Not parent poster, but Swiss citizen having lived in London for past 2 years, my wife is a healthcare worker for the NHS.
There are def. signs that human suffering of substantial parts of the population has dramatically increased over the last years.
Here‘s what I can see:
- Substantial energy bill increases: For us at least 100% over last year. Media is full of stories of people not being able to heat their homes
- Dramatic inflation, with cost of food now approaching levels I know from Switzerland. For example, a regular weekly shop for 2 people used to be 100£, now it‘s typically 170£.
- Continous strikes of large parts of key sectors: Teachers, Uni staff, train/ tube drivers, nurses, doctors, public servants. They are mostly protesting the fact that pay has not kept up with inflation for the past decade.
- Huge increase in food banks: I think this is a clear proxy for human suffering. There are foodbanks in hospitals for staff.
- I specifically see the suffering of healthcare staff. Service levels are going down to scary/unsafe levels and most doctors I meet through my wife are talking about leaving for Australia or New Zealand or go to other industries (huge waste given that it takes a decade or more to train a doctor).
- Infuriatingly, the link to policy makers is broken. There is no plan or ideas in place from government to improve things. Given the poor quality of the media here, typically the ley workers themselves are blamed (tube drivers, healthcare staff, etc.).
- Obviously Brexit, which is a whole different post but reinforces the feeling over here that things are going in the wrong direction.
Don‘t get me wrong, if you are in software, finance, engineering etc. you can have a very good salary and will not feel the pressures I‘ve listed above (also if you‘re young and don‘t need healthcare services). The UK and London are still amazing places.
But for lots of people quality of life has gone down a lot.
Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0].
Worth keeping in mind that the UK is third for tech after the US and China. Like, it'd be ridiculous to say the UK stands a chance of properly competing with the US, but it outcompetes basically everyone else who isn't a continent-scale megastate.
Seems kind of irrelevant as an employee; my coworkers who went to a Chinese employer have regrets. Working for the hotel California I've had happy coworkers in Canada, Ireland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Italy.
NHS service levels are a real issue. The NHS has actually collapsed and unfortunately the population is in denial about this because being honest about the causes is difficult, ideologically.
It has been bleeding staff to Australia/NZ for many years, that isn't something new. A more proximate cause was the forced vaccinations of care home staff. Social care was already seriously short staffed pre-2020 and lack of social care capacity was a long term oft-discussed problem. The mandates however took a serious problem and turned it into a catastrophe. They caused an exodus that pushed the sector into absolute unavailability and consequent high levels of bed blocking due to inability to discharge patients back into the community. In turn that causes ambulances to stack up waiting for beds. It also trashed the ability to recruit new people to the sector, as care home work was already minimum wage and now comes with the significant downside that you may be forced to take experimental medical products you don't want regardless of side effects.
It is estimated that tens of thousands of care home staff left their jobs because of the policy, leading to “immense workforce pressures” and contributing to the “most serious staffing crisis for decades”, according to Vic Rayner, chief executive of the National Care Forum (NCF), which brings together 160 of the UK’s social care organisation. Other results showed the negative impact around recruitment, with 94% of respondents stating they thought the policy had made this more difficult.
The mandates weren't supported by any RCT evidence and turned out to be useless. The costs of this policy are now being borne in the form of deaths that could have been avoided if only ambulances got there in time. People are avoiding recognizing this because so many Brits were all-in on mandates and wanted more. Those who warned of the consequences were treated horribly and deplatformed with wild abandon: now the chickens have come home to roost and nobody wants to admit what they've done.
With respect to the other problems, they are an issue all over Europe. Here's a comparison of UK vs EU inflation:
Energy price rises are likewise the same. Trading Economics can't compare energy inflation for the UK vs EU specifically, so here's a comparison with Germany:
Again, it's the same. The cause is Nord Stream and sanctions against Russia, of course.
There is no plan or ideas in place from government to improve things. Given the poor quality of the media here, typically the ley workers themselves are blamed (tube drivers, healthcare staff, etc)
Of course there's no plan or ideas. Except for energy these problems are a direct consequence of the COVID measures which can't be undone now, and which were systematically cheered on or demanded by healthcare staff themselves. The government's wonderful "independent" inquiry looks set to conclude the only mistakes were to not lock down harder, more and earlier so the idea of learning any lessons here is for the birds. The UK will continue to destroy its own healthcare and social care systems until the population accepts that they have the wrong approach.
