The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline.
In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.
The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.
Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.
Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.
Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.
There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).
Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.
We are punching way above our weight in arts (disproportionally many Hollywood actors and directors are British), complex engineering (off the top of my head, Rolls Royce, Sheffield Forgemasters, and BAE are good examples), and recently building alliances (Japan's JASDF just made their first European deployment in 71 years). We are unusually constitutionally resilient, still maintaining control of the legislature over the executive, which is becoming rarer and rarer in the west.
But below all of that is bubbling energy and drive to fix and improve things. I saw it at startup meetups, I saw it in thinktanks, I saw it at Labour Conference. I see it in your comment.
There are massive risks to navigate, but I'm optimistic about this country's future.
You can but that doesn't neccesarily mean you should.
I tried it for a while, after seeing my Eve Online friend skipping through tasks at a rate of knots without any mouse movement. My god the amount of tab pressing I had to do to get anything done was crippling. I might have to jump through 15 times to get to something that would take me less than a second to click.
Right, but not all, which is what makes unplugging your mouse from Windows painful. On Linux, I often forget to plug my mouse in and only notice when I want to play a game or something.
The only reason I ended up persuing Electronic Engineering at University, or eventually becoming an FPGA Engineer, was because I spent way too many hours playing with redstone in Minecraft as a teenager. Seeing a Verilog compiler for Minecraft is like seeing my career come full circle.
OK. I thought feedback was more like that analog thing in electricity where you plug thing into itself and it amplifies but I guess it's also used in memory circuts
* Feedback causes memory-like effects (e.g. reverb and oscillation whine in audio systems).
* Besides maybe memresistors, memory is pretty much always implemented via positive feedback (i.e. >unity loop gain) plus some sort of saturation to prevent exponential growth (which you typically get for free in physical systems if you can keep them from exploding).
Furthermore, digital behavior is an emergent effect from analog physical systems that are designed to be bistable. Digital systems will always make use of analog physical processes "under the hood".
I believe this used to be a thing absolutely, but something seem to change ~2012 where they seemingly went from some of the least reliable luxury cars on the market to some of the most - but the hangover from 50 years of unreliability will plague them for years to come I'm sure. The tests and standards they need to pass to get out of the design and manufacturing departments are pretty staggering now (compared to the tire kick tests they used to), and general reports from mechanics in forums I frequent and people I meet at car meets is that a modernish JLR will keep on ticking provided they're serviced every year.
Honestly, I've been eyeing up a 2015 Jaguar F-Type for a while now. It was a £85k car depending on trimming that you can pick up for £20k now with a V6 supercharged VS. An old-school style coupe, without all the modern ADAS beeping and handholding, that will just plod away if you look after it seems very appealing.
I wish you luck. I wouldn't buy the 2015 unless they've documented the timing service and give you a warranty. And don't park it outside. I'm not exaggerating when I say (I believe I've even shared this in a previous comments years ago) that every single Jaguar I've ever serviced has had wiring damage due to rodents.
I believe it's something to do with the coating they use on their wiring and harnesses. But I never had a Jaguar in my shop that didn't suffer from some type of wiring damage as a result of rodents chewing on the wiring.
I believe it's something to do with the coating they use on their wiring and harnesses
Soy-based wiring insulation. And it’s not just Jag/LR, Honda had enough of a problem that they wrap their insulation in a tape with capsaicin (active ingredient in peppers) to keep the mice away.
Isn't this common? I have had rodents eat wires in my car 3 times in the last 5 year. (It's not a Jag or LR). My friends have complained about this happening with their vehicles too. Or has there been any new development of some kind of "rodent-resistant" wiring?
Honda makes an anti-rodent tape that's designed for wrapping wiring. It's loaded with capsaicin so any critter that bites down will quickly decide to stop. It's possible other manufacturers are exploring similar ideas.
It may be common, but in my ~20 years of pushing wrenches, I've only ever seen that issues on Jaguars and Land Rovers. Unless we're talking about long abandoned cars that have sat outside for years.
I had a 2015 f type. The day before it was to be transferred to the new owner, the engine smoked out on the highway. I don’t recall why, might have been an oil leak.
There's a guy in New Zealand I met who spent the last 30 years rewilding what was previously agriculture herding land. He said his biggest frustration with land owners wasn't the push back on what he was doing, but the ignorance as to what could be achieved. Every single person he spoke to told him explicitely if the land was left to go to nature, it would be nothing but gorse and it was a waste of good grazing land. The actual result was a return of native rain forest with levels of species diversity that were almost 60% of untouched rainforest, which is pretty incredibly in such a short amount of time.
What one might contribute to malice can normally be attributed to ignorance. I think the political class in the UK is just completely bifurcated from the public (not as much as the Tories were, but more than I though Labour would be), such that every decision senior Labour leaders are making is lauded in progressively smaller circles they keep and they're oblivious to the reality of the situation. They just don't feel the condemnation of the general public. I think current Labour genuinely thinks their popularity is higher than it is polling, and that they're doing what people want.
