Can the UK Create Something To Rival Silicon Valley? 395
An anonymous reader writes "Hoping to bring together ambition, creativity and energy in one place, the UK government hopes to grow East London so that we can benefit from the same sort of success that has been seen in California; jobs, tax revenue, highly skilled workers and takeovers. If it works, the country would massively benefit, with something to rival other established industries."
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Re:Americanisms (Score:5, Funny)
That's "Siliconionium" to you, pal
Assange (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not sure why this is being labeled as offtopic, it is a legitimate concern.
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There are a lot of people who have done things that the US is not happy about, a lot of those people are in the technology field, they may not want to move to a country where they could be easily extradited.
Kim Dotcom is a better example than Assange.
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Old joke. (Score:5, Funny)
The UK doesn't have any PC manufactures.. ..Because they have not yet found a way to make PCs leak oil.
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They should get with the Taiwanese, they found a way to make PC's leak petroleum products.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague [wikipedia.org]
Electrolyte leaked onto the motherboard from the base of the capacitor or vented from the top, visible as crusty rust-like brown deposits. The petroleum-based adhesive that is sometimes used to secure the capacitors to the board can be confused with leaked electrolyte; electrolyte is usually wet, adhesive is dry. The glue is a thick elastic covering usually of a sandy yellow
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No. (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at what happened with the Raspberry Pi, import taxes pretty much sunk any possibility of building it in the UK.
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"Silicon Valley", especially the sort of latter-day web 2.0 Social bullshit that people seem interested in these days, isn't exactly a manufacturing-heavy operation...
But actually living in London is a challenge (Score:5, Interesting)
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he's got a point though, why must it be in East London of all places? Surely somewhere nearer Cambridge or one of the many Oxford science parks would be a better choice. Even Reading would be significantly cheaper (ie near the Corporate Playground that is Winnersh).
Of course, if I set up a company, I'd base it in the lake district or the Cornish coast. I don't think I'd have many problems recruiting staff who'd be happy to relocate to those places.
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he's got a point though, why must it be in East London of all places? Surely somewhere nearer Cambridge or one of the many Oxford science parks would be a better choice. Even Reading would be significantly cheaper (ie near the Corporate Playground that is Winnersh).
Of course, if I set up a company, I'd base it in the lake district or the Cornish coast. I don't think I'd have many problems recruiting staff who'd be happy to relocate to those places.
I agree. This smacks of the usual "we must regenerate East London at all costs!" attitude which has been prevalent for the past 50 years. The first successful wheeze was making it a financial hub (which worked, see Canary Wharf), but now banks are evil e.t.c and that won't do. Then the Olympics were going to transform East London into a global hub of running around. Now it must be a global hub of technology.
As I understand it, a large part of the early success of Silicon valley was due to a glut of educated
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Yes. London is heavily overcrowded, the housing is tiny and very expensive, the transport infrastructure expensive and congested (including trains). Trying to start a new cluster of an industry there is insane at all, especially one full of startups that can and do benefit a great deal from a very low cost environment.
But businesses like London because there's a big pool of employees to choose from, and a big pool of suppliers, accountants, lawyers, banks and so on. And it's the people at the top who earn h
Re:But actually living in London is a challenge (Score:5, Informative)
As expensive as the Bay Area is relative to the rest of the country, it still pales in comparison to nice areas of London.
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I don't know about "pales in comparison". The valley is getting pretty damn expensive:
http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/Mountain_View-heat_map/ [trulia.com]
I guess we still have a ways to go before hitting London prices.
Though rent looks downright cheap, judging from
http://www.londoncommunitynews.com/2012/06/londons-apartment-vacancy-rate-dips/ [londoncommunitynews.com]
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Even a one bed apartment in London costs £750k (~$1m).
That's highly misleading. 1 bed apartments cost that much in a tiny part of London, I could say the same of pretty much all major global cities.
You can get 1 bedroom flats within 25 minutes of the centre of town (by center of town I mean a tube station in the city of London) for less than 275k GBP, I'm sure you can find cheaper ones nearer - but I hardly looked.
Alex
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Yes, but it beats spending 2 hours a day in the subway traveling to and from work.
