panick21_
And the issue is that many of these are booked out and have backlog. So even when they return to flight, its years before they can take on new contract.
And many of them can't fly many of the required missions for NASA or DoD anyway.
Nova has already been renamed Nova Pathfinder and is likely only going to be flown a few times before they will switch to a larger rocket.
Land rent-seeking is still incredibly important. Saying all modern problems are from platforms is silly considering that most people spend far more of their budget on their living situation, compared to paying money to apple or google.
And its much easier to switch from apple to google or other platforms.
> of course there was no talk of Geoism when land rents were the main problem
There was the whole time. Who are you talking about?
Who made discussing georgism illigal?
> lesser evil of land rent-seeking
Its crazy to suggests its a lesser evil.
Since when is a fucking roof for storage in your car revolutionary? Its only revolutionary if you are brain-rotted in accepting pickup trucks as the norm.
Ok, doesn't change my point.
And Musk himself said that geo-fanced self driving isn't self driving.
> HW3 gets a supervised version which is the best they can do with the hardware that they shipped, it’s unfortunate
Its quite literally a scam and it should be viewed as such. Musk said that since like 2017 sold cars where he advertised this feature.
Also, even HW4, current FSD Beta is nowhere near actually self driving or anywhere near that is can independently go out or even make money for you while you work.
So its quite clear that HW4 will not reach that level either, so we just keep kicking that down the road while having essentially scammed all buyers since then and refused them the ability to get their money back at the very least.
And they just moved it back another year in the last call. But sure next year he wont pull the football.
> Apple has a version of Apple Intelligence which is neutered on older devices, presumably because of hardware limitations.
I don't know about Apple, I at least haven't heard about them claiming that the old phones would be able to do some incredible things.
The issue is that you can't have 'Later No Harm' and 'Favorite Betrayal' at the same time.
Star Vote scores high on both but it can't be perfect.
See: https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s10602-022-09389-3?sh...
PS for those that don't know:
STAR Voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff) works in two stages: 1. Voters score candidates from 0 to 5. 2. The two candidates with the highest total scores become finalists. 3. The finalist preferred by more voters wins.
So it combines score voting and runoff. Meaning it favors centrist candidates that are prefered by most people over somebody that can turn out the base.
And people on Hardware 3 should collectively sue, because they will never, ever, ever, ever get FSD fully working on that. But instead of admiting that and paying people back (if they want) they continue to release small updates to pretendent its still possible. Musk is known for not giving a shit of supporting old shit, he looks at only the future always.
Because those ultra far right wing parties really care about science and long term technology development. They also super love capitalism. I mean ignore that they want to destroy free trade, destroy the international order, dismantle equality before the law that is the bases of capitalist labor markets, that they are incredibly and openly corrupt and make it clear that contracts are given out based on loyalty rather then any serious evaluation of technical quality.
The far right wants a old school hierarchical society, based on loyalty and traditional values, not capitalism. Capitalism is literally what has opposed this world view for 100s of years.
The list goes on, if you actually believe that these people are pro-tech, pro-capitalism you are fucking delusional.
He is ultra far right wing and he did the salute as a 'joke', but even if you want to ignore that and argue it away, his support of AfD is 1000X worse. He actually supports a party that literally wants to overthrow German democracy like the actual Nazi party did historically.
He also associated and support far-right wing skinheads in Britain and moved from the far-right reform to the even further far ultra right 'Restore' party in Britain.
I don't know how anybody can justify unless they themselves are a far right extremist.
He is ultra far right wing and he did the salute as a 'joke', but even if you want to ignore that, his support of AfD is 1000X worse.
He also associated and support far-right wing skinheads in Britain and moved from the far-right reform to the even further far ultra right 'Restore' party in Britain.
I don't know how anybody can justify unless they themselves are a far right extremist.
He is ultra far right wing and he did the salute as a 'joke', but even if you want to ignore that, his support of AfD is 1000X worse.
He also associated and support far-right wing skinheads in Britain and moved from the far-right reform to the even further far ultra right 'Restore' party in Britain.
I don't know how anybody can justify unless they themselves are a far right extremist.
Maybe among well-informed people who closely follow immigration policy, but not necessarily among the broader Conservative base.
This illustrates my point: much of the political debate about immigration is driven by perceptions rather than actual policy outcomes. Johnson talked about restricting immigration, which was popular with his base, but many voters had little understanding of what his government was actually doing. Literally just anti-immigration vibes.
