I'd put less blame on London and more on secondary cities than the author does because he misses an important point: London is the only UK city that tolerates growth.
The UK system heavily centralised in tax-and-spend powers, but heavily decentralised in veto powers. Secondary cities have used their veto powers to either stop development or make it so expensive that very little gets developed.
City centres are not being built up to concentrate talent, and I wouldn't blame London or lack of public money. Housing and rents are high enough to justify private spending on concentrated development if not for the regulatory burdens and delays.
The author points out Leeds and Manchester having no metro system that exists in other similarly sized cities. But how much of a useful metro system could Leeds build given the same money spent by Toulouse or Lyon? My guess is none, the money would be consumed by lawsuits and addressing local veto owner concerns.
HS2 is cut short because of money that people outside of London demand be spent on making it so expensive on a per-mile basis. If the line were developed similar to other lines in Europe there would be money available for the full length.
I'm somewhat bullish on Manchester in the long run, they may emerge as a second city that tolerates growth. If they develop enough to become an affordable and large city then they will attract a lot of businesses who would otherwise be in London.
In my city we have a "housing crisis" while the city council owns large empty lots in the city centre from torn down or empty buildings. They have been waiting 8 years on handouts from London to afford to develop it themselves, spending £15m so far without a single unit built. It could be sold to developers and fixed council finances, but there is such a strong aversion to allowing a private company make a profit. The council actually has assets to develop the sites, but has preferred to pursue handouts instead of spending their own money.
I don't think this is right. Secondary cities in Britain are consistently more positive about development than London. I give the example in the piece of Leeds voting to expand its airport and how this was blocked by the UK government. In London it is the UK government trying to force that city to expand Heathrow after London itself rejected it.
The best data I can suggest to try and convince yourself of this is from a fantastic London Centric article on approving 5G masts. This is just one example of how open cities are to growth, but the results are really clear --- "The end result is that in London it is uniquely hard to get permission for new equipment. According to Mobile UK’s internal data in Greater Manchester, Leeds, and Edinburgh more than 80% of requests for new masts are approved at the planning stage. In Greater London this approval rate plummets to less than 40%, one of the worst in the country."
> I'd put less blame on London and more on secondary cities
> HS2 is cut short because of money that people outside of London demand be spent on making it so expensive on a per-mile basis.
I'm not sure that's accurate. Cost overruns have also come from inability to find efficiencies, high inflation in the construction sector, low contingency estimate (half cross rails) and a misunderstanding of ground conditions.
The expense increases due to consultation / public demand have come from demands made on the route between London and Birmingham. For example the Chiltern tunnel extension. There aren't many cities in that gap, and most of that area is London facing rather than Birmingham or north facing.
HS2 between London and Birmingham has the worse cost:benefit ratio of the whole initial plan, and yet it's the only bit being built.
> expense increases due to consultation / public demand have come from demands made on the route between London and Birmingham.
I'm pointing out the problems in the whole country outside London, not just the north. So this includes the demand for 100km of unnecessary tunnels. Tunnels that the create higher risk and uncertainty.
There are scenarios where these target date funds are not good.
Rebalancing into bonds and mmmfs is a form of insurance against catastrophic losses equities. But if you have a sufficiently large account then catastrophic losses that affect your life are extremely rare, if they do occur they will likely affect your bond portfolio as well, and the expected loss vs 100% equities over 15-20 years is significant, something like 10x the value of the insurance you are buying.
If you want insurance for a large account then long-dated put options 20% of the money are much cheaper.
This is not true for fiduciary accounts, which are covered per principal. So FDIC coverage should extend to all customers if the account was properly declared.
Because they use such esoteric software that you'll forever be reliant on Oxide.
I'd rather they use more standardized open source software like Linux, Talos, k8s, Ceph, KubeVirt. Instead of rolling it all themselves on an OS that has a very small niche ecosystem.
Oxide is providing an x86 platform to run VMs/containers on. That's a commoditized market.
The value they're offering is that the rack-level consumption and management is improved over the competition, but you should be able to run whatever you want on the actual compute, k8s or whatnot.
This also means you'd not be forever reliant on Oxide.
