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> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People ar

by pjc50 2y ago

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference. The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. It's not actually where we want to be. While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored. Or bogged down in extra export red tape thanks to Brexit. To improve reality, we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about.

sitkack 2y ago
> we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about Ha ha ha. I was this naive once. This just isn't our reality. You would have to have a functioning education system AND a population with adequate emotional regulation. Do we even have the pieces anymore?
myrmidon 2y ago
> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you). Thanks for this interesting fact.
- bombcar 2y ago
  There's a problem with just directly comparing them - because JKR probably brings in more revenue to the UK than fishing, with Potter copyrights. But most of that revenue goes to JKR, whereas most of the fishing revenue may end up in "working class" people's pockets.
  - 3abiton 2y ago
    > But most of that revenue goes to JKR, whereas most of the fishing revenue may end up in "working class" people's pockets. I am sure JKR has to pay taxes still, which goes back to the government.
    - throw0101c 2y ago
      > I am sure JKR has to pay taxes still, which goes back to the government. Does JKR personally own the copyrights, or have they been sub-licensed to a corporation in (e.g.) Ireland?
      - edm0nd 2y ago
        With the levels of money involved, highly likely its all wrapped in legal fuckery.
        ForOldHack 2y ago
        https://www.newsweek.com/jk-rowling-making-money-hogwarts-legacy-what-we-know-1777087 https://www.newsweek.com/jk-rowling-making-money-hogwarts-le...
    - bunderbunder 2y ago
      But still, the money that's going straight into working class people's pockets is probably better for the UK in the long run. Don't worry, it will get taxed over and over and over and over again as they pay each other for things. Velocity is one of those critically important concepts that often gets left out of these discussions because it's hard to understand if you haven't formally studied economics because it's all about second order effects. But it's a big part of understanding why, historically speaking, maximizing corporate profits doesn't seem to correlate all that well with overall prosperity trends.
      - tim333 2y ago
        There are quite a lot of people who make money from Harry Potter apart from JKR. People running cinemas, bookshops, making the movies, running the studio tour and so on.
- eyko 2y ago
  It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we need to keep producing. More so in the current geopolitical climate. And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.
  - flir 2y ago
    While not disagreeing with you, I don't think we've done a great job of maintaining fisheries.
    - wongarsu 2y ago
      Also, continuing overfishing is a terrible long-term strategy. Sure, we will have the boats, fishermen and infrastructure around fishing, but that's of no help if the fish are gone.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Politics isn't about good long-term planning - it's about accountability sinks. This decade: "We're not the ones trying to steal your fishing jobs!" Next decade: "It's not our fault there aren't fish!"
        potato3732842 2y ago
        You missed the "you can fix it with money though, and our friends are just the people to give the money to" step that comes after each problem statement.
    - eyko 2y ago
      Agreed, and the same goes for most strategic sectors: energy, agriculture, animal husbandry, semiconductors, communications, space, the infrastructure to support all these, education, etc.
- AndrewStephens 2y ago
  > Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!) I had no idea that Warhammer was such a huge industry - they must sell almost 600 sets a quarter.
  - gmueckl 2y ago
    This is either a joke that flies over my head or there are a few zeroes missing. Which is it?
    - miningape 2y ago
      Look up the price of a single small unpainted figure. You'll be shocked.
    - smadge 2y ago
      The joke is that Warhammer sets are expensive.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        I'm kinda surprised people aren't just buying a 3D printer. I print stuff all the time. I'm not into this kind of game but if I were I wouldn't pay that much for a piece of plastic I can print at home for 3 bucks.
        dharmab 2y ago
        My group is 3D printing most of our stuff for beer and pretzels games. But official tournaments have a rule where your miniatures have to be official products. Note that a standard printer won't be anywhere near as nice quality as official models. You need a resin printer for that, which requires ventilation, some basic PPE, and additional labor to clean and cure the prints correctly. Not something you want to do with small children or pets in the house. We resin print most of our models. We use FDM for blocky things like tanks and buildings, though. And some complex or very large models can't be printed (although we sometimes use alternatives for those). Warhammer is an unusually expensive game, too. Other games like One Page Rules will sell you STLs to self-print, or charge very reasonable prices for pro-printed minis. You can buy a 2-player starter kit for OPR for about the same money as one WH40K unit.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  What’s even more astounding is that most of Games Workshop’s manufacturing remains in the UK.
  - 936936 2y ago
    Not only that, they are actively expanding their manufacturing because their revenue is limited by supply. Their factories are running 24/7 and some products are still consistently out of stock.
- jachee 2y ago
  > … that they don' even paint for you Of course. That way they can sell you the official paints. Fortunately, it seems they’ve dropped that you’re required to use the official paints if you want to enter a sanctioned tournament.
  - gattr 2y ago
    I'm not into Warhammer, but out of curiosity, how did they check that? Scrape a sample off each figurine and run it through a mass spectrometer or something?
    - dharmab 2y ago
      Official paint was never a requirement AFAIK. Parent comment has probably confused the Battle Ready rule, which basically says the model and base must be completely painted with multiple colors and shading, but doesn't care about what brands of paints you use.
- yellowapple 2y ago
  The UK ain't alone in that either. California's agricultural sector is one of the largest in the world (let alone in the US) in terms of revenue and output, in many cases providing most/all of national and even global supplies of various fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Virtually all American almonds and broccoli, 90% or more of American dates and avocados, top producer of peaches and dairy products, the list goes on. And yet, California's entire agricultural sector only totals to $50 billion in annual revenue. There are multiple tech and entertainment companies in California that individually surpass that, in some cases (like Apple and Amazon) by an order of magnitude.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    Nitpick, but while Amazon does have offices in California, it's headquartered in Washington State.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    This is so key to understand because it illuminates how not every job is equal in raw value. You cannot have a drying rack manufacturer in the US that pays a bunch of workers $35/hr. There simply is not enough value in drying racks to achieve this. This is what is lost on the populist crowd. They compare themselves to high value workers (i.e. workers that produce a lot of raw economic value per hour), and then want to legislate that low value work pays on the same order. To put that into simple terms, they want to make it so that producing a single $20 bill per hours pays them $30 an hour. No matter what, that isn't going to work out well.
