll have to make major concessions to get a deal done.

That's not entirely true (about global civilization being needed). Any nominally developped but not too wasteful country or even just California could do it. It's just that that ship has sailed and we collectively decided a long time ago NOT to go that way. Recovering from these choices would take a lot of time and a lot of money that we would rather spend on railroads to and from nowhere (California). Sarcasm aside, americans, europeans, japan in particular are not ready to pay the price for that - even while they could totally afford it. They are busy paying the price for lots of other things and can't be bothered.

Yeah, I do recognize that. I just wish that the US could have a healthy mixture of light and heavy industry, so that the cost building any mission critical systems will not go through the roof, and so that we will be able t build anything domestically if we want. Even though it's likely a pipe dream now, but at least the US can do so for the WW II and after WW II for quite some time.

That's fair. UC and the NHS are far from ideal, but, compared to the US, they are heaven.

Thanks - there is no doubt software startups, with typically limited capital requirements are easier than almost anything else.

> Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product,

I see customers as a wider pool than end consumers - they can also include businesses - quite a few large businesses also have investment arms.

For example you mentioned Philips - they have one - https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/innovation/philips-venture...

I guess the worry for startup's there is if you too close then they might 'steal' - however big companies are typically quite keen on upholding IP laws - they use their venture arms to spread their bets - partial stakes ( and inside knowledge ) on a whole array of startups.

Luck and timing obviously play huge roles. But I like to think that as an industry we no longer frequently make mistakes quite as outright stupid as Commodore management did. There are at least some generally understood tech industry best practices which prevent decisions like that when there is serious money at stake.

They also all got started several decades ago when there were huge new blue ocean opportunities to pursue and much less competition for capital. And other many competitors have failed along the way. (Remember Amiga, Wang, Gateway, many others from the 80s and 90s).

The main issue now is competition for capital: the majority of tech investors regard software startups as much safer paths to huge returns. Whether they’re right or wrong in any individual case is a separate issue; they’re playing the percentages.

Those companies don't produce hardware. They assemble it. Big difference.

Look at risc-v official web site, some company called sifive and their UEFI workstation boards.

And I want to be able to buy a USB-C RV64 SOC (without ARM blocks) with tons of GPIOs for my future keyboard controller.

What do you expect the Lord Mayor to say? "Yes we think Brexit was great and that the government is going a good job." They're a lobby, they want to lobby for more concessions.

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

> 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

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.

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.

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?

> Australia pay wayyyy better

well having a relatively small population and bountiful natural resources do great wonder.

Both things can be true: I am happy with the European welfare state and still think there are structural problems.

UK and EU are rich, even if their economy is not doing great.

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.

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.

Ah yes, my fabulous Dutch healthcare basically consisting of being told "you're fine" and overpriced acetaminophen.

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).

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

I have also lived in both and I agree with you. The UK is a lot worse.

At least France has some things going for it, healthcare is still good, unemployment benefits are good, etc.

The UK has literally nothing to show for.

Arguing about which sinking ship is going down faster.

EU meaning… Germany?

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.

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).

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

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.

BUUUT MuHHH PAAARRRKiiiiNNNGGGG!! (And house values). And we can't _possibly_ make the town look different than it did in 1972 because "heritage".

We're talking about a bunch of crusty old church biddies who will literally force you to put the most godawful, hideous house covering in the history of man BACK on your house because they're terrified of being reminded it's not the 70's.

(Sorry for the mail link) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592033/Put-pebble-...

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.

Speaking the language helps. Also working in a highly specialized field.

We could discuss this at length, but I completely share your point of view. Anyone can design a part that's impossible to produce.

The real added value is knowing how something is actually going to be made, in how many stages, with what tools, what controls will be carried out, with what tools, what the acceptance and rejection criteria are, and how these criteria have been determined, are essential points.

> The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day.

I remember, in a CNC programming class, the instructor calling out one of the students on a lathe program: "One millimeter increments?! What material do you think you are using? Styrofoam?!".

That class is where I feel in love with the ASR-33 teletype and its cadenced hum. It was punching the tapes we feed into the CNC machines. I wish I could have bought that machine when it was retired not too long after my class.

For a while, we had the "maker movement" and "maker spaces", and people were learning that stuff. But that all tanked when TechShop went bankrupt.

There are still maker spaces around, but most of them are now more into sewing, paper folding, and hot glue than CNC machining. Few go beyond a 3D printer. The ones that do tend to have some kind of subsidy from a larger educational institution.

What about using simulation(or estimation using software) to understand the manufacturing process well enough to design for it, without being in the factory?

So everyone fully admits that these countries are in fact "worse" in every way?

>the current AI investments

As someone whose done both hardware and AI, the current AI investments are at worst a repeat of the 2000 dot com boom.

They aren't wrong, but they may be premature with how terrible our compute substrate is.

Currently predictive maintenance but previously have worked on simulation software development.

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.

On the other hand, the UK has all these cheap engineers. Is it just that they're not actually cheap, on the international market?

It was always going to be a trap, but it’s been so long in the making that those who started the UK on that path have long since retired wealthy.

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.