I moved to Britain from the US almost three years ago, and I'm astonished by how little is actually produced here. Aside from the Pi and ARM and maybe, what, Ro

I moved to Britain from the US almost three years ago, and I'm astonished by how little is actually produced here. Aside from the Pi and ARM and maybe, what, Rockstar Games, the tech industry here seems almost entirely focused on fintech, providing services to the City, which in turn seems mainly to function as a giant laundromat for the money of kleptocrats who can't take their business to post-9/11 Wall Street anymore. There seems to be little interest - institutionally, commercially or even on a personal level - in innovation or independence. Brexit could be seen as the latter, but it's really just more blustering nationalist idiocy like the MAGA bullshit back home; the difference being that, awful and pathetic as those people are, it's at least theoretically possible to imagine an isolationist America. But Britain literally doesn't have enough arable land to feed its population without imports. It's like if, I dunno, Massachusetts decided to secede from the US and tried to create "favored trading partner" status with Romania and Ghana and Thailand; like, dude, uh, what? :-D It's weird and sad, because this is literally where the Industrial Revolution began, but now Britain seems like a machine that converts abandoned factories to luxury flats that it can pimp out to Russian oligarchs at absurdly inflated prices to wash their money clean. The collateral damage from this leaves much of the populace here scrambling to afford a skyrocketing cost of living and rent - we pay more in rent for a tiny Charles Dickens ass terrace house with a barely functional kitchen and no storage space, just outside the official borders of Greater London, than I paid for a big 3br/2bth 50s ranch house with a covered driveway in Las Vegas. It really makes me sad because in a lot of ways, I prefer living here to America - it has a civilized healthcare system instead of the barbarity back home, it's a more humane country in so many ways. But the entire nation and its future is in the hands of Tories who prop up the City boys at the expense of literally everything else, and even if Labour gets in at the next election, which they almost certainly will, they're barely even an opposition party anymore - Keir Starmer is as much a leftist as Bill Clinton was, which is to say not much at all. I have hope for Britain, but it needs to take a deep look at itself and fundamentally change the way it thinks about power. Also, the tacos suck and I'm pretty sure that's somehow at the heart of all of this. :-D