stow aways on lorries?

[joinerjohn]

The basic problem with Joe's theory is , that whilst manufacturing costs go down via lower wages, the actual cost of things we buy in the shops go up.
Just because something can be made cheaper doesn't mean the price will drop. everything is dependant on OIL.
This drives the market. Oil goes up in price,, everything goes up in price. A loaf of bread is delivered to Asda at a cost of lets say, 2p. Three weeks later the cost of fuel for the lorry has gone up, what happens to the price of the loaf?? It goes up.
The only thing that's actually getting cheaper in relative terms is technology. But of course, that's something we can't eat. A top of the range computer would have cost £1000 5 yrs ago. Relatively speaking a computer nowadays that could outperform the best one 5 yrs ago would cost £700.
An analogy here...The computer on Apollo Eleven cost Nasa hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet nowadays we have mobile phones that have more computing power in them than Apollo 11's computers could ever have and they cost us less than £100.
The graphics card in my own pile of silicon probably has more computing power than all of the Apollo flights linked together,, and that's just one part of my comp.

Anyway, in the not too distant future, oil is going to become scarcer and scarcer. What's going to happen then?? I dread to think. Prices will go up.
Let's hope Chancellor Joe has a plan.

 

[Lincsbodger]

Engineering stuff.

What an eloquently-phrased response

It would be great if the UK really was this hotbed of genius minds and engineering talent that didn't *need* manufacturing to support itself...

The problem with this theory is that nature always gives a spread of any characteristic. An average man is about 5'10, but we all know someone well above 6-foot and someone barely above 5-foot. It doesn't matter how enthusiastically a minister says "By 2015, we want every man in Britain to be 5'10" tall!", short of locating a warehouse full of surgical saws and stilts, it can't be done.

You COULD make everyone in Britain into a research scientist or engineer. They just wouldn't be any good.

Once upon a day we were. We educated our kids properly, and then we trained them into engineers, and physicists, and chemists. Then the looney left trendy pinko teachers took over and started to wreck it with trendy socialist education theory, and then labour got in power and interfered even more till between them the idiot politicians and the brainless looney lefties had wrecked the system.

As a result, all the engineers and physicists and chemist left or retired, and, because the education system was now ****ed and unable to teach anyone to do even basic maths, english or science anymore, started spitting out people with degrees in Folklore and Mythology, or Tourism, or other such equally useless garbage degrees. The rest of us, who couldn't even manage to write our own names anymore, worked in call centres, till the found out that indians would do it for peanuts,

And thats the history of the once greatest engineering nation on the planet, the nation that invented the Industrial Revolution.

 

[plugwash]

. A top of the range computer would have cost £1000 5 yrs ago.

No it wouldn't. Top of the range computers (even limiting it to computers you can fit on your desk and can run desktop versions of windows) have always cost thousands, what you get for those thousands has of course increased over the years.

Relatively speaking a computer nowadays that could outperform the best one 5 yrs ago would cost £700.

Indeed and outperform it by a rather large margin. If we limit ourselves to maches that can run desktop versions of windows (max 2 processor sockets) then you could get a maximum of 2 cores in your system (either a single dual or a dual single, dual dual solutions didn't exist yet) and the individual cores were much slower than any core you are likely to see in a mainstream machine today. 5 years ago windows XP proffesional x64 edition had only just been released so most people were lmited to 4GB of ram.

Nowadays you can get a machine (e.g. the dell vostro 430) with 4GB of ram (upgradable to 12GB without removing modules and 16GB if the original ram is replaced) AND a 2.66 GHz quad core processor that will beat a five year old workstation costing thousands for less than £500.

 

[Lincsbodger]

. A top of the range computer would have cost £1000 5 yrs ago.

No it wouldn't. Top of the range computers (even limiting it to computers you can fit on your desk and can run desktop versions of windows) have always cost thousands, what you get for those thousands has of course increased over the years.

Relatively speaking a computer nowadays that could outperform the best one 5 yrs ago would cost £700.

Indeed and outperform it by a rather large margin. If we limit ourselves to maches that can run desktop versions of windows (max 2 processor sockets) then you could get a maximum of 2 cores in your system (either a single dual or a dual single, dual dual solutions didn't exist yet) and the individual cores were much slower than any core you are likely to see in a mainstream machine today. 5 years ago windows XP proffesional x64 edition had only just been released so most people were lmited to 4GB of ram.

