This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you).

Thanks for this interesting fact.

And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.

This decade: "We're not the ones trying to steal your fishing jobs!"

Next decade: "It's not our fault there aren't fish!"

In broad terms, this is related to the error the USA made. Manufacturing in China was a very profitable deal for the USA. A lot of companies view labour first and foremost as expense, wealth as as the goal, and power in wealth— so it's not surprising as a whole the industry opted to "contract out" labour across the globe.

A lot of power lays in labour though. Money doesn't produce, invent, move, feed, etc— money is only good if someone will take it at the amounts you have it to do that specific labour you need for you.

China is moving up the value chain also, they are being forced to by their demographics, and they are investing heavily in the change ATM (just like they started investing heavily in green energy 10 years ago) so I don't think they will make the same mistake as the Americans are making right now.

No it isn't, productivity has to increase, that's why we constantly get rid of jobs that do not provide much value. People want more money, and the only way we get there is with more productivity (doing jobs that make more money).

> If and when China becomes twice as big an economy as the US, much of our “edge” in marketing, finance, and services isn’t going to mean squat.

China gets to 2X our GDP by doing what we basically did in the 90s, so you are definitely right! They will have their own marketing, financing and services. The only difference is that they won't need to outsource manufacturing to China (well, they are outsourcing it a bit now, but also investing tons in automation).

> E.g. how much “GDP” will evaporate overnight when American universities no longer have the cachet that comes along with being the best universities in America?

I don't know what you are ranting about, but I get the feeling that if I did know what you were saying here I would probably agree with you.

Our measures of “value” are wrong.

> I don't know what you are ranting about

My point is that a lot of what we think of as “higher value” activities are actually derivative of and downstream of our industrial supremacy. As China takes up that mantle, the higher value activities will go along with it. E.g., how long do we expect the US to do the cutting edge nuclear power and weapons research when China is the one building all the nuclear power plants?

I mean look at the path dependency that led to Silicon Valley. Why did the software revolution happen in the same place we were building the microchips?

> Why did the software revolution happen in the same place we were building the microchips?

Hardware people becoming software people was extremely common back then, and still is today (EEs can make more coding than using their degree directly). Now we have the opposite problem (we don't have enough hardware people because software sucked all the oxygen out of the room) and China has less of it (although increasingly...they are repeating history as well). If anything, this just backs up my point in how higher value activities de-emphasize manufacturing (even super high end manufacturing as in semiconductors).

You can replace perceived value with actual value if you don't agree with the value judgement calls that were made, which is entirely reasonable.

How much is this exacerbated by the lack of domestic hardware manufacturing in the US for the hardware people? Seems like software boom starting in the late 1990's happened as China came online for hardware outsourcing. Not suggesting a causal relationship there, just complementary effects.

Not quite. It's all about labor and getting rid of the class that used to (and could have) threatened the elites.

If US has both it might shift the scale a bit.

Dude, how have you completed missed the ongoing push for AI to replace developers?

More developers isn't at odds with the previous comment. That is how you can more easily push the jobs to low cost areas! When 张三 in rural China is given his first computer he can jump right into being a programmer too. Thus you can give him the job instead of a high priced developer in America.

You haven't even put developers out of job as you must remember that I also wanted to build a thing, but couldn't because you had all the available developers tied up. Now there are two freed up who can come work for me. There is no end to all the software we want to write.

Or both. That would be my bet. The industry in general will see a decline. The massive growth in developer numbers will place enormous supply-side pressure. But certain experts who remain supply constrained along with increasing demand for those special services amid the explosion of new software being written will make a killing.

In regards to the auto industry, I'm not sure what you mean by "look where auto manufacturing investment in the US is". Most auto manufacturing jobs are still in the rust belt [1]. Most EV Production investment is in the rust belt [2].

[1]: https://engaging-data.com/auto-manufacturing-state/

[2]: https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/98988-ten-us-states-dom...

So, do we let US companies invest US consumer derived revenue in the Indian economy, just to boost profits a bit, or do we protect good jobs at home instead, and have a virtuous circle where US profits get plowed back into the US economy?

I'd prefer we look to other countries that have solved the problem in other ways, such as including representatives of the employees in the board.

Also, we need to remember that corporations exist at the mercy of the state, having received a special dispensation (corporate charter) to exist. Those companies that are not a net benefit to society have no right to exist and ought to be dissolved.

You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas

If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money

Those sectors you let die might not matter right now, but they might matter later. And you might have to scale up fast.

Convert that to usd and you will see how much premium is being charged.

Many of the EU farming and fishing subsidies are to NOT produce anything.

"We will pay you 5 euros per kg of fish sold in supermarkets to consumers" is different from "We will pay you 500,000 euros a year to keep fishing".

There is a very reasonable argument in fisheries starting at least a century ago (and locally long before that), that we're looking at a partially renewable good - that it would be easy to cause an unsustainable population collapse with unrestricted harvesting, and so you should try and intervene in the market to sustain fish populations and stabilize harvests. Subsidies intended to do this are distinct from subsidies intended to keep fishermen employed fishing.

I feel like money is overwhelmingly how we denominate value, effort, and agency in our society. Almost every time somebody says "You can't just throw money at the problem", they are arguing that we shouldn't even try that, contrary to all established reasoning about how society works.

There are diminishing returns to funding, but the people who use this expression are typically at a tiny fraction of where we would expect to hit them.

If you want to have a fishing industry because fish are your idealized heritage, then choose to subsidize it heavily either to continue to exist, and/or to expand it into waters and economies of scale where you can still fish profitably. Like the Japanese and the Chinese do, respectively.

