> • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms
> • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better
This is _exactly_ my career so far.
The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work.
My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system.
The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.
I used to live and work in Cambridge. In many ways it's a victim of its own success; people will, not unreasonably, argue that it's a beautiful little town of historic buildings, embedded in a primarily agricultural county of either prime agricultural land or protected wetland. They're not going to let you build Shenzen in Shelford no matter what the economic benefit might be. Meanwhile it's close enough to London that the property prices tick upwards to London commuter weighting.
(This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy development or having a bill surcharge.)
The wiki editor(s) who wrote the boosterish Economy subsection of the wiki page on Peterborough [1] (thirty miles away, same county) make it sound as though it is a growing area that does want to grow more.
This is a disease that has infected the entire West. It's just become impossible to do anything that requires space. Even industrial giants like Germany are now de-industrializing because it's just too hard to get permits for building anything new. Sure, labor costs, energy costs, environmental regulations, etc. are all bothersome, but what really makes German industry emigrate is how hard it is to get permission to change anything. It's such a self-inflicted wound.
We'll see. Taking away local control over land development is going to be controversial. A lot of rich and politically connected people are not going to like this. The last three decades in the west has been an endless series of victories for landowners. It's hard to imagine that this time really is different.
> [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any development was permitted anywhere, to one where development was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels, let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second World War.
> Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject new developments, and little incentive to accept them. Historically, local governments encouraged development because their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have centralised and capped local governments’ tax-raising powers.
I remember seeing tons of shipping containers repurposed as offices all over london last year. Was that a way to ease/get-around this real estate issue?
That isn't what I mean. The moral hazard is caused by the bailouts. It isn't about the sum itself. Merely the guarantee that the tab for large gambling losses will be taken by the taxpayers.
I remember when I reached a point where I could just look at the rice through a glass lid and know it was done together with the timer in my head. Silly, but a big moment for me. Growing up, my parents always butchered the rice so I had this weird fear it was really hard. It’s not, as you said, timer and how much water.
I believe that Nando's does the same thing. They always take the table number after asking you if everything's okay.
Interestingly, just as in technical systems, problems arise from trying to keep the state consistent between two separate systems (the table and the kitchen, in this case). At the table, the 'Waiting for Food' state is indicated by the presence of the table number, but in the kitchen, this state is indicated by the presence of a slip of paper with your order on it.
In my experience, it's quite common for the kitchen to misplace your order slip, so the two states get out of sync. To the kitchen, it looks like you've got your food (or you don't exist), but at the table, there's no food so no one checks on you.
It's definitely one of the more unsettling titles I've read recently, but this quote makes it a little less dystopian:
"The CWT-TP process is designed to handle almost any imaginable waste, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged sediment, old computers, municipal sewage sludge, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, and oil-refinery residues".
As a complete layman, it seems to me like a really neat way to handle waste and oil dependence in one go. I'm sure there's lots of reasons why it wouldn't be practical though.
I do love the idea of technologies that make resources (and waste streams) more fungible. Though the level of dystopos then is where we draw the line on "resources" and "waste streams".
"It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people."
Still, technology that excites the imagination is always itself exciting.
There has been no change in their product lifecycle documentation. A bunch of dumb bloggers are reposting each other after one guy found the page, decided it meant Windows 11 was imminent, and posted it.
> • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms
> • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better
This is _exactly_ my career so far.
The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work.
My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system.
The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.
reply