Why the Raspberry Pi will save the UK
petenelson.co.uk
petenelson.co.uk
I studied Mech Eng at college; no-one does that who doesn't want to be an engineer. When I graduated in the mid-90s there were no jobs, so I went into high-tech. But my CV is still floating around, and I occasionally get called by recruiters in engineering. Now I am no rock star, I am paid well (market rate) but not extravagantly so. But these engineering jobs pay a fraction of what I earn, for the equivalent years of experience. And they wonder why no-one wants to do it?
This comes back to the old class system which is still strong in the UK. No matter how educated, an engineer is not "one of us" to the management class, and will never be paid fairly in the old industries, never more than a paper-pushing middle management bureaucrat who went to the "right" school. Only high-tech (enlightened) and The City (where managers are so well paid that they don't feel threatened) pay technical people fairly.
Anyone smart enough to be an engineer - and there are plenty who want to be - is smart enough to not be exploited in that way. And that is why manufacturing died in the UK.
The UK (and Europe) really needs to figure that out. I was able to move to London because I was moving from SV and I got a cost of living increase on top of my US market salary. If I was born here and forced to accept London market salaries I would be looking for my ticket out of here ASAP. As technology and mobility increases it's going to be increasingly important to economies to retain talent, something which I believe is obscured for the super rich who make money by arbitrage highly abstracted from the value in the base economy.
Engineering died in the UK because the management class can't tell the difference between a professional mechanical engineer and a car mechanic (not that the latter isn't a skilled worker). In the rest of the world "Engineer" is a meaningful, exclusive title.
Many people complaining about hiring trouble are complaining about high search cost.
The lesson is that companies are strugglying because they aren't offering enough money. Ergo, if you offer more money, you struggle less.
Only a tiny percentage of developers in the financial world are working on arbitrage, the average bank probably has more developers working on compliance software than arbitrage software. A vast majority of software development work at most banks is infrastructure (integration between systems, data feeds, settlement, etc.) which supports the day-to-day operations.
You can either have great working conditions and pay, or a good manufacturing industry. Can't have both. Some other poorer country will just treat their workers worse, and so be more productive.
(I'm reading "Thatcher - the downing street years" at the moment - a great read).
For example there was a discussion that I half caught on Radio 4 this very morning that claimed the death of manufacturing in the UK is mainly due to the government totally failing to invest in R&D for the last 15 years or so.
I think the truth is probably somewhat more complex and a combination of a lot of factors.
Also find people who were around in the Thatcher days, you'll find a lot of people who either despise her or love her, the book will be biased.
Interesting. Why is it the government's obligation to invest in R&D (of manufacturing?), surely that's the responsibility of the manufacturers themselves?
The debate included anecdotes saying that China, Germany and America have been pumping %-wise much higher amounts into R&D (or schemes to 'encourage' it) through their governments compared to the UK.
This doesn't make the facts she cites, or arguments she presents any less compelling.
It's not really that far fetched to say that "most of our stuff is made in countries with abundant cheap labour".
Investing in R&D would not have solved the fundamental issue - workers in the UK are expensive. Workers in poor countries are cheap.
Look at Germany, they have both but that's partly the vertical companies being ethical and patriotic.
EDIT: In responses asking for examples, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mumbai#City_developm... . The British were responsible for merging the many Islands of Mumbai to get what it is today. Also, the pipelines supplying fresh water to Mumbai were built by the British and are being augmented only in the last decade or so.
How much of the continued re-use is due to it being so superior, or the government being so cash poor that they can't pay for any replacements?
I think that says more about India than it does about British engineering.
(fyi I'm neither :)
EDIT: Forgot to add:
The engineering might be good, but the middle management was often really poor and the build quality of mass-produced items was usually sub-optimal.
Combined with post-war poverty here and post-war subsidies there (Japan) the UK had a weird combination of factors.
Someone needs to explain this to the Germans then.
It seems to be working well for Apple...
In any case, the biggest car company in Germany is VW, and I wouldn't consider them a "luxury" car manufacturer. And most of the Mittelstand in Germany are companies that are not household names, but are very successful in their particular industrial niches.