    - 9rx 2y ago
      Value isn't static, of course. Take the food that was brought up earlier. Food saw a real increase in value by around 30% from 2019 to 2024. A couple of destructive weather events, fertilizer scarcity, and war in the Ukrainian breadbasket shook people enough to think that maybe they shouldn't take food quite so for granted. Drying racks aren't considered terribly valuable today, but if you lock up manufacturing to a single country and impose a number of other restrictions, sentiment can change quickly. The latest episode of Ted Lasso might not seem so important anymore.
- coldtea 2y ago
  And then you try to eat figurines, and find out they're not as digestable
- test6554 2y ago
  A game that is not on a computer... So they don't even calculate damage or move distance for you. And you have to buy each figurine and paint it yourself... And people are spending all their money on this? That's why we're not mining asteroids right now? I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.
  - gond 2y ago
    You approaching this the wrong way. What you are listing as disadvantages is, for the most part, the USP. For example, if you are in the target group, you buy it exactly because it does not uses AR glasses; If you are proficient, you are sleepwalking the damage/distance/all other calculations within seconds in your head, you don’t even have to take a single look at any rule book. The biggest selling point, however is: there are others sitting in front of you, it can be very competitive, you can see the reaction, like in chess.
  - dharmab 2y ago
    > And you have to buy each figurine and paint it yourself... This is a _feature_ for the target audience. There's a sizable chunk of the playerbase who enjoy painting more than the game. I even have friends who paint these miniatures professionally as their side gig. > And people are spending all their money on this? No. Most people are playing at home on a budget, similar to other board games. A very tiny fraction of the playerbase plays competitively and have larger collections. > I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time. You can play this game in Tabletop Simulator, which supports VR. It's _far_ less fun than playing in person with real objects. TTS is mostly used to test strategies before committing to buying the required miniatures. As sibling comment mentions, the damage calculation is rather simplistic, and it's an exciting moment around the table when you roll a fistful of dice, kind of like gambling. I'm not even that proficient of a player and I can calculate a 17 dice roll attack while sleep deprived at 3AM, no computer needed.
wahern 2y ago
> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. There are 3x as many fishermen in the UK than employees of Games Workshop, and much more again if you count the number of related fishery jobs. At the end of the day, politicians and voters alike respond more to employment than nominal monetary figures. A broader employment base is generally better for social and political stability than explicit wealth redistribution (e.g. tax + entitlements). The latter is what economic theory tends to emphasize--i.e. equivocate incomes based on state wealth redistribution schemes--but such economic theory is how we got Trump, Brexit, and a host of other ills. Economics hasn't figured out, yet, how to price the constituent inputs that produce political and economic stability. GDP, Gini, per capita income, employment rate, etc metrics are gross approximations that work well until they don't (though they're still better than rhetoric and handwaving). But to be fair, social and political theorists haven't solved that problem, either; at least, not with a rigorous quantification model.
- matt-p 2y ago
  Sorry, but I don't think this is the reason. There were vastly more people in financial services calling for us NOT to have brexit than fishermen asking for it, even in number of people. I honestly don't think this was a numbers of people affected vs "% of GDP" affected issue. Not at all. What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now? Impossible to say, as it was swamped by the pandemic. My guess as to the fatalities due to Brexit is also untestable as a result.
    - matt-p 2y ago
      true, impossible to come up with a scientific answer, but you could compare with european countries who also went through a similar covid response and start to see a bit of a trend leap out. For what it's worth I'm not sure if the number is actually 10%, but I'd hazard that it's more than 5/6.
throw0101c 2y ago
> […] are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference. See "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy": > I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war. […] > If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced. But this graph doesn’t actually capture the full scope of the decline, because it doesn’t include outsourcing via unfunded mandates — things that the government could do, but instead simply orders the private sector to do, without providing the funding. * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-... Mentions the paper "State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, And How to Get It Back" (22pp, so short): * https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/brinkpaper.pdf https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/br... And the book Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government: * https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/templeton-press/bring-back-the-bureaucrats/9781599474670/ https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/templeton-press/bring...
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  That article seems confused, e.g.: > If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced. The money is going to social security payments. Social security went from <1% of federal spending at its outset to more than 20% of federal spending today. Medicare and other assistance programs are a similar story. Most of the money from these programs goes to paying benefits rather than administrative costs, which is generally regarded as a good thing. But they're also what together now constitute the majority of federal spending. Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Computers were invented. Things that used to be done by hand are now done by machine, and then you don't need as many clerks and bookkeepers to manually process paper records. This is also generally regarded as a good thing. The points it makes about unfunded mandates and NIMBYs holding everything up with meritless lawsuits are valid, but the "ministerial review" it proposes is the existing permitting process. The problem is we have unfunded mandates and NIMBY lawsuits on top of that, which could simply be deleted and replaced with nothing. This really seems like the fundamental misunderstanding: > And guess who’s responsible for monitoring Medicare spending? Bureaucrats. So that’s at least a 2300% return on investment in bureaucracy! If you only look at the most efficient thing a bureaucrat could be doing, look how efficient bureaucrats are! Meanwhile the government is still paying thousands of people to process paper records because although computers were invented many decades ago, only parts of the government have discovered them and there are still many things you have to do by bringing physical documents to government offices to be processed in person even when those things have no legitimate reason not to be a government website. What we need is not to have more bureaucrats, but rather to finish computerizing the things that have no reason not to be so the existing government employees can do the high value stuff instead of wasting time shuffling paper that should have been bits.