Money is something you give people so they can eat and stay warm while they do the thing you want. They still have to be doing the thing you want. Sometimes there's enough reputation and legal threats on the line that you can assume the person will do the thing just based on the fact they're taking money from you and not freaking out. Companies do things this way a lot - individuals not as much.

The abstraction is not the territory, and the idea that money denominates value is an abstraction... often we define "value" as "that for which money is exchanged", making the abstraction tautological, at no gain. This is often done by people who want to think the thing they're spending a lot of money on is very valuable, or want to make you think the thing you're spending a lot of money on is very valuable.

This is exactly what Dr. L. J. Hart-Smith wrote in "Out-Sourced Profits – The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting", a paper from 2001 https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646...

See also How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/, where the author asks, "In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain?"

Once you've outsourced everything except the management work, the organization forgets how to do the thing they're supposed to be managing.

I think a lack of seafood would have less of an impact to the general population than say, lack of satellite navigation or communication technology.

I had no idea that Warhammer was such a huge industry - they must sell almost 600 sets a quarter.

Note that a standard printer won't be anywhere near as nice quality as official models. You need a resin printer for that, which requires ventilation, some basic PPE, and additional labor to clean and cure the prints correctly. Not something you want to do with small children or pets in the house.

We resin print most of our models. We use FDM for blocky things like tanks and buildings, though. And some complex or very large models can't be printed (although we sometimes use alternatives for those).

Warhammer is an unusually expensive game, too. Other games like One Page Rules will sell you STLs to self-print, or charge very reasonable prices for pro-printed minis. You can buy a 2-player starter kit for OPR for about the same money as one WH40K unit.

But cool to hear you're printing them. I can imagine they don't want to allow it at official tournament to protect the golden goose :)

Of course it's not the resolution of a good laser resin printer but resin is also much more expensive and it's a PITA to work with as discussed here.

The extra cost of resin is negligible at this scale, it's mostly the safety requirements and extra labor that makes it harder.

It's fine as a token for the game, but people enjoy the painting etc too.

A resin printer isn't safe for use in an apartment, otherwise that would probably be more common.

That rules out most apartments in countries like the USA and UK.

* Do not locate dedicated work/personal spaces in close proximity to the printers if odors are a concern

That rules out all small apartments, where there isn't a room that can be dedicated to the printer.

* 3D Printers and uncured, open resin vats should be stored and operated in a well ventilated area or with local exhaust

That rules out all apartments in northern countries (like here in Denmark) with lots of insulation

https://radtech.org/safe-handling-of-3d-printing-resins/

And if you actively went it outside carpet and close proximity should ok ok'ish health wise. It's just effort and noise that a lot of people don't like to put in.

Yes I've always wondered why they love carpets so much. When I lived in such an apartment it was terrible. Always dirty and dusty. I'd much rather have a plastic, wooden or tile floor (the latter not ideal due to breakage though).

But you can ventilate, especially if you blow the air outside through an active blower.

And finally, makerspaces are a great way to do these things anyway. A community that can support and help you when you run into issues, friendly people around to borrow equiment and materials from, and they're usually pretty cheap if you don't get a fixed desks.

It's no more dangerous than a craft like woodworking or spray painting when you follow very basic safety protocols, but the safety culture is near nonexistent in the community.

Not everyone is as careful with the stuff so that doesn't really help.

We need a resin printer tuned for mass production of tiny pieces, just like belt FDM printers are tuned for mass production.

FDM prints are either slow or have obvious layer lines or both. If you're painting it maybe that doesn't matter.

I have several printers and I ususually have something "in the oven" while I WFH (my job is not related to 3D printing sadly)

The limitation with injection molding is typically the cost and complexity of having mold plates made when you don't have a demand for all that many units.

The manufacturing isn't easy, sure, but it's more or less a solved problem and not at all reflected in the cost.

So when GP says priced like Lego, they just mean that - priced based on something completely different from the cost of materials, manufacturing, etc.

Micromolding is very hard, and Lego is the best at it.

Lego does not outsource brick making. They tried it out back in 2005 with Flextronics in Hungary and got a painful lesson. Lego runs all their factories themselves now.

I don't think the official Lego China factory products get sold to the US, only Asia?

Nowadays it's kinda irrelevant to the greater point anyways, because some of the knock off factories make parts that are just as good. (Some knock off factories push out terrible QC)

I can't say what's more difficult to manufacture - millions of identical bricks that snap together, or a huge range of different, detailed designs which fit snugly together but don't lock.

Just the first thing on the home page: https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/Deathlords-Mortarchs-Ma...

Clearly you are not aware of the extraordinary range of Lego pieces.

Just from a quick search, within a year Games Workshop offer about 3000 different model kits, each of which will contain ~1-4 unique moulded sprues. There seem to be at least 50 new kits each year, possibly 100, otherwise what's available rotates around the older kits.

Lego have produced about 15,000 different sets since 1950, and a huge number of the parts are shared between sets. (That's the whole point of the toy, no?)

Which is an issue because it makes the sets way more difficult to reuse than 30 years ago. Go figure what to build with a random ninjago set except the official model. But that’s another ~~rant~~story.

The stuff they’re putting out these days is really quite good.

https://www.lego.com/nl-nl/product/lego-education-spike-prim...

https://assets.ctfassets.net/ost7hseic9hc/1alE9DriNd0GJq1SYK...