Just as every individual is unique in its skills, experience, available resources and location, so is each country. Surely China's cheap workforce cannot be replicated in Europe or the U.S. and China's biggest problem will be their own middle-class which gets richer, so you can clearly see that a cheap workforce is not sustainable in a growing economy.
Can the world replicate Silicon Valley or Hollywood? Maybe, maybe not, but surely a lot of effort is required and there are also cultural issues that makes this hard. Failure is accepted as a sign of progress in Silicon Valley, but in Japan it's unacceptable.
The way to grow is to rely on your core strengths and make your weaknesses obsolete. So for example if companies move to China for cheap labor, then pay engineers to build better robots, a strategy which in the long run can yield better and more efficient factories.
However, the main problem with British industries and collapse of some of them in 1970's was unionisation and political fighting. This included even outright sabotage, and of course abysmal build quality. My uncle had a Morris Marina, my father a Sunbeam Avenger. Never again a British car. British workers are OK as long as their overlords are Japanese or German.
UK manufacturing value as such is not so bad, after all. The curve looks very much like any other Western country. See http://management.curiouscatblog.net/images/curiouscat_top_m...
The only major country that took a significant dip recently is Japan.
All I shall say is a. I think you'll find it's more complicated than that, and b. look at the data.
It's called an autobiography.
I've heard the left wing excuses and arguments and find them thoroughly unconvincing.
> b. look at the data.
I have.
It's a autobiography by a right-wing leader, so if you talk about subject X then reference said book, it's likely that opinion will be right-wing, which was my point.
Anyway, I didn't mean any offence, and I don't want to get embroiled in a political argument, rather wanted to highlight that.
For what it's worth, the book isn't really filled with opinions, more than it's filled with facts from the time.
eg "We were spending X on British Steel, and the Unions wanted us to spend Y, wanted pay raises of Z, despite falling productivity" etc.
It was a mistake for me to include the book I was currently reading as it instantly isolates half the political spectrum unfortunately.
The unions certainly didn't help their cause, but it took two to tango to create the mess that is the UK economy.
She had to privatise industries because they became ridiculously uncompetitive and expensive to run.
During the previous socialist government the number of public sector workers increased drastically.
British steel was haemorrhaging money. And the unions response? Demand pay increases and strike. Same with the coal industry.
Would you rather she kept us paying billions in ever increasing public sector wage demands?
"Full employment" should not be a policy. You don't spend public money employing unproductive workers in useless public sector jobs just for the hell of it.
Full employment is something that happens naturally when individuals take responsibility for themselves.
The UK economy is a mess because of drastic overspending by socialist governments. Something we're having to put right (again). Shame the lessons of the 70s/80s weren't learnt.
(I agree that the actions of the unions in 70s are also to the blame, but a better approach would have been to engage the unions and slowly transition to better balance of public and private sector industries rather than the union busting and throwing the baby out with the bathwater that MacGregor and Thatcher did)
In answer to your question would I rather pay billions in the cost of benefits to support people being unemployed or billions keeping people working in nationalized industries or the public sector ? At least with the latter you are getting something back for your money rather than people sitting on their arse all day watching daytime TV.
I fundamentally believe that it is NOT and should not be the task of the government to "create" jobs.
We should toughen up benefits, which the current government is already doing, to ensure people out of work don't just sit on their arses all day.
You cannot do what the past socialist governments have done - create tons of unnecessary public sector jobs paid for by debt. That is unfair to everyone and just has to be paid for later.
The actual amount of money controlled by the City of London Corporation isn't public either - e.g. there is the "City Cash" fund.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation
My favourite bit of City trivia is that they have an official representative at Parliament, who gets to sit opposite the speaker - the wonderfully named Remembrancer.
[Edit: For some highly entertaining, if slightly paranoid, ranting about the City and the evils of offshore finance I can recommend "Treasure Islands" by Nicholas Shaxson - http://treasureislands.org/]
There is also a Church of Ireland (which was disestablished as the offical religion of Ireland (which was in the UK) in 1870ish), and Church in Wales. Scotland has sorta it's own church (think it's a slight different variant) which it has a right to exist due to the Act of Union of 170x.