To caveate this, I am a Labour member (with the goal of advising tech policy such that they don't send our tech industry off a sharp cliff). I've spoken to a few in the cabinet now about growth and industrial policy, and there's no appetite for engagement outside of their think-tanks. I go to the conferences today, and in contrast to the Tory government days where the main topic of conversation was "what do people want" and "how do we gain seats in the election", it's now all navel-gazing about how "well" their policies poll (vs how well the party does, as if they're the same thing). It's baffling how out of touch the current power brokers are regarding the danger Labour are in. There's rose-tinted glasses, and then there's obsidian-tinted horse blinders.
Labour thought it was a good idea to follow Corbyn. I don’t mean that an insult or a gotcha. But it was not a well thought out plan.
The part about only listening to their own think tanks is weird. Academia leans left. American conservatives are suspicious of advice not from their think-tanks, but that’s because it’s hostile territory. The Democrats treat the university/expert/consultant class as free labor.
I don’t mean to be critical of your country especially given who is running America. But we do watch, and it has an impact here. Fear of an American Corbyn is one reason Democrats aren’t veering left.
Also I don’t know if this is related, but the fact that the US is about to install Tony Blair to head Gaza should make you rethink Labour’s capacity for thought.
Its interesting that you mention Corbyn when if you look into the data Starmer got much lower voters than he did but the UK system works in strange ways. I should mention I was one of those that refused to vote for Corbyn on the allegations of anti-semitism but those later turned out to be untrue.
One thing I have to ask about the democrats and a fear of Corbynism is shutting down primaries really and effective way to prevent one? Voters aren't stupid and the not being able to freely choose their candidate since Obama isn't going to help.
Yeah I believe there was a smear campaign - some of it based on some definite instances - Corbyn could have survived but I don't think he had the political chops. I think he probably had too much integrity to do what really needed to do to stay in power and become PM.
As your closest neighbor I think about how things could have been.
Malice is a strong word. I think they (because as another commenter points out, he can't do this entirely alone) primarily just don't care, and secondarily, just assume there's going to be a reward. They aren't told by some shadowy cabal there's going to be a reward, they just assume it.
It's not an unreasonable assumption either. Nick Clegg did seemingly get rewarded for tanking the lib Dems. The ones lower in the party hierarchy will also have seen plenty of examples of pyrrhic loyalty being rewarded.
What modern parties effectively teach - UK Labour is just one of many examples, not even the only example in the UK - is that the supreme political virtue is loyalty to decisions taken in rooms you weren't invited to. That, they think, will eventually get them invited to those rooms.
The sad thing is that whether the rooms actually exist or not, the result is much the same.
"Don't obey in advance" is Tim Snyder's first rule against tyranny. While that is a great moral rule to follow in tyrannies, all organizations want people to obey beforehand, whether tyrannies or not. It's called showing initiative, doing what's needed without having to be told explicitly, and no organisation can function without it.
But in organizations with opaque power structures, where it's expected that decisions are taken unaccountably ("Noen har snakket sammen", loosely, "There has been discussion", used to be an ironic phrase in the Norwegian Labour Party), people may easily slip into obeying in advance a tyrant who doesn't even exist. They're trying to please the responsible people who are surely in charge somewhere nebulously above them in the hierarchy, but those people don't exist, it's bullshitters like Starmer all the way to the top.
Snyder's had his first rule, but I have a first rule too, which I keep repeating, and that is that powerful people believe in all the stupid things regular people believe in. They just act differently on the beliefs. A common person who thinks covid was an ethnically targeted bioweapon rants about it online and gets banned from Reddit. A powerful person who believes it, thinks "it's important that we too get such a weapon, and don't trust experts who say it can't be done, they probably just have scruples". A common person who thinks a Jewish cabal rules the world maybe pesters his relatives with it all day. A powerful person who believes it - well, he's more likely to do something like what Starmer has been doing the last decade. You don't try to fight Bilderberg, obviously, you try to get invited to it. Once you do, (like e.g Jens Stoltenberg was) you probably get disappointed and try to figure out who the real competent ones behind them too are, and how to join them - but you're not terribly disappointed, because on the way up you've been rewarded by all the others who thought they'd be rewarded for supporting someone like you.
I think to understand Starmer is to understand that he comes from a public prosecutors position and he still thinks like it. Which is why everything that screens "justice" is highest on his agenda, this means that privacy-invading things are justified if law & order can catch more perpetrators.
Also explains why he is totally helpless wrt the economy (not his forte).
Interesting comment. I don't think Starmer's trying to get invited to a Shadowy Jewish Cabal, though. That's... a bit out there.
