ARM founder says Softbank deal is 'sad day' for UK tech

In general capital gains in an otherwise depreciating asset are tied to outsized increases in the revenue stream that asset produces. To put it another way, the increase in value is fundamentally driven by an increase in the number of people who want to use the building or the neighborhood - it's driven by a real utilitarian value that the asset does provide, or has the potential to provide for people.

If you think that real estate always goes up in value (above inflation) I would wager you've spent most of your life in the big cities where an increasing number of people want to live. I also have some lovely properties in Buffalo and Detroit that you might be interested in.

Of course, sometimes, in a frothy market, both professional firms and random individuals speculate on real estate, looking for capital gains disconnected from any underlying fundamental increase in utilitarian value. There are plenty of half-finished subdivisions in rural Florida that show how real this phenomenon is. However, it's an aberration, and it's fundamentally unstable so it doesn't tend to last for long.

Drawing conclusions about real estate markets in general from speculative bubble conditions is similar to drawing conclusions about technology companies from day trading on the Nasdaq in 1999.

Sorry, but this can't possibly be true. Since the 2008 crash the Dow Jones for example tripled in value while the San Francisco housing market gained 40%.

It is very rare that the real estate market outperforms the stock market.

Investing in a company to help fuel its growth, like VCs do, is analogous to investing in a new development project. There are lots of firms that provide equity investment to developers for new construction. Much like VCs these firms are interested in helping to create something new to meet market demands. Also like VCs they are typically looking for an exit event, where they benefit from the sale of the recently developed property.

The tech analogue for being a landlord - holding on to a stable asset and maintaining it - is holding on to an already profitable business and just maintaining it. For example, there are lots of SaaS businesses that have a decent number of customers and the owners are happy to just do the minimum needed to maintain the code and handle customer service requests. You can buy and sell these businesses as an investor much like income-oriented real estate investors buy and sell fully-leased apartment and office buildings. These investors are not helping to create something new in a direct way.

However, those income-oriented investors do create a market for stable assets, be it a Midtown Manhattan office building or shares of GE. They aren't directly investing in growth, but they are providing the incentive for growth. After all, while an early stage growth investor might be happy to know that they can sell their stake to another growth investor, as a company gets bigger and bigger its room for growth tends to diminish, and growth investors become less interested in buying it. But the market for its shares doesn't disappear. That's because there are investors looking for stable cash flow, even if it's from a static asset - be it an apartment building from the 1970s or Oracle.

Rent-seeking is everything where you extract value by not being productive in the sense of creating new wealth.

Building a house is damn expensive and creates a lot of new wealth, while maintaining a house preserves the wealth you created before.

When you and your friends work remotely from the UK, you pay income tax and VAT and all the rest. (Corporation tax is both very hard to collect and has just been reduced, yet again, by the outgoing chancellor)

Now I'll grant that for some software/IP-based companies you cannot work from where you choose, but those companies are broken. Also you say you don't like to work remotely, but I think if you worked for a company which was organized around this (as I do) you really would prefer it, as there is hardly any down-side.

> "The UK has an unlected upper House of Lords."

The balance of power has shifted in those 'hundreds of years'. The House of Lords no longer has the same level of power it did 200 years ago. The Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 shifted the bulk of the power for law making to the House of Commons. If you're not familiar with these bills, I recommend taking a look...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_Act_1911

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_Act_1949

> "It has a monarch that technically still has a lot of power, even if it isn't excercised."

The moment the Monarch tries to exercise that power is the moment the Monarch seals their fate, as dissolution of the monarchy would almost inevitably follow soon after. I'd hardly call that 'power'.

> "London is the primary focus of the country's expenditure and may as well be a city state."

I agree that spending in London is disproportionately high compared to the rest of the country.