vkou 2y ago
> Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Oh, boy, let me tell you, the 'State capacity' of the United States, when it comes to doing things that aren't making war on its own, or other people, was both rotten to begin with, and won't survive another four years of this regime. Dysfunctional as the UK is, it's government is not stuck at a triple point of learned helpelessness, intentional sabotage and paralysis (the US is currently, among other things, doing its best to bring cured diseases back), and a deeply negative-sum culture. I've heard that the United States was a magical land of milk and honey in this respect, back when 'competent bureaucracy' wasn't a swear word in it, but I understand that ended ~45 years ago. (With a few surviving holdouts, like the Fed)
- FredPret 2y ago
  All this talk of state capacity and global trade puts me in mind of Europa Universalis
callamdelaney 2y ago
[flagged]
- lostlogin 2y ago
  Do you think Brexit has helped the UK?
  - callamdelaney 2y ago
    I think it could have been a great help to the UK.
    - lostlogin 2y ago
      Yes, a small majority agreed. But that isn’t what I asked.
      - philjohn 2y ago
        This is the problem - brexit meant something different to everyone who voted for it ... and the reality was never going to match up because we have binding agreements like the GFA which meant Northern Ireland was always going to have to be treated differently than mainland UK.
        gadders 2y ago
        Well, only if you think the IRA/Sinn Fein should set UK foreign policy. We could have implemented an (EU-requested) north/south border in Ireland. Or not implemented one at all.
        philjohn 2y ago
        The signatories to the GFA include the US as well - if you want to rip up the GFA to install a hard border you have to own the second order effects of that. Or decide that Brexit was never going to work the way those who peddled it said it would.
logifail 2y ago
> The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing This isn't just a UK issue: "Fishing is a relatively minor economic activity within the EU. It contributes generally less than 1 per cent to gross national product."[0] and if you look beyond fishing, agricultural policy as a whole is - not sure how to put this politely - not easy to understand: "The CAP is often explained as the result of a political compromise between France and Germany: German industry would have access to the French market; in exchange, Germany would help pay for France's farmers [..] The CAP has always been a difficult area of EU policy to reform [..]"[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
- matt-p 2y ago
  For another "not just the UK" example france has managed to persuade the EU not to buy british weapons out of the extra defence fund unless the UK give France some of it's fishing rights. Can you imagine being Poland and not getting the best anti-tank weaponry, or the best missiles because you want the french to have more fishing rights? Completely barking mad. https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-rejects-eu-plan-tie-defense-security-pact-to-fishing-quotas/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-rejects-eu-plan-tie-defen...
  - logifail 2y ago
    > Completely barking mad Well, we'll see that and raise you the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The EU could get rid of this idiocy overnight, except - well - France. (I have nothing against the French, I've visited France dozens of times and have many friends there.) "Once a month the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg at a cost of £150m a year as lorries transport paperwork."[0] "Top EU official brands Strasbourg shuttle 'insane'"[1] "EU parliament’s €114m-a-year move to Strasbourg ‘a waste of money’, but will it ever be scrapped?"[2] [0] https://news.sky.com/story/meps-on-the-move-madness-of-strasbourg-shift-10293596 https://news.sky.com/story/meps-on-the-move-madness-of-stras... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/eu.politics https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/eu.politics [2] https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-year-move-to-strasbourg-a-waste-of-money-but-will-it-ever-be-scrapp https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...
ajb 2y ago
There are two parts to the fishing thing. From a pure economic perspective, fishing is insignificant. But within living memory obtaining food was a national security issue for the UK (during world war II). In a world in which states look not to grow their economy, but to harm others - and guess what, that's where we just arrived - not all industries can be considered purely on their revenue. Man cannot live on warhammer alone. We need to distinguish between paying over the odds to keep industries which are essential to have in an antagonistic scenario, from loss-aversion and nostalgia for industries which don't provide as much employment as they used to.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  A precision injection moulding factory can (I assume) relatively quickly start producing other plastic parts for military use. Post-Brexit, there's now increased incentive for Games Workshop to build their next factory in the EU. (Games Workshop is one company, but this applies to every manufacturing company in the UK.)
  - ajb 2y ago
    Fair. I'm not a fan of Brexit and I think it's been both driven and implemented more listening to nostalgia than strategy.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    Brexit is mad, driven by nostalgia etc. However, if we got a free trade agreement with the US would the inverse be true, EU companies are better off moving to the UK due to brexit? What about just a FTA with all commonwealth countries (why haven't we done this??)?
    - Symbiote 2y ago
      Trump is unpredictable. He made a new free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in his previous term, but has put tariffs on some Canadian goods this time round. That isn't going to reassure investors. A FTA with the USA would come at a significant price — the UK would be pressured to accept low-quality American agricultural produce, and lower many other standards from their current European level. If it does this, that reduces the global value of British exports.
deleted 2y ago
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rayiner 2y ago
The free traders also need to accept the reality that the UK’s decline started long before Brexit and disputes about fishing. In terms of per capita GDP, the UK lost its edge over the rest of Europe in the 1970s, and then simply never recovered from the 2008 global financial collapse. Without the empire, the UK’s “competitive advantage” in financial and legal services wasn’t worth shit. I strongly suspect the US cannot maintain its outsized per capita wealth, on the back of the reserve dollar, in a world where China has an economy twice the size. Just as the UK couldn’t when the US economy overtook the British empire and the dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency. The question, instead, is how we’ll be able to adapt to that new reality. And I suspect we’d rather be Germany in that future than the UK.
- matt-p 2y ago
  I think Germany is a bit of a special case due to what happened after the war, I think a more objective comparison might be say France.
  - hkt 2y ago
    German engineering etc was famously rather good before the war too. The Ruhr valley is part of the reason for this: energy sources (coal) and minerals (iron, copper, etc) very close together. It was the ideal setting for an industrial awakening. Also, even after the marshall plan, Germany kept its existing advantages in industry in large part simply by actually encouraging them to exist. The UK has no industrial policy and actively shed most industries in the 1980s, relying instead on direct investment and deliberately not growing domestic companies.