But most of that revenue goes to JKR, whereas most of the fishing revenue may end up in "working class" people's pockets.

The Harry Potter World theme park in London has over two million visitors annually. That tourism must be more economically significant than fishing for cod.

Warhammer requires designers, moulding experts, warehouse staff and so on.

Games Workshop is a public company, in case you want to look up their accounts for the comparison.

I am sure JKR has to pay taxes still, which goes back to the government.

Velocity is one of those critically important concepts that often gets left out of these discussions because it's hard to understand if you haven't formally studied economics because it's all about second order effects. But it's a big part of understanding why, historically speaking, maximizing corporate profits doesn't seem to correlate all that well with overall prosperity trends.

And the more of that that happens, the better for the economy overall. The less of that that happens - implying more of it ends up in JKR's proverbial dragon hoard, not doing much good beyond being an impressive pile of wealth for the dragon to sleep on top of - the less good for the economy overall.

When rich people get large amounts of money they don’t hoard it like they did in Roman times.

That money either goes into the stock market or to a bank. If it’s in the stock market that money is being used in investments that further economic growth. The portion of the leftover money that’s in the bank is then lent out by the bank to others in the forms of loans and so on for purchasing houses, starting business and so on.

The idea that the pile of wealth is simply hoarded to be slept on is out of date and not representative of modern economics.

Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.

Am I missing something about modern economics?

I look at my tiny townhouse that my Dad could built in 6 weekends with his buddies and zillow needing seven digits to display the price and very well thinking “what a fucking real estate bubble we live in currently.”

there is a clear point at which one might start thinking about real estate as investment (and it sure looks bubbly). if you bought a house as an investments some decades ago it is not much of an investment and basically a loss inflation-adjusted, no?

yes you have.

The home took someone money to build, the land cost money to buy (from the previous owners) - thru the long chain of title ownership that would stem from the conquerors of this land (who ultimately took the land from either natives, or whoever that previously owned it by force).

The previous owners who now got paid by you will use this money for other investments. It is not slept on. Your house is also providing utility (of being a shelter).

You just stopped thinking about the money as soon as it left your bank when you buy the house, and thus you feel that the value of the house is merely being "slept on", when in actual fact, this transaction that is your house is a small cog in a very large system.

The nominal gdp is my father's time was lower and yet he could buy a house and support a family of four on a single salary as an immigrant in his early 20s.

> The idea that the pile of wealth is simply hoarded to be slept on is out of date

I don't see what you're arguing against. If they did that, what would the problem be?

In other words, they're effectively rent-seeking dollars. The whole hope of investment is that you get more money without doing any labor yourself.

And if you invest and they're lost? Well, now it's not even rent-seeking. It's just burning money.

This isn't to say that there's no benefit from that money being available. The issue is that the real value that investment creates isn't really the money going back to the investor. It's the value of the labor and products generated by whatever the money fronted costs for. The actual value is still generated by the labor. The investor does help start the ball rolling, but is still a leech.

Once we get to shareholders, things don't really improve. Shareholders are also only interested in dividends. They want dividends at the cost of the company. At the cost of the product. At the cost of the customer. There's no responsibility to society or to the customer in the face of a shareholder.

Shareholders are like employees that don't do any work but still want a paycheck. "Oh, but they're owners," is kind of a poor excuse when these owners do no work. Stock is like buying a box of Crackerjack and letting your brother take the whistle and sticker.

> Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.

Which she does because donations offset the taxes she owes. She's no Dolly Parton.

The labour _needed_ the money. In other words, the labour doesn't want to take on capital risk (aka, the output turning worthless, or something like that).

Investors aren't leeching, they are taking risks - risks that the labourers dont want to take (otherwise, they would've been the one fronting the cost, rather than expecting to get paid for labour!).

The old idea of capital being leeches only happens when your capital comes from lords who granted you ownership (of the land).

How would that work? You can only write off the amount you actually donate. Paying 100% to save 40% (or whatever your tax rate is) seems very counterproductive if the goal is to actually save money.

Does JKR personally own the copyrights, or have they been sub-licensed to a corporation in (e.g.) Ireland?

What an amazing argument to tax the rich!

Personally, I'm always dubious of the rich and famous genuinely finding unmet cases for charitable organisations. Especially when they've made a fortune outsourcing being morally dubious to others - she can save children because others are paying her to be allowed to sell low quality merchandise almost certainly made in exploitative conditions.

She's not alone, there's many more e.g. Messi donating lots to children's cause through his own charitable organisation after gladly being a global ambassador for unhealthy snacks targeted at children.

That's a long way from advertising unhealthy snacks.

Lego isn't made in dubious conditions, so for toys she's already above average.

Of course. That way they can sell you the official paints.

Fortunately, it seems they’ve dropped that you’re required to use the official paints if you want to enter a sanctioned tournament.

And yet, California's entire agricultural sector only totals to $50 billion in annual revenue. There are multiple tech and entertainment companies in California that individually surpass that, in some cases (like Apple and Amazon) by an order of magnitude.

You cannot have a drying rack manufacturer in the US that pays a bunch of workers $35/hr. There simply is not enough value in drying racks to achieve this.

This is what is lost on the populist crowd. They compare themselves to high value workers (i.e. workers that produce a lot of raw economic value per hour), and then want to legislate that low value work pays on the same order.

To put that into simple terms, they want to make it so that producing a single $20 bill per hours pays them $30 an hour. No matter what, that isn't going to work out well.