If you don't like the tubes, you may as well use your car and travel 4 hours per day...
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Re:But actually living in London is a challenge (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure. Live in London and spend 30 minutes crammed in a sweatbox with other cunts to get to work, paying over a third of your salary in rent.
Or live outside of London and work outside of London, with a gentle commute and a disposable income that lets you enjoy life.
If the Government wants to create a new industry fucking base it outside of the overcrowded under-resourced stupidly expensive shithole known as the South East. There are entire swathes of the country with affordable housing, cheap labour and strong demand for jobs of all types. So fucking invest in them.
Fucking London fucking bias. It fucks me off.
A new wild west (Score:4, Insightful)
What we actually need is a new "wild west". A place where there are no artificial restrictions like patents, lawyers and what not so that innovation can flourish.
Re:A new wild west (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean like china, where all of those problems can disappear for a big enough wad of cash.
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Of course once you actually build your products there your IP will also "disappear" [telegraph.co.uk].
Re:A new wild west (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, Wild West swings both ways, ya know? You cannot tell government to stay out of your way and then come back whining when it does.
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Unless you're a person living near the toxic sludge being overlooked, or you're the kid forced to work 12 hour days below minimum wage in a factory etc.
Sure, a wad of cash can make your problems as business owner go away, but those problems are everyone elses solutions.
Stillborn (Score:4, Insightful)
the UK government hopes to grow East London so that we can benefit from the same sort of success that has been seen in California;
- DOA, just like Russian version of Silicon Valley (Skolkovo).
That is unless the government in UK is planning to get rid of regulations, taxes, labour laws and inflation of-course.
Re:Stillborn (Score:4, Insightful)
You forgot Berkley which contributed both Unix and of course LSD.
Why not in Cambridge? (Score:3)
Why not try to do it in Cambridge? It's already a major technology cluster, better invest there than to try to recreate something from scratch...
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That wouldn't displace enough poor people.
Re:Why not in Cambridge? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nottingham has tried it several times already.
Highfields Science Park began as, and is still, a niche research facility owned and administered by the University of Nottingham. Its original commercial intent was as a supportive facility for tech startups.
The Lace Market quarter was renovated and equipped with facilities aimed at Dotcom startups. Failed. Most of the units now sit unused and unoccupied, and almost entirely owned by New College Nottingham and now used mainly for storage.
The Howitt Building was renovated much as the Lace Market was, as a springboard for tech companies. Has never had more than 25% occupancy. Owned and run as a secured building by the City Council, with the accompanying extortionate office rents.
The Island Business Park is currently occupied by the BBC, Experian, Capital One and the NHS. Little else, more than half the site is still undeveloped.
We're talking about the place where electron microscopes, CAT scanners, and several more of the most amazing medtech breakthroughs in history have been made. *Nobody* is interested in setting up shop there except Boots, Capital One, Experian and Games Workshop?? Makes me wonder why...
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Nottingham has tried it several times already.
(...)
*Nobody* is interested in setting up shop there
Probably because the city council is stupidly anti-business.
The local population doesn't really have a history of working in 'intellectual' industries. If you want a skilled or unskilled labour workforce then sure, come to Nottingham - but the manufacturing industry just doesn't employ as many people as it used to.
Nottingham attracts a lot of students (and has a great university) but then suffers the self-perpetuating cycle of "There are no good graduate jobs"->"Graduates leave Nottingham"->"Businesse
Re:Why not in Cambridge? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. The area around Cambridge has also been known as "Silicon Fen".
Or what about somewhere like Manchester - a big city with an important place in the history of computing, a large, well-regarded university, and a large pool of experienced, well-qualified people?
But no, once again it seems to be London that gets the attention.
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Why not both? London to Cambridge by train is only 50 minutes. Silicon Valley, meanwhile, refers to the bay area between San Francisco and San Jose. It takes more than an hour on the Caltrain to go from one end to the other. The USA is just really huge.
Quick Answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to be old... (Score:2)
The first sentence of that article is "With the Olympics about to get underway"...
Why is such an old article coming up?
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the author smoking. California currently has $380 billion in devt [usdebtclock.org] and a 10.8% unemployment rate [google.com]. I would call that far from being successful.
