One major cause was the policy of defunding education and research. A policy the Telegraph championed and campaigned for.
Another was Brexit (literally sold as "the British people have had enough of experts"). Another colossal mistake the Telegraph pushed for, defended and now finds itself making excuses for.
There is a certain dialogue around the desire to have nothing to do with "green energy" lately as well (another policy the Telegraph championed and campaigned for).
I get that some technology can be dangerous - but this is wind turbines, solar panels or fart powered electricty. They might not be the best option for everyone, but to not persue any innovation that you can then sell to the rest of the world just seems dumb. Its that same sort of fear that led the uk to abandoning its headstart in computers.
The country that pushed Turing to madness but let Jimmy Saville grow old.
Anyway Europe dedicated all it's resources to two world wars which left the field open for America.
Thankfully 1000 years of culture means we haven't been completely subsumed by them.
The reality is the technology industry has become heavily privatised, and privatisation means sales, and good engineers aren't interested in sales, but funding is required to build things... So, you need companies or governments with a long-term mindset, which isn't easy to come by. So instead you get entrepreneurs with borderline-capable engineering abilities, and typically businesses who think of short-term profits, and the end result is gimmicky 'products' rather than breakthrough inventions.
Note however, that there is greater room for complacency in the public sector, given the endless pool of money (via taxes, inflation), whereas the private sector is more touch-and-go and can be more competitive.
So I guess it is about balancing the public/private sectors optimally, which is ambiguous as to how to do. By the way I didn't read the article.
You can't post like this to HN—it just leads to flamewar hell. You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in so many other places too that I think we have to ban this account, at least until we get some reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future.
To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of your comments or your profile page—I don't fully understand them (especially the latter) and I'm worried that you might be in distress. If that's true and there's anything we can do to help, you'd be welcome to email me at hn@ycombinator.com. If not, I'm sorry for posting something irrelevant; please ignore.
Either way, we can't have accounts posting flamewar comments and political/national/ideological fulmination to HN, even if you're completely right on the issues (which I'm not saying you aren't).
Thats too extreme, there is an unspoken culture in the UK, for example the saying, stiff upper lip, its a reference to keep quiet and carry on, like those war time propaganda posters and tee shirts you now see adorning many things and people.
I've been in a unique position to see some of that mentality, army cadets doing military baths on other teenagers that carries on into the military, beastings of sorts.
A violent profession like the military or police have a lord of the flies fraternity culture. The officers get their own mess, ironically Royal Marine officers have to be physically fitter than a normal Royal Marine and operate on less sleep, ie first up, last to bed, but going to a private school will help enormously for officer selection across the military, this is one place where snobbery and not meritocracy is order of the day. Now considering the unhindered privilege the military commands I would say the upper classes do abuse their rank, but this is also a culture created by private school attendance, more so boarding than day school.
Just look at the massacre of Amritsar [1] that mentality still exists in some circles today, I cant really speak highly of Eton of all places, but then I got to witness some military personnel when the first black person took place in the trooping of the colour, and the bile that was coming of the mouths would put any racist to shame!
Is this just talking specifically about supercomputers/actual compute power? Because otherwise I think it's fair to say that Britain is still a computing superpower. Deepmind alone is at the forefront of its domain.
What propaganda? That it would be nice if Britain wasn't being beaten in the supercomputing industry by a totalitarian dictatorship and warmongering dictatorship? As a Brit, I think it's just common sense rather than propaganda.
What exactly makes democracies better than "totalitarian dictatorships" and "warmongering dictatorships" at supercomputing so that it's such a shame that Britain is being beaten by China and Russia?
This is such a convoluted question that I am not even sure if you are asking something in good faith.
Anyway: democracies should try not to lose technological races against authoritarian states. I certainly don't want either Russia or China to dominate at anything even remotely usable for warfare.
Because this is often tendentiously quoted without context, here's what Gove actually said:
> “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
His problem is not with experts, but with people who claim the authority of experts without the track record or ability to justify that claim, i.e. people who are wrong most of the time, but expect you to believe them unquestioningly anyway. I'm sure we can all think of examples.
Essentially the current makeup of the Tories. They all claim to know what's best whilst making everything worse.
I'm trying to think of any examples where reputable authorities made statements that the government followed because it was the right thing to do, and wasn't a made up group from a Tory sponsor who was parroting the party line, and it was wrong.
Lived in China from 2017-2020. What you described wasn’t true in China but true in western mass media.
I’ve written about how my friends in China were confused why the US was so hostile to China. They didn’t understand. They didn’t have the same negative perception about America as America had of them.
Not sure about now though. Perhaps their perception of America is trending towards negative now that it’s clear to them that America does not like them.
Are you arguing that anti-Western media propaganda doesn't exist in China? Did you by any chance spend your three years in China walking about with a blindfold on?
Have you been to China? Or are you just making this shit up from never having been to China or learned anything about its recent history?
Do you actually think that the level of anti-China propaganda in western media is nearly the same as the level of anti-western propaganda in China over the last 6 years?
How much propaganda did you drink to even reply the way you did?
I'm half basing this on the speeches given by China's top diplomat who always seems on the verge of a brain aneurysm when talking about the west. Do they not play him for local audiences?
Another was Brexit (literally sold as "the British people have had enough of experts"). Another colossal mistake the Telegraph pushed for, defended and now finds itself making excuses for.