Drying racks aren't considered terribly valuable today, but if you lock up manufacturing to a single country and impose a number of other restrictions, sentiment can change quickly. The latest episode of Ted Lasso might not seem so important anymore.

And people are spending all their money on this? That's why we're not mining asteroids right now?

I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.

For example, if you are in the target group, you buy it exactly because it does not uses AR glasses; If you are proficient, you are sleepwalking the damage/distance/all other calculations within seconds in your head, you don’t even have to take a single look at any rule book. The biggest selling point, however is: there are others sitting in front of you, it can be very competitive, you can see the reaction, like in chess.

This is a _feature_ for the target audience. There's a sizable chunk of the playerbase who enjoy painting more than the game. I even have friends who paint these miniatures professionally as their side gig.

> And people are spending all their money on this?

No. Most people are playing at home on a budget, similar to other board games. A very tiny fraction of the playerbase plays competitively and have larger collections.

> I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.

You can play this game in Tabletop Simulator, which supports VR. It's _far_ less fun than playing in person with real objects. TTS is mostly used to test strategies before committing to buying the required miniatures.

As sibling comment mentions, the damage calculation is rather simplistic, and it's an exciting moment around the table when you roll a fistful of dice, kind of like gambling. I'm not even that proficient of a player and I can calculate a 17 dice roll attack while sleep deprived at 3AM, no computer needed.

We need to distinguish between paying over the odds to keep industries which are essential to have in an antagonistic scenario, from loss-aversion and nostalgia for industries which don't provide as much employment as they used to.

Post-Brexit, there's now increased incentive for Games Workshop to build their next factory in the EU.

(Games Workshop is one company, but this applies to every manufacturing company in the UK.)

However, if we got a free trade agreement with the US would the inverse be true, EU companies are better off moving to the UK due to brexit? What about just a FTA with all commonwealth countries (why haven't we done this??)?

A FTA with the USA would come at a significant price — the UK would be pressured to accept low-quality American agricultural produce, and lower many other standards from their current European level. If it does this, that reduces the global value of British exports.

iirc Trump did say he wanted EU to accept our livestock to reduce the trade deficit, leading Lutnick to memorably proclaim "They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak!"

It's not something that will be forgotten easily. British people on all sides were against reducing food standards.

And then today all the tarrifs are suspended (down to 10%) so it's hardly like there's a reliable advantage there.

We are literally in the process of moving some of our operations to LATM to avoid this uncertainty.

You have to assume that the US is sane a maximum of four years in a row and in four years another Trump 2.0 will again be completely ignoring all their agreements.

In my opinion, the US cannot be trusted with any treaties ever again the way they currently are.

Is there any fishing going on in the Black Sea at the moment? (genuine question)

yes, while fishing vessels fairly rarely broadcast AIS, there's plenty of turkish, bulgarian, and even three russian fishing vessels broadcasting AIS in the black sea right now. No ukrainian vessels that I can see, but again, AIS is fairly rare for fishing boats anyway.

Yes, but not a lot since the fish is very scarce and it supplies a small part of the local consumption. Romanian vessels used to fish in oceans. I presume Russian vessels, too.

I strongly suspect the US cannot maintain its outsized per capita wealth, on the back of the reserve dollar, in a world where China has an economy twice the size. Just as the UK couldn’t when the US economy overtook the British empire and the dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency.

The question, instead, is how we’ll be able to adapt to that new reality. And I suspect we’d rather be Germany in that future than the UK.

Also, even after the marshall plan, Germany kept its existing advantages in industry in large part simply by actually encouraging them to exist. The UK has no industrial policy and actively shed most industries in the 1980s, relying instead on direct investment and deliberately not growing domestic companies.

The observation is depressingly simple - competent economic management leads to great results. Typically that involves investing a bunch into developing industrial capability. Listen to people like Ed Deming. Let people build things. The US isn't doing that, we haven't seen any new industrial capability out of them in decades. Silicon Valley is the closest thing they have in the modern era and it is mostly services.

If you ask where the wealth is supposed to come from in the Chinese economy there are a lot of obvious answers - it could be energy innovations from the nuclear or renewable sectors. It could be manufacturing innovation as they work on improving their factories. Maybe they're going to come up with hot new products out of Shenzhen. They're big players in the AI revolution and working to build up domestic semiconductor capabilities. Maybe they're just going to wait for other people to come up with good ideas and copy them with speed and scale on their side.

The US has a much less obvious story. Biotech could be an amazing path, but they've left the ring for a lot of the more promising industrial options. And holding the health industry up as being the way to a bright future seems a bit weird. Maybe they succeed in building a services economy that impresses people; that'd be a cool first.

If you want to explain MAGA you have to understand it's a convenient alignment of the upper class and the lower class for different reasons.

Trump is currently causing an earthquake on behalf of the middle-lower class. Maybe blue tinted glasses prevent them from seeing it, but right now he is definitely doing the opposite of "entrenching the power of billionaires and the elite".

Unfortunately, I believe that this is a severe miscalculation on Trumps part, as the "kill the billionaires" class seems to be much more fueled by anger than by rational understanding.

So much of the US government has been focused on maintaining the global hegemony, US citizens wellbeing was sacrificed.

Trump was elected in reaction to rising global hegemony, or at least the effort put to maintain it, not the end of it.

To say US hegemony is numbered doesn’t make much sense. The US economy has only pulled headed further from any Western rival, and China’s economy is stumbling to the point it’s questionable if it can grow enough before it’s population starts shrinking. Russia has been stagnant since the 1990’s.

If anything, US ability to project power is greater now than any time in the past.