    - matt-p 2y ago
      It wasn't a criticism of Germany at all, just that I think alot happened there that was special politically with the east and west, support for reunified Germany was massive, it's just therefore a bit hard to say what would of happened if after the war it was lumped with huge debt and ignored.
Izikiel43 2y ago
> While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored Here is my take on this: For those things, you probably need a lot of technical training and/or advanced degrees. For fishing you just need to be more or less healthy and be able to follow instructions. Most people are more or less healthy and are able to follow instructions. A small subset of those has advanced technical training and/or advanced degrees. Therefore, fishing becomes important because a lot more people can do it, and those people vote.
niemandhier 2y ago
The total volume of money flowing through fishing related business is much larger than through warhammer related. Fishing distributed about 1 billion in household income in the uk. Fishing supports about 12.000 direct jobs plus 5.000 in related industries in the UK. Warhammer has about 3000 employees GLOBALLY. Trickle down is not really present here. Businesses that do not distribute wealth in the general population are much less relevant than those that do. Taxes are nice but businesses are good at avoiding them ( especially via Ireland ), whereas income tax is the major supporter of our states.
- ljf 2y ago
  You aren't comparing the same things here - if only counting Warhammer employees, then you shouldn't you only count actual fishermen (c6500 people)? For example, what about the people who work in Warhammer adjacent companies (plastics production, importing and labelling to name just a few, but also freelancers in publishing, illustration and design ) who would not appear in the 3000 Warhammer employees, but who earn the majority of their livelihood from Warhammer. For a period my brother dated someone from the family that supplied grey plastic to Games Workshop - they probably had over 100 permanent employees, and were a 'small' regional company.
  - niemandhier 2y ago
    I could not find numbers for warhammer related industries in the uk. Probably because they are to low. Warhammer has a large profit per piece sold, at least compared to fishing. US citizens often fail to realise that earnings of an industry are almost irrelevant, it is how much said industry distributes into society that matters, both for people and the state. Classical industries like mining and steel distribute a significant percentage of their revenue. Digital businesses does not, neither does warhammer. The interesting point is, that in the end the value of the money digital good as as well as plastic toys are measured in is based on physically realised wealth: Without physical businesses, the money warhammer is evaluated on would be ethereal.
jdasdf 2y ago
>Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. None of those are state capacity issues. Those are "State is pointing a gun at anyone who would fix them" issues. Friendly reminder that 95%+ of the UK railway system was built by private for profit companies, with state involvement being primarily limited to not preventing it from happening. All of these issues are 100% self inflicted by the state getting in the way. All that needs to happen for them to fix themselves is to stop actively preventing private individuals from fixing them.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  Railways and electricity are run by private companies in the UK. They've had 30 years to make it work, and have failed.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    They've "made it work", just the companies "work" is transferring funds to the shareholders/owners.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  Those railways were built early on in urbanisation. Do you honestly think private enterprise could raise the financial and political capital to build a new regional rail line through a major city like London or Manchester?
- pjc50 2y ago
  None of the original railways was possible without Acts of Parliament for compulsory purchase. Conversely, full privatization of the railways with no restrictions would instantly result in all the rails within 50 miles of London being replaced with lucrative housing.
slt2021 2y ago
Agree, UK did not have a smart and capable leaders and elites for a very long time. The elite/ruling class need to be replaced with the more capable and smarter ones
- lifestyleguru 2y ago
  Oh they are very smart an capable. They just don't work in your favour.
api 2y ago
It’s not rational at all. It’s nostalgia. I wonder how deeply connected all this politics of nostalgia is to the fact that birth rates have been declining for decades and populations are older. Given the older population and the country’s history as a bygone empire I bet nostalgia is thicker in England than the US, but US side there sure is a lot of it. A lot of MAGA is about making the country the way it was when boomers were kids (50s, 60s) to prime age adults (80s to early 90s). There’s even a hint of genX nostalgia too. A while back I was hearing some IDW type railing about how “woke” killed comedy and it hit me that there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for the 90s when comedy and pop culture were all about being an edgelord. The fact that edgelording is "out" is blamed on "woke" and they lament that "comedy is dead" etc. I'm not sure how much "woke" has to do with it. I think... well... edgelording is just out. Change reminds people of their mortality and it always generates a backlash. You’re not young anymore.
- card_zero 2y ago
  There's some excellent non-edgy comedy out there, such as   and
SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
It feels like the US is going to step on its own rake however. Instead of Fishing, it’s manufacturing. Largely a dead industry that has proven to struggle to stay profitable without extremely cheap back breaking laborers or huge regulatory cuts that we’re just not going to be able to sustain, putting both employees and customers at risk.
cowfarts 2y ago
Fishing employs tens of thousands of people and feeds an entire nation. Warhammer employs hundreds, enriches a half dozen and addicts a millions. I'd rather keep the fishermen
vasco 2y ago
Can't really eat plastic figures. And you maybe only ate frozen fish in your life but fresh fish is great. It's way more profitable for me to work than to sleep but I still sleep.
- pjc50 2y ago
  The fishing industry is especially weird because you can't make it more productive and decades of legislation have been spent desperately trying to make it less productive so there are still some fish left. I like fresh fish but there's a very real limit as to how much we can have.
gadders 2y ago
I don't think we will be making much of anything in the UK until energy prices come down, which is unlikely to happen with little new nuclear coming on stream and fracking new North Sea oil being banned. The good news is though that if EG steel manufacturing moves to China and starts using cheap coal fired energy and selling back to the UK, it helps the UK meet its Net Zero targets.
deleted 2y ago
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bfrog 2y ago
Yes but how many people are employed and well paid by warhammer? How many were employed and paid by fishing? Dollars don’t vote, people do!
mapt 2y ago
> The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. [US-wise] Coal and cereal grain agriculture automation have also seen ~98% drops in employment while raising production levels. The industry doesn't have to disappear monetarily for the jobs to be gone.