If I were the UK, I would not want to model anything after California
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were the UK, I would not want to model anything after California.
Anything modeled after California is known to cause cancer in the State of California. But only slightly more seriously, there's a subtle distinction between comparing what happened in California with what happened to California. The company with the largest market capitalization of any on earth is located there. Ten years ago, The Company Which Must Not Be Named was barely a blip on anyone's radar. There are many success stories to come out of Silicon Valley, and understandably, many business-minded folks would like to replicate that success.
Unfortunately, they're suffering from a massive case of survivor bias [wikipedia.org]. It's true that silicon valley has birthed some of the largest, most successful tech firms out there. It's also true that the valley is littered with the corpses of failure. During the dot com bust, companies were erecting fences to keep creditors from repossessing the cars out of company lots. Silicon Valley's success story should be likened to another California success story: The California gold rush [wikipedia.org]. You can't discuss success without also discussing the odds of failure.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, they're suffering from a massive case of survivor bias.
Yes. At one time, when the Computer Museum was being set up, I suggested having an "In Memorium" wall with the logos of thousands of failed Silicon Valley companies.
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If I were the UK, I would not want to model anything after California
Come on. Maybe the weather. Or the food.
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It also has a GDP [wikipedia.org] nearly that of the UK, despite having 25 million less inhabitants. To compare, the UK is £1,278.2 billion in debt [wikipedia.org] with an unemployment rate of 8%. Tech is also a growth industry which the UK needs since it is now too dependent on financial services, a sector that hasn't been doing especially well. That said I don't think this scheme will succeed but you can see why they would want it to.
Is Silicon Valley Worth Imitating? (Score:4, Interesting)
The vast majority of SV ventures have been expensive failures. It's essentially a welfare economy subsidized by venture capitalists who prey on the ignorance of non-technical investors. The rare ventures that succeed tend to move out of SV. The vast majority of SV workers never get rich; they move elsewhere when they are past age 30 and are no longer welcome. SV puts out its hype about the virtues of "hard work", "two men in a garage", and "no government" -- though in reality, it's about knowing the right people, being in the right place at the right time, and making most of their money from government contracts. Most scientific advances happen outside of SV, and most successful high-tech businesses are based outside of SV. I would say that SV is just a mysique created by the banking industry.
The future of high-tech leans toward medicine. SV is not strong in medicine; they just have bubbly biotech start-ups that typically disappear within a year. The successful high-tech business of the future will depend more on interactions with non-IT people, but SV's homogeneous population places it at a disadvantage there. SV does not have large numbers of health care professionals, industrial technicians, or other types who would provide valuable input.
Uk has better workers rights (Score:2)
So they can't pull the 80 hour work weeks or useing temps as full time long term in place of employees.
It's called "The City" (Score:3)
Different places have different specialties.. And when a place attracts lots of people who know something, it becomes a pole for that thing, generates high salaries in that field, and make life very expensive for everyone else. Silicon Valley, Bangalore, etc do high tech. New York, London, Hong Kong do banking. You can't have all of them. And I doubt a small-ish country like the UK can have many of them. The US can afford to have New York and Silicon Valley because they're very very far appart. The City is just too close to East London (or even Cambridge) to make them separate markets, meaning that old humid houses are still terribly expensive and no one in their right minds would want to move there unless they are made tons and tons of money.
It's a pointless question. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a pointless question. Let me explain:
Theoretically, the UK could try to accomplish this. The main barrier preventing any type of industry from flourishing in the UK is the obscenely high effective tax rate on human activity. (please give this typical figures, maybe in percentage if you're more familiar Brits)
The UK could then make an attempt to relieve a certain location and industry of these high taxation burdens to have the locus flourish.
The problem is that while this is a good move and should be applauded, simply cutting taxation on human activity without cutting the corresponding government spending doesn't solve much. The spending has to be paid for somehow, whether that is immediately by confiscating funds from other people and locations or somewhat delayed by building deficits and inflating the fiat money supply and thereby causing the mis-allocation of resources and bigger busts and recessions or depressions, people will continue to pay the piper.