Absolutely not. It caved to Russia in the first place, it is weak against Russia. It WANTS to project power, but while doing so, it is showing itself crumbling into itself.

The sword remains unchanged.

> He represents what large part of Americans are - for internal reasons that have nothing to do with geopolitics.

No, it's all about geopolitics. Perhaps the most thorough analysis of the 2024 election concluded that Trump won 18-25 year old men (white + non-white). Trump did better among younger men than men 75+. Trump also won young white women. (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)

Whatever preconception you have about what motivates Trump voters, you're incorrect. MAGA is about the impending loss of America's stature due to immigration and free trade. It's all about geopolitics.

Impending cause of loss of stature.

> Whatever preconception you have about what motivates Trump voters

By a large, based on what they themselves say and write, they wanted to cause harm to their perceived enemies and have fun watching it. That is primary reason for why conservative and republican voters vote.

Thats dumb to be polite but not surprising when considering where it comes from. Republicans simply can't admit their candidate is incompetent pos, superior ego thing or something. The incompetent part is what matters in this specific discussion, way worse than first term which was tampered by more reasonable people delegating actual tasks.

There does seem to be some sort of cycle in play: first a slave-driver-type economy creates a whole lot of wealth, then people get human rights, then they stop being driven like slaves and coast off the accumulated power, but forget the basic principles of wealth creation in the process (see also "good times create weak men" etc) and just spend all their resources arguing about who gets the wealth that is there instead of creating more. And I'm not saying that in an individualist framework - the reason individuals can't do it is a problem with the whole society, not with those individuals.

Can you explain this a little more? Why does having a trade deficit make your currency more valuable? My naive assumption is it would put more dollars in other countries, so they don't need them as much, making dollars less valuable.

Having a huge trade deficit is another way of saying you've sent a lot of your currency to other countries and haven't received it back yet.

I'm sure you can see how those are the same thing.

Almost nobody is spending resources in the US. And that's half of the problem. It's spent elsewhere, therefore labor stagnates or falls, only leaving low tier jobs to work. No factories locks out advancement reducing morale and draining the best that could have their kids advance.

In the US, you had skyrocketing prices on basics like healthcare and housing too, way more than elsewhere. UK has a lot of this problem too.

That together ultimately causes a reduction in teaching and educational standard, which further shrinks the high end advantage.

Short version: economy and people hollowed out in the middle is unsustainable.

And you can't make work sustainable and level the playing field when you have free trade with developing countries.

People cite Ricardo like gospel, but the math of free trade treats every safety net, worker safety protection, etc., as a loss of "comparative advantage." You know how Texas takes jobs from California by having lower standards, lower wages, etc.? That's what happens when you have free trade with third world countries. It's a race to the bottom.

See "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy":

> I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war.

[…]

> If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced. But this graph doesn’t actually capture the full scope of the decline, because it doesn’t include outsourcing via unfunded mandates — things that the government could do, but instead simply orders the private sector to do, without providing the funding.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...

Mentions the paper "State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, And How to Get It Back" (22pp, so short):

* https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/br...

And the book Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government:

* https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/templeton-press/bring...

> If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced.

The money is going to social security payments. Social security went from <1% of federal spending at its outset to more than 20% of federal spending today. Medicare and other assistance programs are a similar story. Most of the money from these programs goes to paying benefits rather than administrative costs, which is generally regarded as a good thing. But they're also what together now constitute the majority of federal spending.

Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Computers were invented. Things that used to be done by hand are now done by machine, and then you don't need as many clerks and bookkeepers to manually process paper records. This is also generally regarded as a good thing.

The points it makes about unfunded mandates and NIMBYs holding everything up with meritless lawsuits are valid, but the "ministerial review" it proposes is the existing permitting process. The problem is we have unfunded mandates and NIMBY lawsuits on top of that, which could simply be deleted and replaced with nothing.

This really seems like the fundamental misunderstanding:

> And guess who’s responsible for monitoring Medicare spending? Bureaucrats. So that’s at least a 2300% return on investment in bureaucracy!

If you only look at the most efficient thing a bureaucrat could be doing, look how efficient bureaucrats are!

Meanwhile the government is still paying thousands of people to process paper records because although computers were invented many decades ago, only parts of the government have discovered them and there are still many things you have to do by bringing physical documents to government offices to be processed in person even when those things have no legitimate reason not to be a government website.

What we need is not to have more bureaucrats, but rather to finish computerizing the things that have no reason not to be so the existing government employees can do the high value stuff instead of wasting time shuffling paper that should have been bits.

Uh...excluding the very recent cuts this year under Trump; the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. [0]

We had 23.592 million civilian employees in Jan 2025. 21.779M in Jan 2021, after being largely stagnant overall the previous 10 years. That's a net change in excess of 1.8M employees under Biden.

I do find it interesting that it appears that employee count was flat, or even down under Obama, but until COVID, there was a steady increase under Trump v1.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT

The graph you provided is not Federal government, it’s all US government which includes state & city, and other types of government employees. It should be expected this grows with population size, and to get a sense of whether it’s really shrinking or growing, you should divide by population. But in any case, this chart doesn’t backup your claim that Federal government is growing.

The link to the Federal government was just underneath that graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001. US Federal government absolute size peaked in 1991 and has gone down slightly since then. If you divide this one by population, the decline would be a bit stronger and more obvious. The ~10 year spikes are census workers. Notice we can see the peak in 1991 with or without the census spikes.