And the political scandals that ultimately brought him down were largely unrelated to immigration. And he would have been the best for the Tories to have a chance in the election.
> By which metrics that they should all care about has it been doing well for people of the existing nations in europe?
Nice attempt at shifting the goalposts while not so subtly implying that immigration is responsible for all these other issues.
That wasn't the argument. The argument was about whether anti-immigration sentiment and political support for anti-immigration politicians actually correlate with immigration levels and policy outcomes.
> I listed some examples of ones that aren't so great in an earlier comment in this comment tree.
You mean the racist rants based on completely made up stuff or serious misinterpretation of a few data-points while completely ignoring the much more important much more actual relevant issues?
My poor little victim.
Yes, that's my position. None of those things are directly dependent on domestic manufacturing.
> Shrewd investments make productivity, and the public is generally incentivised to make these investments unlike owners
The history of British industry would point to the opposite. But there are counterexamples as well. In general, a government-owned industry faces much less pressure to make difficult choices because it can continue running losses for a long time. If, for example, an industry is not competitive, cutting wages might be the only way it survives to fight another day, but politically this is often impossible, creating a permanent structural deficit.
Meanwhile, many private owners do make smart decisions, and these often preserve at least some significant employment in the country of origin.
And making "shrewd investments" with the long term in mind doesn't really go well with a political system focused on election cycles, the media, and parties trying to undo each other's successes or failures.
British public industries demonstrated exactly these patterns. They were often structurally underdeveloped, leading to low labour productivity. That is not something you can fix with limited protectionism.
> who can simply move the money to low-cost countries
For many industries, there isn't a simple investment you can make to reduce labour costs sufficiently. If you want to preserve some of those industries, you will need to subsidise their higher labour costs through taxes, tariffs, or higher consumer prices. That hurts the competitiveness of your other industries.
If you have the right tax regime and a company headquartered in your country, moving some production abroad isn't necessarily a bad outcome. If that keeps the company internationally competitive while retaining valuable functions domestically, it can be a perfectly reasonable arrangement.
> Of course, the devil is in the detail, and this may be a sound decision (e.g. if you had other more critical industries in need of capital). But since these decisions are made by private owners, and not by the public, such cases are exceedingly rare.
"The public" doesn't make these decisions. Bureaucrats or politicians do. And those decisions are only indirectly influenced by elections every few years, with many layers of indirection.
It's almost impossible to express differentiated views. For example, I might want airlines to be private, the steel industry to be private, but telecommunications to remain public. It's unlikely that any political party will represent exactly those preferences.
I'm Swiss, so we get to vote on many more things than people do in the UK, especially individual policies. But even so, that's a tiny fraction of all the choices a government makes.
If you assume a much larger public sector, actual democratic control can become even weaker.
Politicians are often poorly informed about the details. The UK is a good example, where parliamentarians regularly get appointed to ministerial positions in fields in which they have little experience.
Politicians also prefer to argue over headline-grabbing industries and are more likely to advocate whatever is popular in the short term than to work out what's best for each individual manufacturing business.
Alternatively, decisions are made by bureaucrats, over whom the public often has very little direct influence because of the many layers of indirection. Singapore developed a powerful technocratic bureaucracy that performed extremely well in many areas. Its senior civil servants had considerable internal authority.
But such structures can also fail badly and become deeply undemocratic. It's a sword without a hilt in many ways.
> Limited strategic protectionism
You're picking out a few limited examples while ignoring the broader trends of economic liberalisation in these countries. And you're pointing mainly to arguable successes while ignoring failures.
Norway, for example, tried to protect and develop its domestic electronics industry, but much of that industry ultimately failed to remain competitive internationally.
The UK also maintained substantial protectionism and industrial subsidies, even under Thatcher. British Leyland is an obvious example. The company continued receiving extensive government support throughout the 1980s. Britain also maintained restrictions on Japanese car imports.
Often, governments privatised companies only after absorbing their losses or providing further subsidies, undermining some of the supposed fiscal benefits of privatisation.
The US poured enormous amounts of money into its aerospace and computing industries through military spending and government-funded research. It also maintained extensive protectionism in sectors such as shipping and agriculture.
The US also had a major trade conflict with Japan over semiconductors, leading to measures such as the 1986 US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement and government support for SEMATECH.
But military R&D, strategic procurement, tariffs, and subsidies for declining industries are very different policies. Some were highly successful, while others imposed substantial costs without producing internationally competitive industries.
The point is that protectionism and government intervention were hardly absent from these countries. The question is what those interventions actually achieved, at what cost, and whether the same resources could have been invested more productively elsewhere.