by pjc50 2y ago

sitkack 2y ago

> we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about Ha ha ha. I was this naive once. This just isn't our reality. You would have to have a functioning education system AND a population with adequate emotional regulation. Do we even have the pieces anymore?

myrmidon 2y ago

> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you). Thanks for this interesting fact.

bombcar 2y ago
There's a problem with just directly comparing them - because JKR probably brings in more revenue to the UK than fishing, with Potter copyrights. But most of that revenue goes to JKR, whereas most of the fishing revenue may end up in "working class" people's pockets.
- 3abiton 2y ago
  > But most of that revenue goes to JKR, whereas most of the fishing revenue may end up in "working class" people's pockets. I am sure JKR has to pay taxes still, which goes back to the government.
  - throw0101c 2y ago
    > I am sure JKR has to pay taxes still, which goes back to the government. Does JKR personally own the copyrights, or have they been sub-licensed to a corporation in (e.g.) Ireland?
    - edm0nd 2y ago
      With the levels of money involved, highly likely its all wrapped in legal fuckery.
      - ForOldHack 2y ago
        https://www.newsweek.com/jk-rowling-making-money-hogwarts-legacy-what-we-know-1777087 https://www.newsweek.com/jk-rowling-making-money-hogwarts-le...
  - bunderbunder 2y ago
    But still, the money that's going straight into working class people's pockets is probably better for the UK in the long run. Don't worry, it will get taxed over and over and over and over again as they pay each other for things. Velocity is one of those critically important concepts that often gets left out of these discussions because it's hard to understand if you haven't formally studied economics because it's all about second order effects. But it's a big part of understanding why, historically speaking, maximizing corporate profits doesn't seem to correlate all that well with overall prosperity trends.
    - tim333 2y ago
      There are quite a lot of people who make money from Harry Potter apart from JKR. People running cinemas, bookshops, making the movies, running the studio tour and so on.
eyko 2y ago
It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we need to keep producing. More so in the current geopolitical climate. And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.
- flir 2y ago
  While not disagreeing with you, I don't think we've done a great job of maintaining fisheries.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    Also, continuing overfishing is a terrible long-term strategy. Sure, we will have the boats, fishermen and infrastructure around fishing, but that's of no help if the fish are gone.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Politics isn't about good long-term planning - it's about accountability sinks. This decade: "We're not the ones trying to steal your fishing jobs!" Next decade: "It's not our fault there aren't fish!"
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        You missed the "you can fix it with money though, and our friends are just the people to give the money to" step that comes after each problem statement.
  - eyko 2y ago
    Agreed, and the same goes for most strategic sectors: energy, agriculture, animal husbandry, semiconductors, communications, space, the infrastructure to support all these, education, etc.
AndrewStephens 2y ago
> Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!) I had no idea that Warhammer was such a huge industry - they must sell almost 600 sets a quarter.
- gmueckl 2y ago
  This is either a joke that flies over my head or there are a few zeroes missing. Which is it?
  - miningape 2y ago
    Look up the price of a single small unpainted figure. You'll be shocked.
  - smadge 2y ago
    The joke is that Warhammer sets are expensive.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      I'm kinda surprised people aren't just buying a 3D printer. I print stuff all the time. I'm not into this kind of game but if I were I wouldn't pay that much for a piece of plastic I can print at home for 3 bucks.
      - dharmab 2y ago
        My group is 3D printing most of our stuff for beer and pretzels games. But official tournaments have a rule where your miniatures have to be official products. Note that a standard printer won't be anywhere near as nice quality as official models. You need a resin printer for that, which requires ventilation, some basic PPE, and additional labor to clean and cure the prints correctly. Not something you want to do with small children or pets in the house. We resin print most of our models. We use FDM for blocky things like tanks and buildings, though. And some complex or very large models can't be printed (although we sometimes use alternatives for those). Warhammer is an unusually expensive game, too. Other games like One Page Rules will sell you STLs to self-print, or charge very reasonable prices for pro-printed minis. You can buy a 2-player starter kit for OPR for about the same money as one WH40K unit.
iamacyborg 2y ago
What’s even more astounding is that most of Games Workshop’s manufacturing remains in the UK.
- 936936 2y ago
  Not only that, they are actively expanding their manufacturing because their revenue is limited by supply. Their factories are running 24/7 and some products are still consistently out of stock.
jachee 2y ago
> … that they don' even paint for you Of course. That way they can sell you the official paints. Fortunately, it seems they’ve dropped that you’re required to use the official paints if you want to enter a sanctioned tournament.
- gattr 2y ago
  I'm not into Warhammer, but out of curiosity, how did they check that? Scrape a sample off each figurine and run it through a mass spectrometer or something?
  - dharmab 2y ago
    Official paint was never a requirement AFAIK. Parent comment has probably confused the Battle Ready rule, which basically says the model and base must be completely painted with multiple colors and shading, but doesn't care about what brands of paints you use.
yellowapple 2y ago
The UK ain't alone in that either. California's agricultural sector is one of the largest in the world (let alone in the US) in terms of revenue and output, in many cases providing most/all of national and even global supplies of various fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Virtually all American almonds and broccoli, 90% or more of American dates and avocados, top producer of peaches and dairy products, the list goes on. And yet, California's entire agricultural sector only totals to $50 billion in annual revenue. There are multiple tech and entertainment companies in California that individually surpass that, in some cases (like Apple and Amazon) by an order of magnitude.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  Nitpick, but while Amazon does have offices in California, it's headquartered in Washington State.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  This is so key to understand because it illuminates how not every job is equal in raw value. You cannot have a drying rack manufacturer in the US that pays a bunch of workers $35/hr. There simply is not enough value in drying racks to achieve this. This is what is lost on the populist crowd. They compare themselves to high value workers (i.e. workers that produce a lot of raw economic value per hour), and then want to legislate that low value work pays on the same order. To put that into simple terms, they want to make it so that producing a single $20 bill per hours pays them $30 an hour. No matter what, that isn't going to work out well.
  - 9rx 2y ago
    Value isn't static, of course. Take the food that was brought up earlier. Food saw a real increase in value by around 30% from 2019 to 2024. A couple of destructive weather events, fertilizer scarcity, and war in the Ukrainian breadbasket shook people enough to think that maybe they shouldn't take food quite so for granted. Drying racks aren't considered terribly valuable today, but if you lock up manufacturing to a single country and impose a number of other restrictions, sentiment can change quickly. The latest episode of Ted Lasso might not seem so important anymore.
coldtea 2y ago
And then you try to eat figurines, and find out they're not as digestable
test6554 2y ago
A game that is not on a computer... So they don't even calculate damage or move distance for you. And you have to buy each figurine and paint it yourself... And people are spending all their money on this? That's why we're not mining asteroids right now? I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.
- gond 2y ago
  You approaching this the wrong way. What you are listing as disadvantages is, for the most part, the USP. For example, if you are in the target group, you buy it exactly because it does not uses AR glasses; If you are proficient, you are sleepwalking the damage/distance/all other calculations within seconds in your head, you don’t even have to take a single look at any rule book. The biggest selling point, however is: there are others sitting in front of you, it can be very competitive, you can see the reaction, like in chess.
- dharmab 2y ago
  > And you have to buy each figurine and paint it yourself... This is a _feature_ for the target audience. There's a sizable chunk of the playerbase who enjoy painting more than the game. I even have friends who paint these miniatures professionally as their side gig. > And people are spending all their money on this? No. Most people are playing at home on a budget, similar to other board games. A very tiny fraction of the playerbase plays competitively and have larger collections. > I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time. You can play this game in Tabletop Simulator, which supports VR. It's _far_ less fun than playing in person with real objects. TTS is mostly used to test strategies before committing to buying the required miniatures. As sibling comment mentions, the damage calculation is rather simplistic, and it's an exciting moment around the table when you roll a fistful of dice, kind of like gambling. I'm not even that proficient of a player and I can calculate a 17 dice roll attack while sleep deprived at 3AM, no computer needed.