There are 3x as many fishermen in the UK than employees of Games Workshop, and much more again if you count the number of related fishery jobs.

At the end of the day, politicians and voters alike respond more to employment than nominal monetary figures. A broader employment base is generally better for social and political stability than explicit wealth redistribution (e.g. tax + entitlements). The latter is what economic theory tends to emphasize--i.e. equivocate incomes based on state wealth redistribution schemes--but such economic theory is how we got Trump, Brexit, and a host of other ills. Economics hasn't figured out, yet, how to price the constituent inputs that produce political and economic stability. GDP, Gini, per capita income, employment rate, etc metrics are gross approximations that work well until they don't (though they're still better than rhetoric and handwaving). But to be fair, social and political theorists haven't solved that problem, either; at least, not with a rigorous quantification model.

. This is what stops revolutions and civil wars.

What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now?

Impossible to say, as it was swamped by the pandemic. My guess as to the fatalities due to Brexit is also untestable as a result.

For what it's worth I'm not sure if the number is actually 10%, but I'd hazard that it's more than 5/6.

Just like farming, it's everyone living out there. How the fishers and farmers are being treated is how those communities at large feel like they're being treated. And they always feel like they're being shafted, even though that's just progress and other industries got shafted much worse in the past.

So for every 1 fisherman, there are 20 other votes. And they all generally vote conservative, those are blue strongholds (blue over here is conservative, red labour).

For every 1 Games Workshop employee, there's no other votes. Even spouses will be fairly uninvested in how the government is treating toy exports.

But on the other part of your comment, there's been no 10% GDP loss. Note, I voted remain, and would vote to rejoin in a heartbeat.

But we're roughly at the same position today in the world as we were in 2016, compared to other countries. Sitting about 6/7th in the world. Everyone's suffered since covid, everyone's struggling with growth. There's been no big drop in GDP. So it was actually scaremongering. It feels like there's a conspiracy of economists who lie, heavily influence markets, but their lies don't match reality. It's ideological propaganda for free-market capitalism, rather than fact.

Something not really addressed in all of this is that a lot of the people whinging about British jobs and so on, especially in high-Brexit areas, are actually themselves retirees.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36619342 "Of the 30 areas with the most elderly people, 27 voted leave".

Now, they're often living in economically depressed areas. I've seen Blackpool and Lowestoft (the sad little marker of the UK's easterly point, right next to a gas terminal). But you can't give them their jobs back, because they're not working any more. It's nostalgia.

I'm going to keep hammering the question of "why should people move from lucrative, comfortable email jobs to harder, less lucrative factory jobs, or, god help them, fishing?"

The UK is actually at ""full employment"" (NAIRU): https://obr.uk/box/the-equilibrium-unemployment-rate/ - that is, economists believe it cannot go lower without causing inflation, as shortages mean you can't hire people without having to offer more wages to poach them from other jobs.

(Another conundrum: people want higher wages without higher prices. How are you going to do the arithmetic on that?)

This isn't just a UK issue:

"Fishing is a relatively minor economic activity within the EU. It contributes generally less than 1 per cent to gross national product."[0]

and if you look beyond fishing, agricultural policy as a whole is - not sure how to put this politely - not easy to understand:

"The CAP is often explained as the result of a political compromise between France and Germany: German industry would have access to the French market; in exchange, Germany would help pay for France's farmers [..] The CAP has always been a difficult area of EU policy to reform [..]"[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

Completely barking mad.

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-rejects-eu-plan-tie-defen...

Well, we'll see that and raise you the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

The EU could get rid of this idiocy overnight, except - well - France.

(I have nothing against the French, I've visited France dozens of times and have many friends there.)

"Once a month the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg at a cost of £150m a year as lorries transport paperwork."[0]

"Top EU official brands Strasbourg shuttle 'insane'"[1]

"EU parliament’s €114m-a-year move to Strasbourg ‘a waste of money’, but will it ever be scrapped?"[2]

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/meps-on-the-move-madness-of-stras...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/eu.politics

[2] https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...

I'm not saying it's what happened to the UK, but we asked for what we needed, got turned down and then left.

If you haven't already done so, read up on TARGET2[0], things could get somewhat spicy if a Eurozone country were to leave the EU.

[0] https://data.ecb.europa.eu/publications/ecbeurosystem-policy...

All I remember was Cameron asking to expel jobless immigrants, which confused the EU as Britain was already allowed to do that.

I remember Poland stopped us from getting it (supposedly).

The french didn't want us to exempt from financial regulation that was primarily targeted at the euro even though we use the pound.

Various nonsense, that people at the time felt strongly about (keeping the pound, not giving benefits and a council house to people as soon as they arrived, or some such exaggeration)

Ha ha ha. I was this naive once. This just isn't our reality. You would have to have a functioning education system AND a population with adequate emotional regulation. Do we even have the pieces anymore?

Oh, boy, let me tell you, the 'State capacity' of the United States, when it comes to doing things that aren't making war on its own, or other people, was both rotten to begin with, and won't survive another four years of this regime.

Dysfunctional as the UK is, it's government is not stuck at a triple point of learned helpelessness, intentional sabotage and paralysis (the US is currently, among other things, doing its best to bring cured diseases back), and a deeply negative-sum culture.

I've heard that the United States was a magical land of milk and honey in this respect, back when 'competent bureaucracy' wasn't a swear word in it, but I understand that ended ~45 years ago. (With a few surviving holdouts, like the Fed)

Here is my take on this:

For those things, you probably need a lot of technical training and/or advanced degrees.