The only sure way to encourage industry to flourish is to cut regulation and cut government taxation and spending. Remember, most government taxation is appropriating funds from a more effective use determined by the market, and instead putting them to less effective use as determined by bureaucrats.
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...cut regulation and cut government taxation and spending
Then you can have Silicon Road Warrior:
"Greetings from The Humungus! The Lord Humungus! The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!"
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Don't mock the liberals there are some who actually believe this in the face of all long term contradictory evidence. It's like creationism for liberals. They get all happy on the short term successes that socialism can create but ignore the fact that long term it has never lasted.
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Yes... But... (Score:2)
... do they really want that?
The boat sailed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many things coming together (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of things have to come together to create a 'Silicon Valley'. 1. You need a university center of excellence (like Stanford University) that actively promotes the high technology business. They have (or at least had) leases on land in the Santa Clara Valley, and offered good rates to fledgeling technology companies. 2. You have to have an entrepreneurial spirit: this isn't some 'I just graduated from business school, now I want my million dollars' boob, you need someone who has an idea or a set of i
No. They can't. (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to find someone to pick the right start-ups. Those people are rare, and unlikely to work for a city.
You need a pro-privacy, pro-free speach atmosphere, something that UK seriously lacks. (Cameras, libel laws, etc)
You need a good source of well educated people interested in science, not business.
You need a good place to live. Something that will attract smart people to live there besides the money. The UK is not sunny California.
Re:No. They can't. (Score:5, Informative)
Your summary of the article is stupid. None of those sentences are quotes. In fact the article states at the end that SVs great weakness is that it's a crap place to live, directly contradicting what you wrote. Here's an actual quote:
Yes, yes it is. Having lived temporarily in the Valley and grown up in the UK, I'm pretty sure I don't want to live along the US-101. I'd do it if there was some really compelling reason, but otherwise no thanks - love the sun, hate the driving. Rents and property prices in London are absurd and most likely still a bubble, but other than that it's not a bad place to live at all.
Your other points (not quotes) are also pretty stupid. There are a ton of well educated people in London, as well as many Brits working for Silicon Valley based companies. The UK has a long history of computer science, you know about Bletchley Park, right? The BBC Micro? The government doesn't deserve any credit for it (the BBC does!) but there were a ton of people growing up in the 80s and 90s who had access to really good computers and lots of educational material about them. It certainly got me started. At 28 I'm now a senior engineer at Google (in Switzerland).
BTW I think it's really great that companies like Amazon, Facebook and the big G have set up shop in London. These companies are great at training people who can then develop the confidence and skills to go do their own companies (Facebook was practically made of ex-Googlers back in the day, don't know if it still is). Especially anything internet related that might scale up fast will benefit a lot from the pool of skilled workers these companies will attract and create.
Come for the tech, stay for the dreck (Score:5, Funny)
so that we can benefit from the same sort of success that has been seen in California
Yes, and for free, if you order now, you will also receive:
*Crushingly high real estate prices
*Monstrously overcrowded prisons
*Bankrupt schools
BUT WAIT! THERES MORE! Be one of the first 100 callers and receive, as our special gift to you:
*Shortages of electricity and water!
*Political leadership totally devoid of morality, consistency, or backbone!
But seriously, California is a "hotbed" for ONE single reason: The weather is nice pretty much all year long. Anyone who lives there and tries to sell you on something else is lying to themselves. People go for the nice weather, and they put up with the constant bullshit because hey, it like never snows, unless you live in the mountains, which are only like 2 hours' drive away from the beaches... So why not live there? Right? And once you get enough smart people in one place (they are bound to turn up when you have 30 million people to start with) things just sort of take shape.
So, UK, you want your own Silicon Valley? Get a warm-weather generator, a couple of nice schools, a semi-pristine coastline, then fill it over the top with people, and wait 50 years. You will probably get something like that, or hey maybe you will end up with something like Haiti. Could go either way.
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yes, but on the bright side.. we might get Jason Statham as Mayor.
First step: relax labor laws (Score:3)
Until then the question is moot.
Clueless politicians (Score:2)
Clueless politicians sometimes have these ideas which, on the surface at lease, seem like a good idea.