wahern 2y ago

> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. There are 3x as many fishermen in the UK than employees of Games Workshop, and much more again if you count the number of related fishery jobs. At the end of the day, politicians and voters alike respond more to employment than nominal monetary figures. A broader employment base is generally better for social and political stability than explicit wealth redistribution (e.g. tax + entitlements). The latter is what economic theory tends to emphasize--i.e. equivocate incomes based on state wealth redistribution schemes--but such economic theory is how we got Trump, Brexit, and a host of other ills. Economics hasn't figured out, yet, how to price the constituent inputs that produce political and economic stability. GDP, Gini, per capita income, employment rate, etc metrics are gross approximations that work well until they don't (though they're still better than rhetoric and handwaving). But to be fair, social and political theorists haven't solved that problem, either; at least, not with a rigorous quantification model.

matt-p 2y ago
Sorry, but I don't think this is the reason. There were vastly more people in financial services calling for us NOT to have brexit than fishermen asking for it, even in number of people. I honestly don't think this was a numbers of people affected vs "% of GDP" affected issue. Not at all. What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now?
- ben_w 2y ago
  > What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now? Impossible to say, as it was swamped by the pandemic. My guess as to the fatalities due to Brexit is also untestable as a result.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    true, impossible to come up with a scientific answer, but you could compare with european countries who also went through a similar covid response and start to see a bit of a trend leap out. For what it's worth I'm not sure if the number is actually 10%, but I'd hazard that it's more than 5/6.

throw0101c 2y ago

> […] are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference. See "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy": > I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war. […] > If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced. But this graph doesn’t actually capture the full scope of the decline, because it doesn’t include outsourcing via unfunded mandates — things that the government could do, but instead simply orders the private sector to do, without providing the funding. * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-... Mentions the paper "State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, And How to Get It Back" (22pp, so short): * https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/brinkpaper.pdf https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/br... And the book Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government: * https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/templeton-press/bring-back-the-bureaucrats/9781599474670/ https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/templeton-press/bring...

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
That article seems confused, e.g.: > If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced. The money is going to social security payments. Social security went from <1% of federal spending at its outset to more than 20% of federal spending today. Medicare and other assistance programs are a similar story. Most of the money from these programs goes to paying benefits rather than administrative costs, which is generally regarded as a good thing. But they're also what together now constitute the majority of federal spending. Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Computers were invented. Things that used to be done by hand are now done by machine, and then you don't need as many clerks and bookkeepers to manually process paper records. This is also generally regarded as a good thing. The points it makes about unfunded mandates and NIMBYs holding everything up with meritless lawsuits are valid, but the "ministerial review" it proposes is the existing permitting process. The problem is we have unfunded mandates and NIMBY lawsuits on top of that, which could simply be deleted and replaced with nothing. This really seems like the fundamental misunderstanding: > And guess who’s responsible for monitoring Medicare spending? Bureaucrats. So that’s at least a 2300% return on investment in bureaucracy! If you only look at the most efficient thing a bureaucrat could be doing, look how efficient bureaucrats are! Meanwhile the government is still paying thousands of people to process paper records because although computers were invented many decades ago, only parts of the government have discovered them and there are still many things you have to do by bringing physical documents to government offices to be processed in person even when those things have no legitimate reason not to be a government website. What we need is not to have more bureaucrats, but rather to finish computerizing the things that have no reason not to be so the existing government employees can do the high value stuff instead of wasting time shuffling paper that should have been bits.