Simpler take: The middle ground has been hollowed out. The old method (appeal to the centre) does not appear to be working. Starmer's throwing stunt policies at the wall to try to get some purchase.
It certainly is. And he'd maybe use more classy words for it, if he ever could be convinced to talk about his sincere beliefs. But as I said, I'm fully convinced that powerful people believe all the out there things that regular people believe. We've seen so many examples of it over the decades, and it's otherwise very hard to explain why Starmer would keep doing things which are neither a popular thing to do or the right thing to do.
The simpler take you propose doesn't work for me, because "throwing things at the wall" suggest unpredictability to me, and Starmer has been very predictable if you assume what I have been assuming for a few years now. His actions are not the actions of someone who would try anything, quite the opposite.
Yeah, there's normal political corruption and graft, and then there are some who go above and beyond, taking unnecessarily destructive actions that don't even appear to benefit them in any visible way. Usually you can say, "So-and-so did X because Y," even if you disagree with X or think Y is a bad reason. You can at least see the motive.
When the action is clearly going to hurt their political career, and there's no indication that it will put money in their pockets, and they don't even make much of an attempt to claim they're fighting for a principle, yet they clearly have a purpose in mind and keep doubling-down on it, you have to start looking for a motive somewhere else. "They hate their own people" comes to mind, but that's not really an answer because it still leaves you looking for the reason why they hate their own people. Not all leaders do, after all.
Gut biome is important for legume consumption. The first few months I went to a plant based diet my digestion was hell. At some point I reached a turning point though, and my gut health became even better than before. My flatulence was so much worse when I was eating meat regularly - often room clearing.
For me it means I reduced my meat consumption by about 95%. As far as I see it that’s 95% as good as being completely vegetarian, which is a pretty good score!
I usually like the tongue in cheek term “fake vegetarian”.
Humans are quite capable of digesting a diet rich in legumes just like all our other close relatives in the great ape kingdom. They subsist on a 85-99% plant based diet, primarily of fruits, nuts, and seeds. We have clearly adapted to eat more meat as our bodies changed to master running and throwing for hunting, but we are still a variant of great apes at the end of the day.
I surf a lot, and I've lost count of the amount of times I've had to save people from a riptide. They're always completely exhausted, barely keeping head above water, and minutes from getting pulled out to sea with no energy left to swim around the rip and back to shore. I pulled out a couple on deaths door on their honeymoon just a couple weeks ago - that could have crippled their families. It's frustrating the lack of awareness people have around the sea. Unless you know the shore you're swimming on intimately, or the sea is flat with no swell, there's no guarantee you'll be able to fight the sea if you're further out than up to your waist in water.
Around here flat sea is the killer as it usually is a sign of strong undercurrents. To the uninitiated it simply looks more calm. It can pull you down for real.
If you just float to open sea (typical tourist in a dingy or paddle board) you might need to get a "fun" helicopter ride from the friendly sea rescue services. Most people tend not to know that if the emergency is due to gross stupidity they will be billed afterwards (they are kind - so that is rare). Their rates are however significantly higher than regular tour operators.
So I do agree the lack of awareness is frustrating. If the locals stop swimming you should too.
But... Send me down under to Australia.and I would probably die in 5 minutes. Everything seems to be dangerous and/or poisonous there.
We are all to some degree "tourists" at some point in time with all that entails.
Why are riptides safe for surfers? Is it because you can just take a break on your surfboard and float? I would think getting dragged out to sea on a surfboard would still be dangerous...
Not OP, but my impression from reading the literature is that the problem with rip currents is that people either exhaust themselves fighting the current, and/or get pulled out beyond their ability to swim back.
The typical distance a rip current will pull people out is about 100m. Given that about 50% of the US population can't swim functionally at all, this can be very dangerous. However, it depends — 100m is not very much for an experienced open water swimmer, who might be used to swimming 1500-3000m routinely.
Most updated recommendations suggest people should ride the current until it stops and then signal for help and/or swim away from the current. This is to avoid exhaustion and because research indicates rip currents can go in different patterns.
If you know what you're doing and can swim that distance, it's not that dangerous. Experienced surfers would fall in this category, as they're used to navigating shore currents.
Riptides are only dangerous for beginners who don't know how they work. It's a narrow stream outwards, about 3-4m wide. Like a street. At your surf you get out by paddling parallel to the beach just a few strokes. Beginners fight the rip, but you just need to step out. For surfers it's a dream
Great example. I used to love rip currents as a youngin. Just swim parallel and body surf back to shore. Sometimes I used to just swim into them for the workout and amusement. But I got older and it had been about a decade since I had ventured out into the ocean -- was out body surfing for about 20 mins before I got caught in a fairly normal riptide and ran out of energy really fast. Would have been really unfortunate if I hadn't been in the same situation hundreds of times before. I was panicked and debated yelling for help lol.
In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.
The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.
Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.
Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.
Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.
There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).
Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.
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