Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.
The U.K. has been stripped and laid bare of its assets since the era of privatisation. The U.K. needs to wake up and start innovating to take back control.
You mean like water? ... I believe we're the only 'developed' country in the world to have sold off / privatised it's water.
It's all we do. Sell our country down the river for the benefit of a few wankers.
I signed up to the link in the original post, but don't have that much hope. We'll sell our grandma if it'll mean we get a 50p voucher or save 2 more minutes of our day.
I’m working on stuff that I can’t say too much about. But let’s just say there is a way out from this - but it will require the smartest minds and folks starving for change to come together and create the change we want. Sometimes an environment that creates a desperate need for change can be a good thing.
It’s not going to happen via politics. It has to come by being creative from the outside in.
Let me guess, its a new Web Framework isn't it? :P
I am pleased to read someone is taking some initiative.
Someone who is more open to a “take the best of what exists” is what is needed.
Appreciate the positive sentiment.
Wasn’t it both England and Wales?
To me the NHS is a hang-over from the 20th century, out of date and struggling to keep up. A new system of health care needs to take over. I'm not smart enough to know what that is, but I hope it happens soon.
Politicians quickly learn to use government services/"rights" as a means of dividing and controlling the population. Instead of thinking about the survival of the nation, people focus on personal survival (e.g., should I vote to live another three years or help pay for a new weapon system?). To provide healthcare is akin to weighing the nations' pancreas on a balance scale against, for example, the Navy. What kind of a country is that? (Ans. "Almost every developed nation today!-(")
I believe the term for this is "incommensurability". Whilst money seems to make everything "commensurable" at first glance, it is a mistake to extend the application of money in this manner to government-provided healthcare.
https://healthcarereaders.com/insights/healthcare-fundamenta...
Let private businesses sell insurance. Let people buy what insurance they desire.
Insurance doesn't have to cover everything: any aspect of coverage is debatable since it is a contract between buyer and seller with the courts as the deciding powers when either buyer or seller believes the contract has been violated.
They absolutely should. And it should be free for all and private health care should be absolutely forbidden to force the rich to use the exact same health care system as the poor. That's the only way you get quality. Same with education.
I don’t know about this, but I’m positive employers should not provide health insurance.
Companies don’t have the right incentives to be controlling your healthcare plan, when you leave the company you don’t have a plan (unless you can afford COBRA), you might not even be eligible for health insurance from your company because of company-policy to not cover non-manager level or part-time——are they too not deserving of healthcare insurance? Employers coverage is good for some because incentives align, but it should not be the standard.
That's a nice dream.
But the UK government's GDS team is a fantastic example of doing tech right in government. I can see an expanded government involvement in tech for bodies like the NHS that is a clear alternative to the Silicon Valley model. The salaries would never reach US levels but could still afford a very comfortable life.
Problem is that it would require the government to spend money on itself and its employees, which successive governments are loathe to do because the press will punish them for it every time.
Many of the country's assets and infrastructure are now literally owned abroad, and run for the benefit of foreign owners.
You regularly get outbreaks of talent like GDS, and they regularly get sidelined/eaten/shut down if they're not aligned with corporate ownership.
The US has avoided that fate up until this point but when I look at Larry Ellison’s son buying Paramount with dad’s money, the Trump juniors cashing in on their dads name (and to your point, all of them happily taking investment from the Saudis) I do have a sense of history repeating itself.
It's worse if it's literally part of the design of the country's civil fabric, e.g. Saudi Arabia or indeed Britain's Royal Family but while Charlie and a handful of his family have that sort of connection a lot of those random Earls and other minor titles are just inherited power, same as a Kennedy or a Roark. And it's barely a century since Britain last had to do the "hard" (it's about an hour of parliament's time) work of just crossing out names on these lists (last century it was because some of our uh, nobles, were actually born and lived in Germany, and had thus become our Enemy in World War I)
To my mind, a big problem is that until extremely recently Britain's two major political parties both agreed on the Protestant Work Ethic, the idea that doing work is a moral necessity for people. There are a lot of scenarios where that breaks down, but neither Labour (because um, clue is in the name) nor the Tories could stomach the idea that maybe working isn't itself a valuable end. We are well past the point where it's mechanically necessary to employ everybody, and we may be approaching the point where doing so is actively harmful, a political party who can't even imagine that is a bad fit.
My Christmas wish is for decision makers to do like I was told when I learned how to drive: Keep the eyes far ahead on the road, not right in front of the car.
It could even be revenue generating as, once developed, it could be sold out to the private sector, instead of essentially being taxed by foreign corporations for such basic digital infrastructure as hypervisors and key/value stores.
It could also act as a buffer and wage-stabiliser for people like us, who work in tech, by providing guaranteed employment when the private sector implements layoffs.
I don't know why anyone in our position wouldn't support that.
So, yea, build some data centers in Scotland and somewhere in the midlands, setup some good cloud services, starting with the basics - Compute, DB, and storage.
Choice would be a fine thing ... I understand there is a move in some European countries towards more open source. How successful that'll be is debatable, but at least they're trying ffs.