Teh British foreign economy
Britain has one of the most open economies in the western world, where our government does not practice protectionism against essential services and major companies.
What I would like to ask of the Hexus collective is this:
With so many of the UK's essential assets, major employers & service providers being owned and run by foreign interests, how can the Government keep effective control of the economy?
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Originally Posted by Blitzen
Interest rates and taxes.
Society's to blame,
Or possibly Atari.
I think the most ridiculous thing is phoning British Telecom ( 0800 800150 ) and being put through to a call centre in India...
Obviously by outsourcing workers we avoid those nasty things like having to pay people a sufficient minimum wage to live on, but if we can't be bothered to stick to our morals in making laws for workers rights why have them at all? If we are just going to bypass it all and go to the lowest bidder without any international oversight.
Last edited by Perfectionist; 19-01-2010 at 02:46 PM.
Two important industries that I can think of:
The games industry, one of the must successful in the world.
The offshore services industry, yes there is oil and gas in the north sea, but we are net importers of all that anyway. What we do export is a massive amount of knowledge and equipment to every other part of the world that has oil.
The point isn't so much that we don't pay them a sufficient minimum wage, but that a sufficient minimum wage in India is probably less than a week's sufficient minimum wage in the UK. In fact (AFAIK!) call centre employees in India are actually very well paid in local terms - but that's still significantly less in currency terms than the minimum you could pay a UK worker.
Our science and medical research is among the best in the world but the way the government is cutting funding for research even this will be under threat. A lot of this research will be important for the world as a whole. The UK has had 14 Nobel price winners in medicine,physics and chemistry in the last 20 years alone!
The £1.5 billion in RBS bonuses is equivalent to no funding cuts for science and medical research for YEARS.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 19-01-2010 at 04:11 PM.
Perfectionist (19-01-2010)
This is a completely different argument, and we shouldn't derail this discussion further. But I will say that paying bonuses is not linked to cuts in scientific finding. I am, of course, against cuts in scientific research*, but am not against bonuses being paid to people that have earned it.
*cuts are entirely appropriate is the research is not appropriate any more or does not offer the return on investment offered by spending the money else where.
Actually it is. Money had to be given to the banks to bail them out and hence money has to be cut elsewhere. People in science work damn hard for their money and get paid very little for the hours they put in and the job security is crap. There is no bonuses or anything like that at all.
More money in science would mean retaining among the best minds in the world to put it in "bankers-speak"!
These bankers seem to be stuck up their a-holes on how they "deserve" their pay and bonuses and yet the rest of the country works even harder for less money.
This is almost like holding the taxpayer to ransom with their attitude.
I would rather that 1.5 billion pounds of the money the banks owe us is given back to the tax payer this year. At least this means the government has a little more money for other things.
????
Perhaps you need to read about Sir Paul Nurse and why he and his colleagues got a Noble price. The original focus of their research was the cell cycle in yeast. Using your warped logic it would be of no use and should not be funded as it obviously has no short-term commercial use.
I assume you know about cell cycle checkpoints then and cancer??
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 19-01-2010 at 04:59 PM.
Perfectionist (19-01-2010)
Totally true, research is not like building a car, you can't get any true innovation if it's strictly controlled...
That's a horrific misreading of what Funkstar said. He didn't mention commerical use or short-term outcomes at all. I think it would be hard to make a case that ongoing cellular biology research into the formation of cancer was innapropriate or had no chance of return on investment.
That doesn't change the fact that a lot of research eats up huge amounts of funding and has no relevance, is inappropriate, is plain bad science, or has no useful purpose. Where such research is identified it thoroughly deserves to have its budget cut, in favour of other more appropriate research *or* for other purposes full stop.
For instance, huge amount of money are poured into medical research on animals, when all animal testing is inherently flawed due to the differences between animal and human physiology*. Don't believe me? Then consider that Thalidomide (to use an example that has been in the news recently) passed all of its animal testing...
*EDIT: I'm not saying that animal testing serves *no* useful purpose, by the way - but it is far less conclusive than the people who get paid to do it would have you believe...
Sigh!! The whole point is nobody at the time knew that if the research would be of any significance to medicine. Using short-terminism it would probably have been canned.
It is only when they found equivalent humans genes that it was realised that a similar system of cell cycle regulation existed in human cells(this is very simplified - sorry!).
Loads of research with model organisms(like the yeast used) paves the way for research into more complex systems. In the long-term it actually saves money as the usually more costly research into more advanced systems can be better directed. Without the base the top crumbles.
A lot of biological and medical research is like that. It has long-term goals and different areas feed into each other.
With regards to drug testing it has become progressively more complex and stricter since the days of thalidomide and no doubt the model systems have got more refined as time as gone by. Of course animal models are not the only ones which exist now. Now you get human cell lines which you could do testing with(sorry I am not an expert in the area of drug testing ) but the technology did not exist or was not viable when thalidomide was invented. OTH,animal testing still may hold some merits in certain cases.
Non-human testing systems needed to exist otherwise even human testing would not be passed would it?? Animals models were probably the best(or best understood) system available in the 1950s and 1960s before the final human tests. With any drug there can be side effects as testing can never be 100% accurate even after years of trials.To test all possible combinations which may cause an adverse effect when the drug is taken seems nigh on impossible unfortunately.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 19-01-2010 at 05:48 PM.
So what your saying is we should invest in things we have no idea as to what the consequences could be?
But there are some things which become quite difficult, for instance thalidomide I understood would cause problems in the animal population in a similar ratio to that in the human population. If the sample in any test is too small then your not going to see fully representative behaviour. Given how cheep animal testing is, its kinda a bargain.
The thing is as func said, its a separate issue regarding that £1.5bn. If one tries to connect it all they could easily take the view point that RBS will loose all profit making traders if they don't get a bonus, this is blindingly obvious to anyone that knows any part of the industry, RBS is likely to suffer a decline in share price, meaning even less public money available for spending.
Of course, that is just a theory, but you can't say its money out of the pockets of researchers, it just isn't.
(Also one could argue that the ESPRC spend 0.5bn on foreign research....)
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
http://www.cern.ch/
You have to if you want to achieve anything other than progression along the same tired railroads.
That's the problem with you financial types, no imagination whatsoever.
They can't.
Which is possibly why the UK is in deep economic poo poo at the moment.
Anyhow, I thought the Kray's great grandchildren and Don Corleone (that's the Don Corelone who lives in Bethnal Green) controlled the economy?
The iconic US bus company Greyhound is UK owned.
In fact they are owned by FirstGroup, their head office is in.... Aberdeen
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