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> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. So the simple truth is you can almost n
by scott_w 11mo ago
> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not.
So the simple truth is you can almost never "ignore the cost" because that cost must be borne somewhere. And there's always someone that's considered "national-strategic" by someone. Hell, I recall my dad being enraged that our "blue" passports are now manufactured in Poland under contract from a French company. What actually happened is De La Rue took the piss on their contract bid thinking they would just rinse the taxpayer.
Having the taxpayer there to bail out a failing shipyard blunts the incentive to modernise which, as we can see from the article, was barely there to begin with. Should the taxpayer sit there with effectively unlimited liability to build these ships? Should that come at the expense of, say, funding for the NHS? Housebuilding? Fixing our crumbling prison system? Modernising our water infrastructure?
- potato3732842 11mo agoSociety can't ignore the cost. But the bad faith peddlers of the costs sure can. You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation, some additional labor overhead, some procedural change, some tweak of input sourcing or other reduction of outputs relative to inputs as being "amortized" over the course of whatever to much applause from the comment section. And yet these same people are smart enough to recognize these sorts of dishonest "the solution to pollution is dilution" type arguments when applied in other contexts. It ought to make you wonder how much malice is sailing under the flag of ignorance.
- scott_w 11mo ago> You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation I don't see what regulation has to do with (effectively) nationalising the entire shipbuilding industry. When I say "cost" I literally mean the financial cost to the Exchequer.
- potato3732842 11mo agoRegulation was just one example. Could be any sort of TPS report or other overhead type crap.
- scott_w 11mo agoI’m not talking about TPS reports, overheads, etc. I’m talking, quite literally, about the actual line item costs that appear on the ledger of the Exchequer. I don’t see why this is hard for you to understand without and why you’re waffling about unrelated things.