However, it's worth remembering how big a part of the UK that London is. The population of Greater London is roughly 9.8 million. The population of the UK as a whole is roughly 64.1 million. Therefore, approximately 15% of everyone in the UK lives in London/Greater London. To put that in perspective, that's more people than live in the next 6 largest urban areas combined (Greater Manchester, West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Greater Glasgow, Liverpool, South Hampshire).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_the_Uni...

There are signs that UK public spending outside London will be improving. At the moment public spending in the UK is guided by the Barnett formula, which even the author himself admits was a 'terrible mistake'...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_formula

> "The City of London, an entity unto itself is rife with fraud and corruption on a global scale, and essentially owns our politicians, much like Goldman Sachs basically owns the US government."

The City of London is rife with fraud and corruption, but that's no argument for the EU, which is equally in bed with big business. The lobbying industry for the EU is massive, second only to the US.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-euro...

I'd recommend watching the whole talk I linked to in my earlier comment if you get the chance.

The people that are democratically elected are bound to the electorate that got them there. How so? If they do a poor job, they can be voted out. It is in their self interest to listen to their voters. The worst thing that can happen in this situation is if voters are apathetic, as then the elected representatives can get away with whatever they want. In a functioning representative democracy, it is up to the general public to hold their elected representatives to account.

> "I also consider the greek referendum not a good example. The Greek basically had a referendum on how to spend other peoples money. I don't agree with the outcome, but I don't agree with the greek government position either. If you're trying to reschedule loans your banks will want to have a word in it. The alternative - a Greek state bankrupt and an exit from the EU/Euro zone was on the table, but the elected Greek government decided not to - which was their democratic right to do. It's not like the EU armies invaded Greece and forced the governments arm."

You should watch the video that I linked to before, the story did not play out how you paint it. To illustrate, how much money went to the Greek people during the last bailout?

> "And I don't consider Yannis Varoufakis a good politician either. He's certainly a good economist and his position may quite well be correct in economists terms, but politics is much much more then economics. Politics need to balance the perfect against what's achievable and judging from what I could see how things went down, trying to achieve a perfect outcome was impossible from the start. Yet, still, he tried to sell the unsalable - his interpretation of his introduction speed as "moderate" is quite telling. (Insults from both sides and comparison of Schäuble with Hitler didn't do any good either). In that regard, Merkel is a much more capable politician: She accepts the inevitable and instead focuses on the possible. I don't like the politics she's pursuing but she's doing remarkably well in that regard."

Again, you should watch the whole video.

Using the Wall Street Journal example is an attempt to illustrate that even corporate-focused news outlets admit that the EU is not built on a strong democratic foundation. If you're not happy with that example, I could point out other news outlets that have made similar statements, or I could point out direct quotes from those involved in the EU. Which would you prefer?

> "That's nonsense again. If that were the case Germany could send its bureaucracy home. But the German bureaucracy is much much larger than the EU bureaucracy in Brussels"

It's not the size of the bureaucracy that's important, it's the level of influence that non-elected bodies possess in that bureaucracy. If you had watched the video I linked to, you'd have heard about the example of the Eurogroup Working Group dictating the policies of the Eurogroup. The Eurogroup Working Group is comprised of the members of the "Economic and Financial Committee (EFC), the European Commission and the European Central Bank" (quote taken from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogroup_Working_Group ).

To be clear, the EFC is comprised of "senior officials from national administrations and EU central banks, the European Central Bank and the Commission" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_and_Financial_Committ...).

None of these people are democratically elected, yet they are setting the financial policy for all members of the Eurozone. Does that not concern you in the slightest?

> "Out of context quote. Much of the economic policies is made in the member states. On an EU level there is some stability of longer term economic policies needed. That's what Schäuble was talking about."

At what point does stability and consensus not apply? What level of economic integration do you want to see across Europe? Are there any financial decisions that should be beyond the reach of the EU?

The line should be drawn somewhere, as otherwise the EU will become a closer and closer economic (and political) union, with less room for individual countries to set their own policies.