So it's all a bit complicated and depending on how you define "UK" and "UKwide"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scotland
NB Although I've always been an atheist, I grew up in a small community in the North of Scotland dominated by the Kirk and it's more zealous offshoots. If you've seen Lars von Triers "Breaking the Waves" then you'll get the idea.... :-)
Funny - in Australia and New Zealand we have Governors General to represent the Queen, and they're also given the final say on whether a law is passed. In New Zealand the people I've talked to have considered it purely ceremonial, but in Australia 1975 that viewpoint was refuted when the governor general dissolved the parliament.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerr_(governor-general) for more.
And while technically the House of Commons can pass just about any law it wants, the House of Lords generally acts as a counterweight to reign in worst of the Commons. Usually if its not in the governments manifesto and the bill gets kicked back to the Commons then by convention its usually kicked into the long grass unless the changes proposed by the Lords are acceptable.
Of course the Commons could invoke the Parliament Act to push through legislation it generally only does so in rare circumstances (a handful over the last century). However any attempt to do this over anything other than a firm manifesto pledge would likely again plunge the UK into said constitutional crisis.
So the checks and balances in the UK system come from the fact none of parties involved wants to deal with the mess that would result if they didn't follow prior convention.
Don't you mean "Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union"?
I stopped reading Reddit about the time the entirety of r/uk was threatening to occupy twitter or something about this. Please don't bring it here too.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure...
But, are these engineers being paid proportionally to the value they create? That is the acid test. The class system works both ways; people being held down are ingrained to believe that that is their station in life.
You can find considerably more interesting contract work outside the City that pays the same as a salaried role in the City - worth considering if you don't mind a little uncertainty, don't want to work overtime, and want to be able to switch around whenever things get dull...
1) The free market is not efficient
2) There is some hidden benefit to overpaying clueless PHBs
I'm genuinely curious about this, actually...
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
And hence assuming that a free market is more efficient, that you can make more money by trying to make the market more free-er (i.e. hire based on merit, not class, etc.).
Imagine if everything you ever bought worked this way. You want some eggs? You'll need to go in the store managers office, he'll make an offer and you can accept it or negotiate. You might not even get the eggs. Once you do, you're afraid to tell anyone else how much they cost. How efficient would that market be?
There is a similar thing going on with sex. The difference between a back rub and rub&tug isn't just the target location, it's also the associated taboos and stigmas.
(Circuit IV, for those of you who've read Prometheus Rising...)
The real issue is that, bizarrely, workers buy into silly fantasies about "family" etc., instead of realizing that selling your time for a wage is a market action and must be treated as such.
Simply paying more isn't the same as not being exploitative, even if it does make you feel better about yourself. I suppose it might make sense to consider the wider picture too, like how much of that increased income is produced by more fully exploiting other laborers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_labour#Surplus_labour_a...
"Exploitation occurs when those appropriating surplus labour — whether in the form of surplus-value, surplus product or direct surplus labour — are different than those performing surplus labour..."
There is no universal definition exactly but they share certain elements. In particular exploitation is the result of a power inequality between the laborer and the exploiter.
The question is not simply about the split of profits between capital investors and laborers. (Since capital is the accumulation of surplus labor, it's already exploitative.) The original act of exploitation it's self occurs much earlier. When you do not receive renumeration equal in value to that of your surplus labor.
Putting real numbers to those values is hard and I don't really have a satisfying answer to give you. You might find Elinior Ostroms work interesting though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom
So - if entrepreneurs give away all surplus value to their employees, what motivation do they have to start businesses?
Another reason why The City might pay higher: Since there is so much money at stake/to be made, and since it's so compeditive, and rewards can be gotten so quickly (you could make millions in one year, no need to wait for things to pay off) that it would be foolish for a upper class toff to sit on their hands and not hire the bright young commoner.
It could be that the traditionalist companies probably missed out on a lot of good techies, and hence weren't able to compete and were marginalised by companies who did hire based on merit, not class.
Capitalism at work for our labour.
That is not the case now.