> If not from industry, then where does the Wealth of Nations come? If banking and finance service only foreign industry
You are aware that there are other services besides finance?
But yes, finance is part of it, and it's a great business if you can get it. It provides high-paying jobs, is relatively clean, and requires comparatively little physical infrastructure. And established financial centres can maintain their positions for centuries.
You can use that wealth well, as Switzerland has done in many respects, or you can concentrate financial activity in one city and allow much of the resulting wealth to be captured by landlords.
There is also agriculture. Look at the Netherlands, which developed a highly competitive agricultural sector despite having historically faced many of the same geographical and economic constraints as Britain.
There is also mining and resource extraction, which can be managed well or badly. Britain did a lot to keep its coal sector thriving, a questionable long term choice.
Software is generally classified under services too. Along with other kinds of design and art.
> No it doesn't, but I hope that it at least has led you to consider the possibility.
The Netherlands, for example, has a manufacturing share of GDP only moderately higher than Britain's, nowhere near enough by itself to explain the difference in living standards.
Let's create a counterexample. Assume that all of Britain's industrial policies and its manufacturing trajectory remained exactly the same, but that Britain had instead:
- Invested in railway infrastructure like Switzerland (even assuming private operation), and generally spent public money more efficiently rather than having some of the world's highest infrastructure construction costs.
- Invested in cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands (which is relatively inexpensive compared with major road and rail projects).
- Invested in nuclear power, electrification, and better insulation like France, instead of following its actual energy policies.
- Adopted a land value tax to combat landlordism rather than relying on Stamp Duty, and generally developed a sensible tax system instead of one still burdened by 19th-century structures.
- Introduced proper devolution so that local areas could address their own problems arising from deindustrialisation and invest in local infrastructure.
- Avoided creating a planning system that makes construction extraordinarily difficult, while subsequently reducing public housing provision without adequately addressing the restrictions on private construction. This includes problems with green belts and other housing policies.
- While we're at it, adopted better zoning laws like Japan.
- Developed a better-organised welfare state, like Denmark.
- Adopted a better pension system, like the Netherlands.
- Given the NHS a stronger focus on preventative care, alongside government policies promoting healthy food and healthier lifestyles in general. There are many things the NHS doesn't do particularly well. Sweden spends a broadly comparable share of GDP on healthcare but achieves better outcomes on several important measures.
- Adopted a voting system that better represents what people actually want, rather than one that overwhelmingly favours two major parties.
- Avoided creating such an extensive surveillance and policing apparatus.
- Dealt with inflation more effectively and earlier.
- Developed a better apprenticeship-based vocational education system, like Germany or Switzerland.
- And, as a fun bonus, not followed the US into the invasion of Iraq.
All these things could have been done even if you assume exactly the same trajectory for manufacturing.
I deliberately picked mostly real policies from other countries to illustrate where Britain could have made different choices.
Taken together, these changes could plausibly have brought British living standards much closer to those of the more prosperous European countries.
You're overly focused on manufacturing. Most of these problems are not directly related to manufacturing.
> You don't think since the Boris Wave there has been a surge in politicians taking anti-immigration positions?
That's not what we are arguing about. No question that the avg. level of opposition to immigration has gone up.
But interestingly again this is not actually correlated with how many immigrants are arriving, and the popularity of these politicians isn't actually correlated with how good they actually did on immigration.
Boris himself being in power while there was a lot of immigration but he remained popular with the base.
Because most people don't have any actual understanding of immigration issues or look at any kind of data.
My point is that the manufacturing difference is not the primary explanation for the differences in living standards, and even if it were, your policy conclusions would not automatically follow.
First, the reason Copenhagen and many cities in the Netherlands or Switzerland are nicer places to live than most British cities has a great deal to do with investments in infrastructure, cycling, railways, metros and public spaces, alongside better urban planning. These things directly improve living standards. Britain doesn't need more steel mills to build cycling infrastructure or run a competent railway system.
The same applies to other areas where Britain performs poorly despite spending comparable amounts of money. Does Britain pay more for infrastructure because it privatised its steel industry? Of course not. Countries with much smaller steel industries manage to build infrastructure more efficiently. The problem is how Britain plans, finances and delivers infrastructure, not whether the government owns steelworks.
Healthcare is another example. Britain spends around 11% of GDP on healthcare, almost exactly the same proportion as Sweden, yet Sweden achieves considerably better outcomes on several important measures. Sweden spends more per person because it is wealthier, but pointing to manufacturing GDP doesn't explain why Britain gets worse outcomes from a similarly large share of its economy.
