"London obviously continues to be heavily subsidised by the rest of the UK"
This is a farcical comment. Were you being sarcastic? The tax revenue from London massively subsidises the rest of the UK. The investment happens in London because you can guarantee it will make a return, and quickly.
The real reason London is rich at all is because it was a trading depot with the continent. It made money from goods leaving England, and entering England. Later on, like Paris, it became wealthy off running an overseas empire, and when that empire vanished it turned to nearer territories.
London has centuries worth of investment from everywhere else based on that. That money has stayed there, and money is spent constantly on infrastructure which helps it make more money. Contrast this with Liverpool, Cardiff or Belfast which suffered decades of decline for various reasons and a fraction of the investment.
If the capital had been moved to Liverpool back at some point in the Middle Ages, then that would have remained a wealthy city instead of becoming a basket case in the eighties. The presence of the civil service and government alone would have kept Merseyside wealthy, and would have made it a huge tourist centre. Bigger than now, and even that was mostly to do with the Beatles.
By the way, the state funded Wembley refit cost more than the construction of the Scottish Parliament. Guess which one got all the negative press?
Let me put this another way. If I got given a very well paid civil service job, I would end up paying a lot of tax in return. And if someone paid for my house to be renovated and build the best utility and transport connections, then the value of it would go up.
And if mass media continued to promote my area continually then the value of my home would also go up. I would get given higher wages to cope with the increased cost of living there. We would get more tourists visiting my area, and firms and non-doms would set up there because of the positive image.
Don’t take everything at face value: a fall in Sterling necessarily means that an exporters products are cheaper overseas, so should boost sales. Unless their costs were already higher than their revenues, in which case they were doomed anyway. The reason brexit will be bad for exporters is the possible future imposition of tariffs. This hasn’t happened yet, so actually in the short term brexit is relatively good for them. Just to be clear I’m against brexit, however in this case blaming brexit for the failure is wrong.
This hasn’t happened yet, so actually in the short term brexit is relatively good for them.
Except that isn't born out by the figures, UK manufacturing is weakening at the moment. The pound might be delivering higher profits on foreign trade but it isn't delivering more orders yet.
Yes, but equally it means that imports are more expensive. We can interpret the statement as implying that the company imports a lot of parts, etc. Let's remember that Ireland uses the Euro so they just need to import from across the border to feel the pinch.
This manufacturer is in Northern Ireland, so they can use Euros if they want anyway. And current plans are for a frictionless border. The argument as Brexit causing it to close is silly, its grossly mismanaged.
Are you really claiming that TCM and other such pseudosciences have been a net positive for the world? Unproven treatments that may make problems worse, while also encouraging patients to stay away from tested treatments, should play no part in a modern society. If you're in any doubt about this, perhaps you should read 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre, which takes a whistle stop tour of such quackery, as well as the various unethical practices undertaken by pharmaceutical companies.
So Goldacre's finding is that unethical practices and unproven treatments exist both in mainstream pharma and "CAM" [1].
So why is your contempt reserved for "CAM"?
> Unproven treatments that may make problems worse, while also encouraging patients to stay away from tested treatments
I keep hearing this but I've only witnessed the opposite.
I've utilised "CAM" for conditions that mainstream medicine couldn't help with (after years of trying to get help from different mainstream practitioners).
Only a combination of treatments from "CAM" modalities (naturopathy, osteopathy, myotherapy, yoga/pilates, limited chiropractic & TCM) has enabled me to get properly well.
Every "CAM" practitioner I saw encouraged me to keep checking in with mainstream doctors, which I did and have continued to do.
My mainstream doctors now look at my test results and just say "whatever you've been doing, keep doing it".
I get that there are horror stories, as there are in many facets of life. But like much of what makes up mainstream news reporting, the very thing that makes them noteworthy is that they are exceptions to the norm.
As someone who has gone about as deep into researching health/medicine as one can without actually undertaking a medical degree, I'm comfortable that the hysterical reactions over "CAM" are overblown.
So, it would seem, are government regulators around the world who are actually looking at the data, otherwise there would be even more stringent controls imposed on practitioners than are already in place.
I know it’s hard to believe and to generalise beyond your own experience but you are one data point. You might have gotten better without any of the things that you mentioned. Most likely it was a placebo effect, strengthened by your own research and belief in the practices.
I’m not sure the lack of government regulation is a valid point. In my experience, and as you’d see if you read Goldacre’s book, government administrators don’t understand statistics. Even if they did, they don’t neccesarily legislate to maximise welfare.
I'm sure you're sincere in wanting to advocate positions that are good for the world. So you'll want to know how your arguments in this comment are flawed.
> Because CAM doesn’t even attempt to be correct.
Practitioners don't stay in business if they don't provide benefits. So unless you're asserting that most "CAM" clients like spending money for zero benefit, this claim doesn't hold up.
> I know it’s hard to believe and to generalise beyond your own experience
If you were committed to intellectually honest discussion, you'd have at least made further enquiries of me before making this assertion.