vkou 2y ago

> Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Oh, boy, let me tell you, the 'State capacity' of the United States, when it comes to doing things that aren't making war on its own, or other people, was both rotten to begin with, and won't survive another four years of this regime. Dysfunctional as the UK is, it's government is not stuck at a triple point of learned helpelessness, intentional sabotage and paralysis (the US is currently, among other things, doing its best to bring cured diseases back), and a deeply negative-sum culture. I've heard that the United States was a magical land of milk and honey in this respect, back when 'competent bureaucracy' wasn't a swear word in it, but I understand that ended ~45 years ago. (With a few surviving holdouts, like the Fed)

FredPret 2y ago
All this talk of state capacity and global trade puts me in mind of Europa Universalis

callamdelaney 2y ago

[flagged]

lostlogin 2y ago
Do you think Brexit has helped the UK?
- callamdelaney 2y ago
  I think it could have been a great help to the UK.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    Yes, a small majority agreed. But that isn’t what I asked.
    - philjohn 2y ago
      This is the problem - brexit meant something different to everyone who voted for it ... and the reality was never going to match up because we have binding agreements like the GFA which meant Northern Ireland was always going to have to be treated differently than mainland UK.
      - gadders 2y ago
        Well, only if you think the IRA/Sinn Fein should set UK foreign policy. We could have implemented an (EU-requested) north/south border in Ireland. Or not implemented one at all.
        philjohn 2y ago
        The signatories to the GFA include the US as well - if you want to rip up the GFA to install a hard border you have to own the second order effects of that. Or decide that Brexit was never going to work the way those who peddled it said it would.

logifail 2y ago

> The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing This isn't just a UK issue: "Fishing is a relatively minor economic activity within the EU. It contributes generally less than 1 per cent to gross national product."[0] and if you look beyond fishing, agricultural policy as a whole is - not sure how to put this politely - not easy to understand: "The CAP is often explained as the result of a political compromise between France and Germany: German industry would have access to the French market; in exchange, Germany would help pay for France's farmers [..] The CAP has always been a difficult area of EU policy to reform [..]"[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

matt-p 2y ago
For another "not just the UK" example france has managed to persuade the EU not to buy british weapons out of the extra defence fund unless the UK give France some of it's fishing rights. Can you imagine being Poland and not getting the best anti-tank weaponry, or the best missiles because you want the french to have more fishing rights? Completely barking mad. https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-rejects-eu-plan-tie-defense-security-pact-to-fishing-quotas/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-rejects-eu-plan-tie-defen...
- logifail 2y ago
  > Completely barking mad Well, we'll see that and raise you the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The EU could get rid of this idiocy overnight, except - well - France. (I have nothing against the French, I've visited France dozens of times and have many friends there.) "Once a month the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg at a cost of £150m a year as lorries transport paperwork."[0] "Top EU official brands Strasbourg shuttle 'insane'"[1] "EU parliament’s €114m-a-year move to Strasbourg ‘a waste of money’, but will it ever be scrapped?"[2] [0] https://news.sky.com/story/meps-on-the-move-madness-of-strasbourg-shift-10293596 https://news.sky.com/story/meps-on-the-move-madness-of-stras... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/eu.politics https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/eu.politics [2] https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-year-move-to-strasbourg-a-waste-of-money-but-will-it-ever-be-scrapp https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...

ajb 2y ago

There are two parts to the fishing thing. From a pure economic perspective, fishing is insignificant. But within living memory obtaining food was a national security issue for the UK (during world war II). In a world in which states look not to grow their economy, but to harm others - and guess what, that's where we just arrived - not all industries can be considered purely on their revenue. Man cannot live on warhammer alone. We need to distinguish between paying over the odds to keep industries which are essential to have in an antagonistic scenario, from loss-aversion and nostalgia for industries which don't provide as much employment as they used to.

Symbiote 2y ago
A precision injection moulding factory can (I assume) relatively quickly start producing other plastic parts for military use. Post-Brexit, there's now increased incentive for Games Workshop to build their next factory in the EU. (Games Workshop is one company, but this applies to every manufacturing company in the UK.)
- ajb 2y ago
  Fair. I'm not a fan of Brexit and I think it's been both driven and implemented more listening to nostalgia than strategy.
- matt-p 2y ago
  Brexit is mad, driven by nostalgia etc. However, if we got a free trade agreement with the US would the inverse be true, EU companies are better off moving to the UK due to brexit? What about just a FTA with all commonwealth countries (why haven't we done this??)?
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    Trump is unpredictable. He made a new free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in his previous term, but has put tariffs on some Canadian goods this time round. That isn't going to reassure investors. A FTA with the USA would come at a significant price — the UK would be pressured to accept low-quality American agricultural produce, and lower many other standards from their current European level. If it does this, that reduces the global value of British exports.

deleted 2y ago

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rayiner 2y ago

The free traders also need to accept the reality that the UK’s decline started long before Brexit and disputes about fishing. In terms of per capita GDP, the UK lost its edge over the rest of Europe in the 1970s, and then simply never recovered from the 2008 global financial collapse. Without the empire, the UK’s “competitive advantage” in financial and legal services wasn’t worth shit. I strongly suspect the US cannot maintain its outsized per capita wealth, on the back of the reserve dollar, in a world where China has an economy twice the size. Just as the UK couldn’t when the US economy overtook the British empire and the dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency. The question, instead, is how we’ll be able to adapt to that new reality. And I suspect we’d rather be Germany in that future than the UK.

matt-p 2y ago
I think Germany is a bit of a special case due to what happened after the war, I think a more objective comparison might be say France.
- hkt 2y ago
  German engineering etc was famously rather good before the war too. The Ruhr valley is part of the reason for this: energy sources (coal) and minerals (iron, copper, etc) very close together. It was the ideal setting for an industrial awakening. Also, even after the marshall plan, Germany kept its existing advantages in industry in large part simply by actually encouraging them to exist. The UK has no industrial policy and actively shed most industries in the 1980s, relying instead on direct investment and deliberately not growing domestic companies.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    It wasn't a criticism of Germany at all, just that I think alot happened there that was special politically with the east and west, support for reunified Germany was massive, it's just therefore a bit hard to say what would of happened if after the war it was lumped with huge debt and ignored.