Unfortunately, they have no earthly idea how to implement these ideas; and indeed, the very political nature of their jobs and way of thinking precludes them from doing so.
To draw an analogy, it's like trying to grow a forest by transplanting seedlings, without considering issues like soil quality, moisture, or environment.
Businesses are started by innovation, and grow in an environment of infrastructure.
Wh
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What is the infrastructure in London like? Is there easy and direct access to roads, or is there draconian limits on driving in the city. Is there universal access to high-speed internet, or are there restrictions on what you can do with your net connection?
The roads aren't the primary transport infrastructure in London (that's railways), the limits actually help companies (by reducing congestion). But as a way to start your comment, you seem like you've made up your mind already.
I'll answer your questions very quickly: Internet yes, restrictions no, business *extremely* easy, tax breaks no, political favours not really, tolerance for ideas yes, radical political ideas yes, libel is complicated (and how is this going to affect you anyway?), the IP stuff is gl
Right idea, wrong location (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want a "silicon valley" in the UK, don't target East London. Extend what you have and go for Reading [pronounce "REDDING"], which as it happens is already nicknamed "The silicon valley of the UK". Comfortably, Reading is already the home of many small unknown companies such as Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft and Symantec.
Did anybody 'create' Silicon Valley? (Score:2)
The problem with trying to create something like this, is I'm not sure that Silicon Valley was 'created' per se.
It seems like it happened because you had a couple of companies (HP for example) who set up shop there, and then other stuff grew around it. I'm not sure you could just go out and say "OK, we'll put a center of innovation and technology here".
It sort of has to grow organically I should think.
I used to work with someone who grew up in what is now Silicon Valley. He said at the time, it was a very
The White Heat of Technology (Score:4, Informative)
It's a recurrent theme in British politics. Look up Harold Wilson's 1963 "White Heat of Technology" speech and the creation of the Ministry of Technology.
Britain within living memory has been a technology leader in aviation, nuclear, computing, Those were largely developments that came out of the war and declined in the face of a dependence on government money for investment (and in the latter case, an unwillingness to admit even to the existence of the technology).
Private investors aren't interested in long-term investments - the "investment banking" industry has become big largely because it's eschewed actual growth-producing investment for complex financial instruments which are essentially a form of privatised taxation.
There is still a lot of high-tech industry (take Rolls Royce aero engines for example), but it survives and grows pretty much in spite of the business environment. It's no accident that Britain's now successful, productive and growing car industry is owned and financed from Japan, Germany and India.
It may be possible to grow IT-based industries in London, but they won't be owned in London and nor will any IP associated with them. And I'm afraid the government is sufficiently clueless about technology that it might actually feel it needs to encourage businesses like those cited by the article ( Instagram, Skype and Groupon) whereas there is probably a lot to be said for actively discouraging them.
Plus, this seems to be all about exempting businesses from paying their normal dues. I'm all in favour of foreigners spending money in London. I'm not in favour of the government giving it back with interest to encourage them.
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Private investors aren't interested in long-term investments - the "investment banking" industry has become big largely because it's eschewed actual growth-producing investment for complex financial instruments which are essentially a form of privatised taxation.
Well said. It is with deep regret that I have to report that back in the previous century I was working in a department that was one of the leading forces in bundling and selling mortgage and mortgage servicing portfolios. In other words, we were supposed to predict what those bundles should be worth over 10, 20, year years or so. um, yeah.
For doing this, we'd get something like .01 of 1% in fees as each billion-dollar bundle flew by. To mis-apply the late Senator Dirksen: a billion here (or .0001 thereof),
Join the club (Score:4, Insightful)
The world is full of urban centres that are trying to emulate the success of Silicon Valley. Ever heard of Silicon Valley North? No, I don't mean San Francisco. It's a term my home town, Ottawa, Canada, has adopted for itself. It's also been applied to Toronto, Vancouver, Waterloo, Calgary, and Montreal. But the truth is that none of them have a decent claim on the title -- they can't touch the real Silicon Valley in terms of scale, depth of expertise or level of innovation.