I think there is value in having this proposal written and published.
Even if it does not get built anytime soon (say because today‘s society thinks this is a waste of money), having the idea discussed in public helps and might inform future decisions.
For example, we still reread proposals like the Dyson sphere, space elevators, a next-gen LHC, etc. . None of this is either technologically feasible today nor realistically fundable, but it shows the ambition and might spark discussions.
I‘m also a fan of nuclear but do you think as a global economy we can collectively invest into multiple huge industries at the same time which aim to solve the same issue (too-cheap-to-meter & renewable power, deployed asap to avoid runaway climate change)?
What I mean is that wind + PV are on a roll at the moment. This has turned into a huge and hungry global industry which has a lot of momentum (people wanting to work there, technical readiness, investors ready to supply capital, public acceptance, pretty decent public opinion on the industry).
From personal experience, I used the live in Munich where one of the main industry fairs (Intersolar) takes place, and it‘s a huge and ever growing event.
So even though I like nuclear and agree that the currently running reactors should stay online as long as possible, I appreciate that getting the nuclear power industry to the same fitness level as the solar industry would take a long time (which we don‘t have) hence me preferring solar.
This is a zero-sum mindset, which I believe applies here.
Having been somewhat active in my uni days in „environmentalists“ orgs (eg Greenpeace), I think being blamed by everybody is part of the game as an activist. The reward is knowing that one has had an impact in pushing the needle a tiny bit.
And now it slowly emerges that the decades of activism have started to pay off now that we see more amd more stats about surging PV/Wind deployment and them providing already significant chunks of electricity needs in Europe (where I‘m from) and globally.
I like the headline, specifically aimed at aviation. This might definitely turn some heads. While this is still strong on the marketing with few details, it shows the intent to electrify air travel at some point, which is a good thing IMO. Also might put pressure on SAF, which themselves have a long way to go.
Also, this could be interesting already for existing small and/or short range airplanes like Pipistrel‘s training aircraft or Eviation‘s Alice. I don‘t know the energy density of their current batteries, but this could give them a boost very soon.
Is there any specific reason why the suit is not white/reflective? It looks like that would be thermally not ideal, and a departure from all previous designs.
>Though this prototype uses a dark gray cover material, the final version will likely be all-white when worn by NASA astronauts on the Moon’s surface, to help keep the astronauts safe and cool while working in the harsh environment of space.
There are def. signs that human suffering of substantial parts of the population has dramatically increased over the last years.
Here‘s what I can see:
- Substantial energy bill increases: For us at least 100% over last year. Media is full of stories of people not being able to heat their homes
- Dramatic inflation, with cost of food now approaching levels I know from Switzerland. For example, a regular weekly shop for 2 people used to be 100£, now it‘s typically 170£.
- Continous strikes of large parts of key sectors: Teachers, Uni staff, train/ tube drivers, nurses, doctors, public servants. They are mostly protesting the fact that pay has not kept up with inflation for the past decade.
- Huge increase in food banks: I think this is a clear proxy for human suffering. There are foodbanks in hospitals for staff.
- I specifically see the suffering of healthcare staff. Service levels are going down to scary/unsafe levels and most doctors I meet through my wife are talking about leaving for Australia or New Zealand or go to other industries (huge waste given that it takes a decade or more to train a doctor).
- Infuriatingly, the link to policy makers is broken. There is no plan or ideas in place from government to improve things. Given the poor quality of the media here, typically the ley workers themselves are blamed (tube drivers, healthcare staff, etc.).
- Obviously Brexit, which is a whole different post but reinforces the feeling over here that things are going in the wrong direction.
Don‘t get me wrong, if you are in software, finance, engineering etc. you can have a very good salary and will not feel the pressures I‘ve listed above (also if you‘re young and don‘t need healthcare services). The UK and London are still amazing places.
But for lots of people quality of life has gone down a lot.