While I admire the great priced hardware and look forward to playing with a Pi applying them to various "problems", I cannot see this kids lark at all. I showed my kids these things, and they have no interest in them what so ever. They have PC's, laptops, tablets, smart phones, Xboxs, PS3's, etc, etc. What do these things do? Not a lot. What can they be made to do? Less than everything we all ready own. They are impressed with it's size and price, but that is all. All they see is a very small computer that can do these same things their current machines can do, just.
Education? Think about schools (UK schools in my case). Budgets are squeezed, curricula locked down and time tight. Not to mention the lack of low level computing skills in the staff. Well, high level isnt much better, one of my kids acts as a class assistant because the teacher is pretty much clueless. Who is going to champion this and when? How are kids going to be motivated to do this low level stuff when they have alternatives that are much more exciting and "hip"?
Im sorry, I don't believe the Pi is going to solve the education aim at all. The idea is commendable, and I recognise the problem and support any attempt. But I honestly don't see kids getting excited and I don't see any structure that will either capture or motivate them.
Sure, they are selling. Rightly too. But who too? 8 year olds, or geek experimenters like me? I mean, I can see loads of geeky uses. Im loving it. But any kids? Any primary schools? I was in primary school when I first encountered a computer. Secondary school it too late.
I dont want to be down on it in any way, it is a brilliant bit of kit, incredible price too, loads of uses, I must have one, but cant see it starting an educational revolution like BBC Micro (and many others) did.
I mean, its just too darn complicated. The old ZX81, 4 chips. The circuit is so simple. The software was simple.
You know, its just so darn complicated now. There is too much of a gap.
Ooooooo. That was long, and a bit garbled. Sorry.... :)
Let's hope it comes true!
Surely a better analogy then would be that kids don't need to learn how to build things out of metal (Unless they particularly want to).
Welding and metalwork is for some people. Just as programming is for some people and not others.
Personally, I don't think we have fallen behind at all. Kids are still learning to program, just as they used to. Being taught in schools is (I guess) a nice to have, but not necessary.
It's easy for programmers to think that programming is the only thing that matters and it's crucial everyone learn it. But it's really not. All that matters is that people who wish to learn it, can.
I have a problem with idealism like that. Andrew Carnegie thought if we had public libraries, it would enable people to help themselves. And where are we today? Education is free too, and where are we today?
I'm not saying that it might not help a small crucial group of children who -- through their own motivation -- will go on to do great things that will change their lives. But recognize that is the likely reality instead of pining for a universal enrichment that is never going to happen.
A chicken in every pot sounds good, but not everyone knows how -- or wants to learn how -- to cook.
I mean it is the idealism that motivates him to do this in the first place, if it turns out the raspberry pi motivates a few kids to become great engineers/inventors/scientists, that's great right? Would it have been better if he was cynical about it?
"I write this as the Raspberry Pi is selling at 700 units a second" Really? That's 42,000 per minute, or a million a day. Sure about that?
This is apart from the fact that the rpi is _just a PC_. There's no new software, educational or otherwise. You can't just give every schoolchild one and expect anything particularly new to happen on it's own.
Finally the claim that a new model of computer will 'Save' the UK is so beyond ludicrous that I don't know where to begin. The device is not even manufactured in the UK!
I'm all for the sentiments expressed in the article, but let's try and keep the hysteria in check. There's a lot more work ahead.
Something closer to the Fignition side of the spectrum. (I've personally liked taking my kids back to Papert's Turtle Graphics on such a simple machine: http://bit.ly/figlogo)
However why do we need a Raspberry Pi? Can't you make software with any computer (except recent things from Apple)? Or is it a case that RP, being so popular will get people talking about creating and playing with stuff?
Though, I think about the insane hours I spend tinkering with my computer when I was a kid and it makes me wonder how many parents would be happy to let their children go on tinkering for hours like that on the commong family screen!
Now, with a rp, when a kid says "I'm gonna strap my computer to this servo, and that servo to some junk in the garage and throw it all off of the roof AND IT WILL FLY!" a few less parent will freak out and there is more of a chance we can all benefit from what ever is in this kids head..... and latterly smashed on his lawn :)
There are a lot of ideas in kids heads that just don't see the light of day.
Even the richest parents would think twice about allowing little alice to throw her laptop off the roof.