For fishing you just need to be more or less healthy and be able to follow instructions.

Most people are more or less healthy and are able to follow instructions. A small subset of those has advanced technical training and/or advanced degrees.

Therefore, fishing becomes important because a lot more people can do it, and those people vote.

It's not the Labour party that's campaigning to repeal this act.

You are being facetious. Repealing the current act does not mean that there would be no human rights or statute protecting them. Nobody is arguing for that.

The loudest voices calling for a scrap are exactly the people you DON'T want deciding what human rights you'll be "allowed".

And incitement to violence is, and always should be, unprotected speech - your silly "two tier kier" is informing me greatly that you're on the "they locked them up for hurty words!" bandwagon.

It’s literally the policy of this country to sentence white men to harsher custodial sentences with more chance of a custodial sentence than any other group, simply for the crime of being a white man. Are these the sorts of people you think should decide our rights?

If the government would do what people have been voting for for decades and end mass immigration and take real action on this ridiculous and purposeful misuse of the human rights act, then nobody would want to redact it.

But they won’t.

Please provide some evidence that you aren't coming from the same place as the neonazis, lest you be viewed as one because you're saying the exact same things as they do.

The sentencing council is an independant body, they are not the government, and the government has said "no, that's not right" so they're passing a bill to stop the new guidelines coming into effect: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-introduce-l...

It doesn't matter if it's set by parliament. It doens't matter if it's set by an independent body. The fact is that you will receive a harsher sentence for being a white male than you will if you belong to any other group. That is the policy. The Conservative government thought that was the right thing to do.

Apparently the new government 'will' introduce a bill to stop this, but they haven't yet. So it's still the policy.

Meanwhile it's legal and popular to discriminate against white men and women on the basis of being white - the government, police and military regularly put out jobs only for none whites. But if I were to put out a role only for whites, that's against the law. This discrimination extends to our top universities where it's becoming much more difficult (relative to population %) to obtain a spot as a white student.

That's why people think this country is now a two tier system, and they're right. Opportunities are being taken from those who have earned them and given to those who have not. Meritocracy and equality under the law is already long gone.

You probably didn't even realise that the sentencing guidelines were put on hold on the 31st of March.

Got any proof that the fall in white admission to university is down to discrimination, and not the relative poorer showing of the native population compared to first and second generation immigrants who put a higher premium on doing well at school?

Also can you respond with some of the "non whites only" job postings?

It's possible that some percentage of this is because of better academic achievement, though in that case it's confusing that Oxbridge are looking to remove exams due to underperformance of students of ethnic minority background in tests [2] - which would support my view that it is easier to study at these institutions if you aren't white. but it's also possible that the education system is systematically 'letting down' white boys, which is a view supported by an education committee report (and countless others) in 2021. [3]

- 31 white pilots were let go / held back / paid off so that the RAF could prioritise diversity hires [4], [5].

- Police roles only open to BME candidates [6] - there are countless other examples of this, various government departments have used 'positive action' racism clauses in the same way.

You're just regurgitating what Labour talking heads are saying. You probably didn't even realise that it's legal to be racist against white people. Perhaps you should read more of the news, so you can understand what's really going on.

[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/admissions-stat...

[1] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/file...

[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/oxford-cambridge-move-away-tradit...

[3] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...

[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66060490

[5] https://news.sky.com/story/raf-recruiters-were-advised-again...

[6] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/09/west-yorkshire-p...

On [3] it was found to be unlawful so your assertion that "It's legal to be racist against white people" careers headlong into reality that no, it's not.

As for the west yorkshire story, do you not want the police to be representative of the area they serve? There are far more white men than there are as a proportion of the local population.

It feels like you're grasping at straws here.

Personally I don't 'agree' with brexit, but it's the reality that we're in. In typical british fashion we're trying to stay friends with the EU, even though they basically hate us, while also trying to do trade with the rest of the world. Predictably we can't really do much of 2 without 1 becoming a problem (and vice versa). However 1 is currently our biggest trading partner (as a bloc, US as a country) so what have we done? Sat in the middle not doing anything radical hoping we can be best friends with everyone.

Take this Eitas Visa for example, this is literally just sowing resentment towards the EU in the UK. It benefits nobody and is totally insane, it's just making people hate the EU. Same with not being able to use the digital passport machines at airports.. why?? We're a pretty secure country, we have digital passports. Brexit happens and now every time I go to Europe, which is a lot I've got a 50/50 chance of waiting 3 hours at the border for someone to stamp my passport while the digital gates have no queue. That means I now have to arrive 3 hours early every time just in case. If I bring a tool for work I need to spend weeks of paperwork on something called a carnet so I end up buying there and throwing out.

At the moment we're trying to give security backing for Ukraine and you're asking us to give up our fishing rights for the honour of helping secure Europe.

I get it, actions have consequences, but the thing is that only a minority voted for Brexit, most of us didn't. Each year you're disenfranchising a new generation of would be Europeans with this path. To me it's all dreadfully regrettable, the whole things a mess.

It's impossible for us to 'come to our senses' while we get treated like this in my view.

The offer from the EU for a youth exchange program was rejected by the UK.

The fish thing looks like anti-EU nonsense. The anonymous source "hinted", whereas the people speaking on the record denied it.

Starmer ruled out joining the customs union, so blame him for the tool import paperwork.

> but the thing is that only a minority voted for Brexit,

So with such a failure of democracy, it's no wonder that the EU would require changes to the voting system (for example) before Britain can rejoin.