As we are talking about steel, let's examine that example more closely.
British steel had been losing its relative international competitiveness for decades before the 1970s. By then it faced serious structural problems, including outdated facilities, excess capacity and poor productivity.
And Britain did not simply refuse to intervene. The steel industry was already nationalised, and even the Conservative government launched a £3 billion modernisation programme in 1973. Successive governments spent billions more on investment, restructuring and covering losses.
Britain committed vastly more public money to its steel industry than Sweden did in absolute terms, and enormous sums even relative to the size of the industry. The idea that Britain simply failed to support steel while Sweden generously financed its own industry is historically absurd.
Sweden certainly intervened, notably by creating the majority-state-owned SSAB in 1978, consolidating production and providing state financing. But Sweden was already in a much stronger industrial position by 1970. Its restructuring was not a case of rescuing an industry with the same accumulated productivity problems as Britain's.
And what actually happened in Britain? British Steel eventually became profitable and internationally competitive before privatisation, but only after extensive modernisation, plant closures and enormous employment reductions. Its workforce fell from roughly 166,000 in 1979–80 to 52,000 in 1986–87.
That's a reduction of almost 70%.
So yes, the British government did manage to rescue a competitive steel industry. What it could not do was preserve anything close to its previous employment levels. Sweden also closed facilities and reduced employment as part of its restructuring.
How many more billions should Britain have spent trying to preserve those jobs? Another £10 billion? And what exactly would that have achieved? Would it have made those factories internationally competitive, or merely subsidised their losses for another decade?
Those billions could also have been invested in housing, infrastructure, education, research or entirely new industries. Government money has an opportunity cost, something your argument largely ignores.
This also illustrates why focusing exclusively on what happened after 1970 misses much of the story. Britain entered that period with serious structural disadvantages that had developed over decades.
The same goes for manufacturing more generally. Yes, Britain had a much larger manufacturing share of GDP in 1970, but so did most other industrialised countries. And British manufacturing's productivity problems were already glaringly apparent.
Historical OECD estimates suggest British manufacturing labour productivity in 1970 was only around 59% of Sweden's, and substantially below West Germany's as well. Britain had a large manufacturing sector, but it was already far less productive than several of its major competitors.
As Japan and other industrial economies became increasingly competitive, these weaknesses became harder to sustain. A large manufacturing sector is not necessarily a successful manufacturing sector.
That is central to my disagreement with your argument. You focus almost entirely on governments failing to protect industries, without adequately considering why those industries were struggling in the first place.
Governments can nationalise failing factories, protect them from imports and subsidise production. What they cannot do is make those factories internationally competitive simply by changing who owns them. Maintaining uncompetitive production indefinitely means diverting resources away from potentially more productive activities.
And that is not what Sweden did. Sweden consolidated its steel industry, shut down uncompetitive production, reduced employment, modernised facilities and concentrated increasingly on higher-value products. Its restructuring was about improving competitiveness, not preserving the industrial structure of 1970.
The Nordics, Switzerland and the Netherlands also experienced market liberalisation, privatisation and other policies commonly associated with neoliberalism. You present these countries as though they collectively rejected market-oriented economic policies in favour of protectionism and state control. They didn't.
Most of the successful manufacturing companies in these countries are private enterprises competing internationally. They benefit from education, infrastructure, research, skilled workforces and functioning institutions. Some received direct government support, but that doesn't make protectionism or public ownership the primary explanation for their success.
Switzerland is a particularly obvious counterexample. It has exceptionally high manufacturing value added per capita, comparatively low government spending and an overwhelmingly privately owned, internationally integrated industrial economy. Its success is hardly evidence that countries need to nationalise major industries or protect them from foreign competition.
France provides the opposite example. It has a long history of extensive state intervention, nationalisation and active industrial policy, yet its manufacturing share of GDP is relatively close to Britain's. If state intervention and protectionism were the decisive factors, how do you explain that?
And Britain is not even a particularly low-spending country. Government expenditure is broadly comparable to the Netherlands and Denmark. Sweden spends more, but much of that difference reflects its broader welfare state and public services rather than industrial subsidies.
You repeatedly point to countries with stronger manufacturing sectors and attribute their success to industrial policy, while ignoring the many other things those countries do differently. You also ignore countries that pursued extensive industrial intervention without achieving comparable manufacturing outcomes.
That's selecting examples to fit your explanation, rather than testing whether the explanation actually holds.