As a kid that grew up without a lot of stuff and my parents struggled to get me my first computer (Oric 16k). It changed my life. I think the RP will change more lives and open up more avenues to genuinely poor kids who want to experiment.
Great ideas are not just generated by middle/upper class kids, us working class kids have great ideas too.
I realise this is a great generalisation and we live in a 'class-less society' and money goes up as well as down and some kids will indeed use RP to record their sisters undressing and some kids will try and snort their RP up their nose BUT it's a genuine opportunity for ALL kids and I endorse it.
They're also going to be gently hampered by having various incompatibilities - the programming environment will cause some stuff to not compile and while that's a great learning experience it's not what you want someone to be faced with on their first "Hello World" example. Note that all those home computers that people started on, typing listings from magazines, did not have those problems.
And advanced learners are going to be gently impeded by the OS not letting them get access to the hardware. I made a simple DA converter out of resistors soldered to a D25, which I used with NO$GB emulator. Building that DA was useful for me, and seeing the data lines on the D25 made the concept a lot more real. I guess this is possible under Linux or OSX or Windows but it's harder than just selecting addresses and sending data to them.
[1] My answer to those questions is to just use "Learn Python the Hard Way"; perhaps having a version tailored for young people and the Raspberry PI. Once they've worked their way through that they have the confidence to start choosing editors etc.
And yes, surely some have >1 already. So what? How does the fact that some kid has 3 computers do anything for a kid who has none?
In fact I'd say that Apple's stack is outstanding for this purpose because it goes all the way from the very top (high level support for multi-touch) all the way to the very bottom (arm assembly), with an IDE and remote debugging at every level.
I think there is also a psychological advantage to the Apple stack for passionate young programmers - they aren't programming a toy.
For this purpose though, it is vastly more expensive than the alternatives.
If all you own is an iPad, Apple don't let you run software tools on it.
If you mean that you can't develop native apps using only an iPad, that is true. For that you need to buy other tools (e.g. a Mac mini), which is why I said it was an expensive option.
1. The designers of the Raspberry Pi have said that while their intention was to design and manufacture the device fully within the UK, the latter turned out to be impossible from a business perspective due to the high import taxes of materials for electronic assembly.
2. Why will the untested potential of the Raspberry Pi "save the UK" when an already extremely successful and much older electronics company like ARM (also based in Cambridge) has already got there first? ARM's devices are used all over the world for the lower power efficiency of their CPU designs, most notably in Apple devices.
ARM's success has had no impact on the trend towards services in the UK economy since its founding in 1990.
3. When the size (GDP impact) of the City relative to the UK real economy is six times larger than the size of Wall Street relative to the US real economy, you can be sure that if there is any change it will be very slow indeed.
The UK long ago given up the many benefits of engineering and manufacturing. It takes a considerable amount of time to ramp up the expertise to build competitive products in the world today. Just look at the centuries old Germanic Mittlestand and the 40-year Korean engineering sector development - the formerly fastest economic developer in the world. Also, engineering in the UK (unlike in the rest of the EU) has serious cultural and financial downsides plus little government support.
did "raspberry pi might increase interest in software development slightly, although it's hard to see why this should be restricted to the uk since it's available internationally" not sound catchy enough?
Several huge industries have been closed down in the last quarter of the 20th century. Governments were adamant that subsidies absolutely were not available to those industries. Many people have lived in relative poverty for years, in areas with very high rates of unemployment.
And then the banks went into meltdown, because of greedy irresponsible sometimes criminal behaviour; and these were the same banks that were talking about the importance of pure market forces and no government intervention; and these banks were propped up at vast expense to the UK taxpayer; at a time when many well loved public services are being cut; and those same greedy bankers (despite being in position when their banks lost billions and needed support from tax-payers) are taking huge bonuses.
I suggest you do a little reading, start with the Industrial Reorganization Committee and the Wilson government (1964).
Oh for our kids to learn how and why of computers, and grow up to rule them instead of be ruled by them!
I get it when it is WebGL, but not for static text.
Every time I scrolled every single visual reference point of where I was reading changed.
Oh they are. I'll shut up then... :)
“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”