The EU doesn't want a half-in half-out Britain. It had that for decades.

Re the fish;

>But in an interview with POLITICO, the minister said EU member governments were unlikely to sign off on a security deal with the U.K. unless negotiations are also resolved on other “sensitive” issues, including access to British waters for European fishing fleets. A deal on fish would also help in “building trust” between London and Brussels, she added.(1)

It's just a combination of low turn out and a 52/48 marginal split, it does not mean we have a failure of democracy, that's a bit of a stretch.

(1) https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-eu-defense-pact-really-do...

You are not trying to secure Europe, you are trying to sell something to Europe. We would rather build capacity to make whatever you want to sell us ourselfs.

I agree we should work closely together, more so after US started dancing naked around burning brides. But everyone is looking into how to secure themselfs, without depending on 3rd party, and from EU's perspective UK is on the outside (even if not as crazy as US has become).

So then you won't be wanting our troops there for peace-keeping, something only ourselves and France have even offered. Nor any of our finance, we can stop giving billions a year to Ukraine as the EU want to take over?

Seriously it's ridiculously isolationist to be thinking like this. Not working with us just because we left your club is beyond mad.

It took serious damage to imports and an invasion for them to move during the last World War.

The argument here is they don't want to buy our weapons because we might decide to stop selling to them. Do you really see that as even vaguely likely in a war against Russia?

2. Thank you for confirming our fears. We decide not to buy something for you and now you go full crybaby and deny Ukrain help. Yes, you guys sound like totally dependable.

3. It's not isolationist and we do want (or should want to) cooperate with you, but Eu has just learnt what happens if you outsource your own defense and US elects idiot for the 2nd time. And lets not forget that you have political party on the rise, (Reform UK), that seems to be a bit too friendly with Trump, Farage supposedly received money from RT (russ sponsored Tv) in 2022. One of your previous PMs (Boris Johnson) had appointed Russian oligarch as Lord and is said to have ditched his own security to party with Russian intelligence officers while he was in office. So, if eu and russia come to blows, whos side will UK be on? Depends on what party is in government.

But that isn’t what I asked.

Or decide that Brexit was never going to work the way those who peddled it said it would.

As of time of writing this comment, I believe both are at 10%? Of course that could change at any time.

> enshrine freedom of speech in law

ECHR already does this. I presume there's some other weird definition of free speech going on here like unrestricted use of the N-word on TV or something.

Fishing distributed about 1 billion in household income in the uk.

Fishing supports about 12.000 direct jobs plus 5.000 in related industries in the UK.

Warhammer has about 3000 employees GLOBALLY. Trickle down is not really present here.

Businesses that do not distribute wealth in the general population are much less relevant than those that do. Taxes are nice but businesses are good at avoiding them ( especially via Ireland ), whereas income tax is the major supporter of our states.

For example, what about the people who work in Warhammer adjacent companies (plastics production, importing and labelling to name just a few, but also freelancers in publishing, illustration and design ) who would not appear in the 3000 Warhammer employees, but who earn the majority of their livelihood from Warhammer.

For a period my brother dated someone from the family that supplied grey plastic to Games Workshop - they probably had over 100 permanent employees, and were a 'small' regional company.

US citizens often fail to realise that earnings of an industry are almost irrelevant, it is how much said industry distributes into society that matters, both for people and the state.

Classical industries like mining and steel distribute a significant percentage of their revenue.

Digital businesses does not, neither does warhammer.

The interesting point is, that in the end the value of the money digital good as as well as plastic toys are measured in is based on physically realised wealth: Without physical businesses, the money warhammer is evaluated on would be ethereal.

None of those are state capacity issues.

Those are "State is pointing a gun at anyone who would fix them" issues.

Friendly reminder that 95%+ of the UK railway system was built by private for profit companies, with state involvement being primarily limited to not preventing it from happening.

All of these issues are 100% self inflicted by the state getting in the way.

All that needs to happen for them to fix themselves is to stop actively preventing private individuals from fixing them.

Do you honestly think private enterprise could raise the financial and political capital to build a new regional rail line through a major city like London or Manchester?

They've had 30 years to make it work, and have failed.

Conversely, full privatization of the railways with no restrictions would instantly result in all the rails within 50 miles of London being replaced with lucrative housing.

The elite/ruling class need to be replaced with the more capable and smarter ones

I wonder how deeply connected all this politics of nostalgia is to the fact that birth rates have been declining for decades and populations are older.

Given the older population and the country’s history as a bygone empire I bet nostalgia is thicker in England than the US, but US side there sure is a lot of it.

A lot of MAGA is about making the country the way it was when boomers were kids (50s, 60s) to prime age adults (80s to early 90s).

There’s even a hint of genX nostalgia too. A while back I was hearing some IDW type railing about how “woke” killed comedy and it hit me that there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for the 90s when comedy and pop culture were all about being an edgelord. The fact that edgelording is "out" is blamed on "woke" and they lament that "comedy is dead" etc. I'm not sure how much "woke" has to do with it. I think... well... edgelording is just out.

Change reminds people of their mortality and it always generates a backlash. You’re not young anymore.

It's way more profitable for me to work than to sleep but I still sleep.

The good news is though that if EG steel manufacturing moves to China and starts using cheap coal fired energy and selling back to the UK, it helps the UK meet its Net Zero targets.

Dollars don’t vote, people do!

[US-wise] Coal and cereal grain agriculture automation have also seen ~98% drops in employment while raising production levels. The industry doesn't have to disappear monetarily for the jobs to be gone.