Nowadays you can get a machine (e.g. the dell vostro 430) with 4GB of ram (upgradable to 12GB without removing modules and 16GB if the original ram is replaced) AND a 2.66 GHz quad core processor that will beat a five year old workstation costing thousands for less than £500.

Unfortunately all of this is irelevant if you want to compare computers of vastly different construction over large spans of time.

The only measure that you can use are flops. An average PC today is about 10 Gflops. A 25-node Grid gives throughput of something like 1.6 teraFLOPS. By comparison a 1982 Cray X-MP delivered a theoretical 200 megaFLOPS from each of its two processors - which makes the 25-node grid equivalent to more than 4000 X-MPs. X-MPs apparently used to cost $15 million - not including disks. Around the same time frame, a 4MHz Sinclair Z80 was capable of around 0.001 megaFLOPS, so we could alternatively think in terms of 1.6 billion Sinclair ZX81s . They have computers to do fluid flow dynamics problems these days that are 0.5 Petaflops - half a tera tera flop

 

[joinerjohn]

Crikey Lincs,,, Iv'e gone all floppy now.

 

[dextrous]

I dont believe im having to explain basic business practice to Dextrous.....

If if costs me £10 an hour to employ someone to make widgets, and they cost me £1 each to make, and he can make 10 an hour, then in 1 hour i spend £10 + (10 x £1) = £20 making them, and ive got 10 to sell, so ill sell them for £3 each and make £30-£20/£30 net margin = 33%

on the other hand if i find some idiot willing to do the same job for £5 an hour, i can either sell the same widgets for £5 less and make £25-£15/£25 = 40% nett margin or i can sell them for the same price and make £30-£15/£30 = £50% nett margin.

Furthermore, ive now got an idiot to work for £5, so im not going to pay anyone else any more, especially when that nice Mr Blair has flooded the country with millions of idiots who will work for **** all

Which do you think most bosses choose to do........

Thanks - the maths wasn't a problem, it was how this meant that wages across the UK would have to be kept low.

Final question - if the UK had not been flooded with illegal immigrants and the related cheap wages, wouldn't the UK have lost every single manufacturing industry to cheap sweat shop labour abroad? At least by managing to keep it economically viable for some companies to remain in the UK, some UK citizens will be earning some money from these businesses and paying some tax on this income. Not much maybe, but better than nowt.

 

[Lincsbodger]

I dont believe im having to explain basic business practice to Dextrous.....

If if costs me £10 an hour to employ someone to make widgets, and they cost me £1 each to make, and he can make 10 an hour, then in 1 hour i spend £10 + (10 x £1) = £20 making them, and ive got 10 to sell, so ill sell them for £3 each and make £30-£20/£30 net margin = 33%

on the other hand if i find some idiot willing to do the same job for £5 an hour, i can either sell the same widgets for £5 less and make £25-£15/£25 = 40% nett margin or i can sell them for the same price and make £30-£15/£30 = £50% nett margin.

Furthermore, ive now got an idiot to work for £5, so im not going to pay anyone else any more, especially when that nice Mr Blair has flooded the country with millions of idiots who will work for **** all

Which do you think most bosses choose to do........

Thanks - the maths wasn't a problem, it was how this meant that wages across the UK would have to be kept low.

Final question - if the UK had not been flooded with illegal immigrants and the related cheap wages, wouldn't the UK have lost every single manufacturing industry to cheap sweat shop labour abroad? At least by managing to keep it economically viable for some companies to remain in the UK, some UK citizens will be earning some money from these businesses and paying some tax on this income. Not much maybe, but better than nowt.

We lost most of out basic engineering and manufacturing years ago. We showed the japanese how to make motor bikes, bikes, cars and electronics, we showed the indians how to make cloth, and the chinese how to smelt steel. All we have left is the hi tech stuff, and even thats going down the pan. Theres one specialist industrial hammer left in the Uk now can that can smelt and work stuff like titanium steel, and thats owned by the americans, and all the strategic rare metals are in china. China for example has all the Lanthium, which is going to be the core component of the next generation of batteries, and especially in electric cars.

Industry isnt about the cost of labour until its final stages. Initially an industry is about resources. Why did Ironbridge in the West Midlands become the world centre of smelting technology for 150 years? Because it was next to massive reserves of iron ore, coal, limestone and they built canals and railways there. Not because there was cheap labour. It only became about labour in the latter part of the 20th Century when our labour became too educated and therefore too expensive. People with degrees dont want to work for peanuts.

 

[joe-90]

It's Lanthanum.

 

[Lincsbodger]

It's Lanthanum.

yeah, couldnt be arsed to look up the spelling................