There's a big barrier to anyone trying to be the new Silicon Valley and it has nothing to do with corporate tax rates or research incentives. Those are all easy to measure and copy. It's the network effect -- the same one that makes eBay, the QWERTY keyboard and Microsoft Office so hard to displace. The smart people want to go to Silicon Valley because that's where the smart people are. After all, being with other smart people is not only more interesting, but more likely to lead to your own success. It's easy to see in a place like Ottawa, where the cream of the tech community are frequent targets for Silicon Valley head-hunters. They go, not (just) for the money, but to be part of that scene.
So good luck East London, but maybe you should have a plan B, just in case.
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Sorry, yes, the UK already has
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Glen [wikipedia.org]
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well, except Silicon Glen has kinda collapsed in on itself.
Also this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_with_'Silicon'_names [wikipedia.org]
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I thought it was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_corridor [wikipedia.org]
Re:No (Score:4, Funny)
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No, because UK doesn't have Al Gore.
No but they have Tony Blair, and he's teflon coated, Al Gore only has hairspray and makeup.
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Can England gather together a bunch of self righteous, self absorbed a**holes that will hop from one company to another hoping to strike it obscenely rich?
Were you asleep in civics class when they discussed the British East India Company?
Re:Can they? (Score:4, Funny)
You don't need civics class for that now. You can learn all about it with Johnny Depp in their wonderfully instructive series Pirates of the Caribbean.
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Meaning of Life.
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I guess I must have missed something.
So you are saying that the British East India Company was a conglomeration of private businesses with employees constantly jumping ship from one private business to the next?
That sounds closer to Lloyds of London rather than the British East India Company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd's_of_London [wikipedia.org]
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that will hop from one company to another hoping to strike it obscenely rich?
Depends on how liberally their Restraint of Trade clauses are interpreted.
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Aren't these bastards currently 'round the corner in Ireland where the same was tried a while ago? And as we all know, Ireland is the financial center of Europe with vast amounts of capital surplus.
Re:Can they? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that Silicon Valley and innovation these days mostly means software development and services on the Internet, and not so much hardware devices and operating system.
I also wonder why technologically minded people would want to move to a place and innovate when you get arrested for a tweet. Now before +Troll, think about it for a second. Most people responsible for innovation these days don't like regulations constraining the Internet, and certainly not regulations and laws that get users thrown in jail.
The UK truly is a pit of shit right now as far the Internet, freedom, privacy, freedom of speech, etc. is concerned. Not exactly attractive to most of the talent in the rest of the world. If you are already there you are just making the best of it.
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Re:Can they? (Score:4, Informative)
That's incredibly narrow speech. You make it sound like we have no freedom of speech because we can't threaten the President. That narrow restriction does not only apply to him/her either, but also applies to my neighbor as well.
So aside from some very narrow restrictions on speech, there is a much greater freedom of speech in the US, and you certainly cannot view the UK and the US as equals in that regard.
Re:its called HUGE tax breaks for R&D (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, no non-compete contracts.
If there are enforced non-compete contracts then there will be no community of individuals to hire to create a "Silicon Valley".
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Re:its called HUGE tax breaks for R&D (Score:5, Informative)
My previous employer had a non compete clause, but then they were an American company (though they waived it when they moved our dev jobs out of the UK and made us redundant). My current employer (which is British) doesn't, and I don't remember any British company that I worked for having one.
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Non-competes aren't necessarily unusual. They are however difficult to enforce.
The courts use awkward terms like "Restraint of Trade" to back individuals' rights to go and get a job.
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No, it's not common and the courts take a dim view. If any term in a no-compete is considered overly strict the court will just null they entire thing (they cannot reduce it to a reasonable level).
Anyway they've shot themselves in the foot by trying to make everything short term contracts. Nobody signs up for 6 months with the prospect of limiting what they can do in the following 6 months. I resent contracts anyway, way to build a committed employee-employer relationship there guys :/
Even if someone did ha
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If any term in a no-compete is considered overly strict the court will just null they entire thing (they cannot reduce it to a reasonable level).
Posting AC for obvious reasons...
My current (US based) employer had me sign a non-compete when I was hired. I was a bit turned off, but it's been almost a year and I can honestly see why they did so now that I have heard all stories from previous developers who jumped ship, stole clients (some I am sure you've heard of), and moved across the street.
