Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.

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.

>>Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.

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.

Yes that’s exactly what I mean.

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.

>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.

Let me guess, its a new Web Framework isn't it? :P

I’m not very confident in the strategy of immiserating most people to drive positive change. This has been a Communist talking point for a century and a half that has yet to produce positive results, despite many attempts.

I am pleased to read someone is taking some initiative.

> You mean like water? ... I believe we're the only 'developed' country in the world to have sold off / privatised it's water.

Wasn’t it both England and Wales?

I think the only reason this is done is because we are in an era of exceptional illegal kickbacks. Unethical/illegal behavior has become so normalized that if you aren't actively working for a party who is doing it/doing it yourself you are losing.

Our whole tech stack is foreign owned and built. Everything from the CPU to the operating system and more. We live in a globalised system and there's no undoing that. The very idea of "nation" is being challenged.

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.

But this is actually not what happens and for the most part democratic governments that do provide health care are the ones with the best health outcomes worldwide, so what point are you trying to make?

Yeah and we’ve seen that fail again and again and again. So no.

> “Democratic governments should not provide health care.”

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.

> The U.K. needs to wake up and start innovating to take back control.

That's a nice dream.

Hopefully I can reply back to you in 2 years and laugh :)

It’s not impossible. The UK has a rich history of tech innovation but it’s long since been eclipsed by Silicon Valley and its funding (which the UK can only dream of).

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.

In many ways the UK is a tragic country: top tier talent in many areas, hamstrung by political, management, financial, and media culture rooted in the 19th century, and wholly colonised by offshore owners and foreign powers.

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.

Yes, I also think ossified social structures have a lot to do with it. You work up the chain of management and eventually you find the son of the Earl of Tossingham, who turns out to be completely ineffectual.

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.

Nah, the US has always had the same problem except without titles. Robert F Kennedy Jr. is the same phenomenon. Why is the Earl or RFK in charge? Because of the name. That's what the Roark family in the Sin City stories is about, this happens in major US cities just like anywhere else.

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.

We don't need to look further than to Europe and the Ukraine war (wrt. gas etc) to see short-sighted decisions biting people in the ass. Or America, where the Roe v. Wade overturn caused peoples trust in healthcare apps to suddenly be weaponized against them using subpoenas. Short-sighted trust in the status quo hurting people isn't an abstract concept, it happens all the time.

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.

The answer is not to give them unmitigated power for as long as they want.

I didn't say I had a better idea.

This doesn't scale, though. It can work if you're a superpower or a bloc, but most countries don't have enough resources to each run their own cloud, mines, energy production, and food production.

But Palantir is a software company. Do you feel similarly about the NHS using AWS/Azure/GCP? Do we want it all on some on prem homemade stack?

Actually yes, that would be an ideal intervention of state into computing infrastructure.

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.

The UK also needs better distribution of data centers. Ireland is off the table for some services, like police etc. So all data ends up in London, and you need to distribute between AWS and Azure, but you don't get the regional distribution.

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.

Which, they could - in fact, government (specifically meaning Civil Service) is the ideal environment in which to manage long-term scale, focus, and investment - it's just that private (in fact multinational) interests have weaponized politics against "government", which in practice means "good governance".

The UK absolutely, categorically has the talent to build something like AWS. They should do this, but I feel like the government doesn't have the talent to fund and execute on a project like this.

Yes. I do feel similarly.

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.

But they've been trying for fourty years and not got very far. You can argue government should all be running Linux all you want, but if you want to deliver services, sometimes it's okay to just buy something off the shelf that works.

The irony of course being that the "off-the-shelf" something in fact needs to be adapted to an ever-shifting set of requirements, and then does not "work".