Izikiel43 2y ago

> While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored Here is my take on this: For those things, you probably need a lot of technical training and/or advanced degrees. For fishing you just need to be more or less healthy and be able to follow instructions. Most people are more or less healthy and are able to follow instructions. A small subset of those has advanced technical training and/or advanced degrees. Therefore, fishing becomes important because a lot more people can do it, and those people vote.

niemandhier 2y ago

The total volume of money flowing through fishing related business is much larger than through warhammer related. Fishing distributed about 1 billion in household income in the uk. Fishing supports about 12.000 direct jobs plus 5.000 in related industries in the UK. Warhammer has about 3000 employees GLOBALLY. Trickle down is not really present here. Businesses that do not distribute wealth in the general population are much less relevant than those that do. Taxes are nice but businesses are good at avoiding them ( especially via Ireland ), whereas income tax is the major supporter of our states.

ljf 2y ago
You aren't comparing the same things here - if only counting Warhammer employees, then you shouldn't you only count actual fishermen (c6500 people)? For example, what about the people who work in Warhammer adjacent companies (plastics production, importing and labelling to name just a few, but also freelancers in publishing, illustration and design ) who would not appear in the 3000 Warhammer employees, but who earn the majority of their livelihood from Warhammer. For a period my brother dated someone from the family that supplied grey plastic to Games Workshop - they probably had over 100 permanent employees, and were a 'small' regional company.
- niemandhier 2y ago
  I could not find numbers for warhammer related industries in the uk. Probably because they are to low. Warhammer has a large profit per piece sold, at least compared to fishing. US citizens often fail to realise that earnings of an industry are almost irrelevant, it is how much said industry distributes into society that matters, both for people and the state. Classical industries like mining and steel distribute a significant percentage of their revenue. Digital businesses does not, neither does warhammer. The interesting point is, that in the end the value of the money digital good as as well as plastic toys are measured in is based on physically realised wealth: Without physical businesses, the money warhammer is evaluated on would be ethereal.

jdasdf 2y ago

>Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. None of those are state capacity issues. Those are "State is pointing a gun at anyone who would fix them" issues. Friendly reminder that 95%+ of the UK railway system was built by private for profit companies, with state involvement being primarily limited to not preventing it from happening. All of these issues are 100% self inflicted by the state getting in the way. All that needs to happen for them to fix themselves is to stop actively preventing private individuals from fixing them.

Symbiote 2y ago
Railways and electricity are run by private companies in the UK. They've had 30 years to make it work, and have failed.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  They've "made it work", just the companies "work" is transferring funds to the shareholders/owners.
Earw0rm 2y ago
Those railways were built early on in urbanisation. Do you honestly think private enterprise could raise the financial and political capital to build a new regional rail line through a major city like London or Manchester?
pjc50 2y ago
None of the original railways was possible without Acts of Parliament for compulsory purchase. Conversely, full privatization of the railways with no restrictions would instantly result in all the rails within 50 miles of London being replaced with lucrative housing.

slt2021 2y ago

Agree, UK did not have a smart and capable leaders and elites for a very long time. The elite/ruling class need to be replaced with the more capable and smarter ones

lifestyleguru 2y ago
Oh they are very smart an capable. They just don't work in your favour.

api 2y ago

It’s not rational at all. It’s nostalgia. I wonder how deeply connected all this politics of nostalgia is to the fact that birth rates have been declining for decades and populations are older. Given the older population and the country’s history as a bygone empire I bet nostalgia is thicker in England than the US, but US side there sure is a lot of it. A lot of MAGA is about making the country the way it was when boomers were kids (50s, 60s) to prime age adults (80s to early 90s). There’s even a hint of genX nostalgia too. A while back I was hearing some IDW type railing about how “woke” killed comedy and it hit me that there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for the 90s when comedy and pop culture were all about being an edgelord. The fact that edgelording is "out" is blamed on "woke" and they lament that "comedy is dead" etc. I'm not sure how much "woke" has to do with it. I think... well... edgelording is just out. Change reminds people of their mortality and it always generates a backlash. You’re not young anymore.

card_zero 2y ago
There's some excellent non-edgy comedy out there, such as   and

SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago

It feels like the US is going to step on its own rake however. Instead of Fishing, it’s manufacturing. Largely a dead industry that has proven to struggle to stay profitable without extremely cheap back breaking laborers or huge regulatory cuts that we’re just not going to be able to sustain, putting both employees and customers at risk.

cowfarts 2y ago

Fishing employs tens of thousands of people and feeds an entire nation. Warhammer employs hundreds, enriches a half dozen and addicts a millions. I'd rather keep the fishermen

vasco 2y ago

Can't really eat plastic figures. And you maybe only ate frozen fish in your life but fresh fish is great. It's way more profitable for me to work than to sleep but I still sleep.

pjc50 2y ago
The fishing industry is especially weird because you can't make it more productive and decades of legislation have been spent desperately trying to make it less productive so there are still some fish left. I like fresh fish but there's a very real limit as to how much we can have.

gadders 2y ago

I don't think we will be making much of anything in the UK until energy prices come down, which is unlikely to happen with little new nuclear coming on stream and fracking new North Sea oil being banned. The good news is though that if EG steel manufacturing moves to China and starts using cheap coal fired energy and selling back to the UK, it helps the UK meet its Net Zero targets.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bfrog 2y ago

Yes but how many people are employed and well paid by warhammer? How many were employed and paid by fishing? Dollars don’t vote, people do!

mapt 2y ago

> The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. [US-wise] Coal and cereal grain agriculture automation have also seen ~98% drops in employment while raising production levels. The industry doesn't have to disappear monetarily for the jobs to be gone.