The one I signed stated something along the lines of a 50 mile radius being the area included, I don't recall. I thought that was a bit silly, considering that
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Sure they can, with a giant military to destroy anyone who resists. That's how empires work.
Of course, this isn't likely to happen any time soon, since there's too many competing factions at the moment which are too powerful for any one faction to take over everything. But factionalism doesn't have to be a problem with regional governments; just look at China: you think they have any problems with factions trying to break away? Of course not, they just send in the PLA and crush them.
But yes, in a hypothe
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Of course, that also means that in the end, yes, you have a lot of high tech industry around, but it eventually costs you more in subsidiaries and kickbacks than you get in tax revenue.
Hint: Cali is broke.
Re:its called HUGE tax breaks for R&D (Score:5, Insightful)
California is broke because of Prop 13. It basically cut out from under it the main funding mechanism for the state government property taxes and then put severe limitations on how the state could raise funds through other mechanisms by making any tax increase in other categories like sales tax or income tax too difficult to enact. As such the previous high-tax/high-service government that Californians enjoyed became unstainable.
Additionally, due to the initiative system the state has almost no control over it's finances. Something like 70% of the budget is mandated spending by initiatives, with a large portion of the remaining 30% either things you have to spend money on like police, or required via Federal funds. It's why to pass a budget every year they always need to resort to some tricks. And with the requirement that they need 2/3rds majority to pass any budget, instead of 50%+1 like every other state in the union, means the minority party has no interest to negotiate.
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I thought California is broke because people can vote for propositions while simultaneously voting against any measures to fund said propositions. The general fund isn't an unlimited source of free money.
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People are not an unlimited source of free money either which is why they forced that proposition thing through.
Of course, huge corporate tax breaks are not much good if you tax the population so much that the high cost of living means the companies have to pay higher wages, causing them to leave in droves for Texas and elsewhere (I can look out my window and see the "Nissan of America" building, previously headquartered in California).
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In the UK they actually are providing "tax credits" - temporary low tax rates for businesses setting up and hiring in high unemployement areas.
Thing is, the "Silicon Roundabout" - what a pathetic name - is in one of those zones, "subject to contract" - they're looking to create the tech equivalent of the city/canary wharf for finance, mayfair for hedgefunds and soho/fitzrovia for fashion.
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Not being from the UK, I'm given to understand that the regulations on employment and tax structure is much less favorable to starting up a business there than it is in the United States. (Whether that, especially the former, is a good thing is an open question.) Even with the support and incentives mentioned in the blog posting, it's hard to see how they would create a SV like environment without that. Would anyone from the UK care to chime in?
Well one thing UK employers don't have to worry about is the health care of their employees. They don't have to deal with the endless mountain of paperwork going back and forth between patients and health insurance companies like they do in America.
Re:Not being from the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm an employer in the UK but lived in US for 5 years. UK's pretty good for employers really. You have to provide more time off (minimum of 5.5 weeks off per year) but that's offset by not having to provide health insurance. You have to be a bit more careful about firing people (if they've been with you more than a year) than fire-at-will states, but you're less likely to be sued for some random bullshit because people just don't pull that crap as much here. Compared to the rest of Europe -Italy:paperwork and regulations are horrendous, france:everyone is on holiday all the time, hungary: tax doubles your costs, etc.. the UK is very employer friendly.
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Government? Really? Mmmmm. No.
Care to expand on that?
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Government? Really? Mmmmm. No.
I, for one, certainly remember the part where Silicon Valley's habit of sucking at the trough of massive defense spending and an excellent state university system doomed it to soviet-style stagnation and decay...
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The UK certainly does have that. Not necessarily a good thing; but the City proper is home to more financial shenanigans than virtually anywhere else...
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You ignorant shit. Teeth are not naturally white. Just because you damage your teeth by painting them (or scratching the protective cover off them) every day doesn't make our dentists shit.
It means we spend less on cosmetic surgery than you.
Hey, that's fine. I have no issue with you spending your disposal income on worthless vanity. But please, don't go pretending it makes you any better than people with a more mature outlook on life.