i_have_suffered

An old old effort https://file.io/GRK1MYoYqESv

I got some flack giving a presentation that mentioned civilian participation in my organisations business by Chinese companies. The US Admiral that I was talking to (the topic was innovation - so no secrets) railed about us collaborating with entities that were alien to our core values. I could not reply - without unemployment - but all the time I thought about US support for Saudi - where the Admiral undoubtedly had served, and what kind of core values does that demonstrate?

Maybe the GP has a job that means that they can't comfortably give some specifics. However, literally every GCP and AWS customer engineer that I have been on a call with says "you can use these models out of the box for any application and they will just work". Also, all of my competitors are saying "ML is democratized you just plug the models in, the cost of your project will be 3 engineers for eight weeks from India/Ukraine/Brazil". The problem is that this is leading to unnecessary failures of the technology both because it means that many projects that should not be attempted are being attempted and are doomed to fail, and on the other hand it means that projects that could work if done right are failing unnecessarily. This is burning investment capital and good will all over the place. In my opinion educating the market is essential : any dolt can wire together a demo that does 80% of what's needed, sales people can use that to convince the customer that the outcome will be a project that costs in at 30% of the value and delivers 110% (they are sales, so maths is not important to them) but delivering that project requires technical insight, competence, structure and professionalism. All of which are in short supply.

Ok - the EU was founded 1st November 1993; I remember the UK as a centre for world finance and one of the most prosperous and settled nations in the world at that time. I could have been very drunk and made a mistake however.

But - I think you are referring to the state of the UK when it joined the EEC in 1973. The UK was in fact in a big mess at that point - which promptly got a lot bigger. This led to IMF intervention in 1976 [1]. This was not a big win for the EEC at that point in my book. The UK was in a big hole because it had spent all its money on unwinding its empire and failed to either properly retool its industries or pay down its second world war debt. The EEC and Europe in general did not help or bail out the UK - in fact they continued to expect payments from the UK in the midst of all this, a pattern that I fear Italy and Spain are about to encounter in the way that sentances encounter full stops.

What turned this round - the discovery of North Sea Oil. This enabled Thatcher to restructure the UK economy, recapitalize the City of London and hey presto off the UK went to the races. The big buggeration was the collapse of the Soviet Union which meant a restructuring of Europe in order to prevent the East from falling into anarchy and exposing the German state to abject collapse. Thus we all got swept up into the EU.

Anyway, if you want to argue about "prospered inside the EU sad much as the UK has" I ask you to look at the economic performance of Germany.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_IMF_crisis

We had a huge influence right up until push came to shove and then we had none. I agree we can't become great - isolation or not; I believe that isolation isn't on the table either - next few weeks excluded. The reality is that France and Germany shafted the UK publicly and conclusively during the euro crisis, they also shafted the Greeks - but I'm not Greek so that's less of a problem for me. Remember also that they removed an Italian government and installed a technocrat. Yet lots of people seem to have forgotten that and either don't care or can't bring themselves to see the reality of the situation.

The UK's weakness was exposed by the 2011 veto and subsequent upending of the EU treaties to suit everyone apart from the UK. We had been floundering in that club since 2009, despite bailing out other members (ie. Ireland) - and when push came to shove Germany and France made it clear that the UK could shove off. The UK is no weaker now than it was then - it's just that it's clear where we stand. The great powers of the world (China, US, Germany) act in their own interests, the UK must act as if that is true and attempt to navigate around them - or we must simply be subjugated to one of them. I believe that Germany in particular will regret this situation in the future, with a pretense of a triumvirate of powers and associated allies (ie. France, Italy, Spain etc; UK, Poland, etc; Germany and everyone else) there was a chance of a very different EU. That's gone now and Germany must take the reigns - and it will be in a very different strategic context.

Also they have supplied aid to Italy and Spain (although also screwed up with medical supplies to Spain).

Well, I think it's along the lines of "The US has behaved recklessly for the last 20 years, and any personal or corporate preferment for a US entity has been supported at the cost of the national interest of its allies. We have discovered all sorts of theft and malpractice by US companies and intelligence agencies and yet any complaint made to the US government is met with a smirk and a shrug. Not only does the US ignore our national interest, but US officials are openly contemptuous of it. The Chinese are evil and their values are alien to us, but the US is increasingly more similar to Saudi Arabia in it's values, system of government and international outlook than it is to us. We don't trust the USA and we need to have options."

If the UK goes all in with the USA we will end up looking like Mexico. If we go all in on Europe we will end up looking like Italy, or Greece (as was made clear in the aftermath of the 2011 veto). Many people who are not from the UK seem really keen that the UK is smashed up and humbled, we are supposed to be poor, sardonic and to provide cutting edge humor. This is not a great direction of travel for everyone who lives here though. Fundamentally the UK is alone in the world and needs to grow up and act like it - so we need to make some sort of bargain with the Chinese, and the Russians (which is much harder as they are acting as the perfect irrational player in the game of international relations right now).