I have many acquaintances pursuing similar paths through their own health challenges, and have done for many years. I've examined many case reports and research studies, in order to understand the medical basis for what I've observed and experienced. So, yes, I'm one data point, but I've observed and researched many others.
> You might have gotten better without any of the things that you mentioned.
There's no basis for this. My health consistently declined for many years - for reasons that are now easily explained. And it started to turn around only after I started undertaking particular healing practices from the "CAM" sphere - but for reasons that are easily explained using scientifically sound medical knowledge.
> Most likely it was a placebo effect, strengthened by your own research and belief in the practices.
Serious question: do you suggest that my healing was imaginary, or that it was real but caused by beliefs/emotions rather than material factors?
People who invoke the placebo effect in this context often aren't conscious of importance of the distinction, but it matters a lot.
If it's the former, then I guess there's no more to discuss without knowing the details of my case - which you're welcome to enquire about.
If it's the latter, well then I agree with you that my healing has been influenced - indeed mostly driven - by changes in beliefs/emotions, as is the case with the version of the placebo effect that I subscribe to.
I've extensively researched the placebo effect and what is known about it, and how it may be relevant in my case, and I'm happy to discuss it further if it's a topic you're genuinely curious about.
> I’m not sure the lack of government regulation is a valid point. In my experience, and as you’d see if you read Goldacre’s book, government administrators don’t understand statistics. Even if they did, they don’t necessarily legislate to maximise welfare.
My point is not that there is a lack of regulation. There's a lot of regulation in most jurisdictions; professional bodies, health authorities, consumer protection authorities, criminal justice systems.
Governments may not legislate to maximise welfare but they are highly motivated to avoid horror stories on the front pages of newspapers, and the infrequency of such occurrences indicates that the level of harm caused by "CAM" is low.
Sure it would be great if it were lower, as is the case with all aspects of society where any harm occurs.
But striving for a world that only allows the practice of therapies that have been approved in advance by the mainstream medical establishment is not going to lead us to a better world than what we already have.
Do you have anything better than an appeal to tradition to justify your viewpoint, perhaps a book or study that comprehensively justifies TCM without falling into the basic traps of failed statistical reasoning?
Perhaps the missing point is that the TCM approach to illness or health is dramatically different from Western medicine.
Surgery or modern medicine (injection, pills) focuses on one particular manifestation of illness and targets a particular illness.
On the other hand, TCM is not targeting a particular illness, but rather, it sees illness as the symptom of something deeper going off track in the body. Hence it tries to regulate and balance the body so that it can correct itself, without too much intervention.
It's not something that you can quantitatively study easily and get concrete results, as it is more long-term and therapeutic rather than short-term result driven.
The slowest is three times slower than the fastest! That’s not almost identical at all, and could easily be the difference between a useable interface and an unbearable one...
It could be. And when I have evidence that user experience is affected, I'll care about the difference. But what if it's 1ms vs 3ms? Or 3ms vs 9ms? And the 9ms time is a much more expressive, productive, high-level language?
I'm not going to care about the difference just because "omg one number is 3x another number!?!"
I was referring to response time in a GUI app -- 9ms is undetectable.
Again, if you have a reason the speed matters, then it matters. The specific numbers here are not relevant to my argument, which boils down to: being "slow", in and of itself, is meaningless.
A small bone of contention: it’s not about Moore’s law per se, which has been ‘dead’ since about 2013, coincidentally when the deep learning revival started. It’s matrix multiplication ASIC development that is driving the progress.
GPUs already existed when the idea to use them to make the feasible size of neural nets larger came about. For a long time the drive for the increase of GPU compute power was still gaming/commercial graphics houses. It’s really only in the last 1-2 years that we’ve seen highly specialised GPUs with features like tensor cores (or indeed google’s TPUs).
Also, calling neural nets ‘brute force’ because they use a lot of computing power to train a model is slightly reductionist - a true brute force approach to image recognition, ie enumerating all possible combinations of, say, 200x200x256x3 pixels, would be completely absurd and probably exceed the computing power currently available on earth.
I'm not saying that neural nets are brute force. I'm saying that there haven't been any algorithmic improvements in neural nets to make them more computationally feasible than they were when they were first invented. Instead, we have specialized hardware which can just do the necessary computation quickly enough to make neural nets feasible.
It's not like neural nets are a new technology. They've been known since the '80s, at least. It's just that they were considered a dead end, because we didn't have the computational resources to run deep neural nets, nor did we have sufficient training data to make neural-net approaches feasible. Once those preconditions were met, neural nets took off in short order.
Your ability to recognise faces, you surely realise, was passed down to you genetically? It’s encoded as hardware priors in the structure of your brain. So it’s not too hard to extend that to knowledge of a smell, similarly hardcoded somewhere. I’m not defending the original paper btw, which seems to have some faults.
This is a farcical comment. Were you being sarcastic? The tax revenue from London massively subsidises the rest of the UK. The investment happens in London because you can guarantee it will make a return, and quickly.