So here are my main points:
- Most of Britain's living-standard problems are not explained by a lack of manufacturing. Britain has serious problems with infrastructure, housing, public transport, planning and public-service delivery. These are overwhelmingly questions of government policy, institutional effectiveness and how resources are used. A larger manufacturing sector would not automatically fix them.
- British manufacturing's problems were already deeply entrenched before 1970. Its productivity disadvantage was substantial, and governments spent enormous sums attempting to modernise industries such as steel. Restructuring ultimately restored competitiveness, but required massive employment reductions. The idea that insufficient government protection was the principal problem ignores much of the historical evidence.
- A competitive manufacturing sector is not primarily the result of protectionism. It depends on productivity, investment, innovation, infrastructure, education, research, energy costs, labour-market institutions and a functioning economy more generally. Government policy matters enormously, but owning factories and restricting imports are only a small part of the possible policy toolkit.
- Nationalisation and protectionism often fight the symptoms rather than the causes. If an industry is uncompetitive, public ownership does not magically make it productive. Subsidising existing production is not the same thing as building a competitive industry. Sweden understood that distinction, and British Steel's eventual recovery required exactly the same kind of restructuring.
I am not arguing against industrial policy. I am arguing against treating manufacturing value added per capita as the primary measure of economic success and then assuming that more protectionism, state ownership and subsidies are the obvious solutions.
The fact that Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands produce more manufacturing value added per capita than Britain is interesting. But it does not establish that this is the primary reason for their higher living standards, or that their manufacturing success was primarily caused by the policies you advocate.
Hence you have places like Fox news run coverage about cities all the time, telling you how they are lawless places full of crime. Scaring rural people about what all these immigrants will do once they final start to move to bum-fuck nowhere.
You seem the same pattern in most democracies.
There is no correlation between contact with immigrants and anti-immigrant voting.
But the method of increasing speed limits because everybody is breaking the current limit is clearly just bad engineering practice.
You start by over-designing and over-building the road, then you add spit limits to slow it down, and then you realize that everybody still speeds and you up the speed limit.
That just evidence of a broken culture around safety and road design. And people are paying for it with their lives.
The living standard was not actually high during this period. Unless you love dying early and breathing coal smoke.
And this didn't fall apart in the 70s, that just an rewrite of history. It had been falling apart for much, much longer. In the 70s they just had to reckon with it. In the Post-WW2 they had the advantage of much of the rest of the world being destroyed, but as Japan and Germany recovered, they out competed Britain in almost major industry.
But Britain could have done much to improve standard of living continuously even without the manufacturing dominance of 100 years earlier. Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands aren't major steel producers that are 'the workshop of the world' but the standard of living went up. Britain had the chance to do the same thing, but they didn't.
His growth would go to him and then he would graceful give some 'alms' to the 'deserving poor' meaning only 'good white christens who do not advocate for anything he doesn't like'.
Peter Thiel is literally human scum of the worst kind. He literally has his hand in all destruction of modern western society, and is trying to go back to 11th century emperor aligned with a compliant pope, but extend this over the whole world.
Individual examples are results of specific circumstances and not indication of a universal trend.
That said, its also wrong to measure benefits only by capita GDP.
The question is sometimes, were they terrible run or did they just suffer from bad investment?
Because often they got little money but also had universal service requirements.
Badly privatizing these companies made things worse, not better. Just nationalizing monopolizes is a bad idea, as well as just smashing them into 100s of pieces and leaving behind a mess (see railways).
Also those countries that did things well, see Telecoms in the Nordics, or rail in Switzerland often did it state lead.
And ironically, for example rail required more subsidies after privatization. While also losing the amazing research and forward thinking organization that was British Rail.
I would argue improving these national industries would have been far easier and more successful then privatizing them. And ironically often cheaper.
And its in no way going to solve any of the actual long term energy issues in the UK.
For example, if you assume limited government resources, massive investment in North Sea fossil is just inherently stupid.
Allowing some private exploration and production would be tiny and barley relevant to solve any problem. The right wing people who advocate this as some kind of 'solution' are more delusional then any 'leftist'.
And nuclear had no chance what so ever in the post market liberalization world. Those sudo-market are not design for that kind of thing.
Nuclear made most sense in the area of centralized utilities, but most nations didn't use it well for various reasons.
We don't really need new technology in nuclear, I mean it would be nice but its not really needed.
France has made an absolutely amazing deal by investing in nuclear. If you calculated all the benefits is actually insane how beneficial it was.
Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.