Draghi report made it abundantly clear that this is the big issue. Despite being outwardly unified, EU market is horribly fractured, with regulations building on top of EU standards in almost every state and every area of business.
Then there are high energy costs, high salary costs, limited mobility of the workforce (partly due to ongoing housing crisis), entrenched overseas competition that doesn't have to deal with same challenges.
Together, these add to a deadly mix. Paradoxically, software is less affected than other industries. But even here it's bad.
I always thought that it could be reasonably simple to have a safe alternative. Have people enter a SHA256 of their password instead, and match against a database of other hashes.
Almost everyone interested in checking for password leaks knows how to generate SHA256 of a string. And those who don't shouldn't put their passwords on the internet.
Or even better, generate hash for all passwords in the database, package these hashes together with a simple search script and let people download it. That way, you are not sending any information anywhere, and noone can exploit the passwords, because hash is a one way function.
Then again, that download could be really large. I admit I have no idea how much storage would that take. But it's just text, so easily compressible. And with some smart indexing, it should be possible to keep most compressed and only unpack a relatively small portion to find a complete match.
Then again, I have virtually no background in cryptography, could be something horribly wrong with this.
When you do a check on https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords nothing is sent to the server. Instead the password is hashed locally and a list of the hash range is downloaded, which contains all the hashes and the number of occurrences.
The server doesn't receive the password, neither in plain-text nor hash form.
It would be easy enough to add this as a "secret" feature:
* user submits password
* gets hashed client side
* server compares it against stored hashes
* server also re-hashes the stored hash, and compares it against the hash received from the client
This would effectively mean that either entering the password, or the password hash would correctly match, since when entering the hash you are effectively "double" hashing the password which gets compared to the double hashed password on the server.
The upside is that users who don't understand hashing or don't feel like opening a sha256 tool wouldn't have to change their behavior or even be confused by a dialog explaining why they should hash the input, while advanced users could find out about the feature via another channel (e.g. hackernews).
The downside would be that it adds an extra hash step to every comparison on the sever. It's hard to know how expensive this would be for them.
Care to explain how you can tell what scripts gp was sent for the page https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords and what scripts he will be sent on future visits?
One more proof that you need real industrial policy, not just 'let the market handle it'. Otherwise you end up as a consumer of products designed and manufactured somewhere else.
The good thing is that China has proven that there is a way to turn not-industrial country into industrial one. So there is a blueprint for that.
General economic defeatism in this, and similar discussions, is staggering. Historically, many countries were suffering from various forms of economic malaise and managed to pull trough. Countries that lacked almost any form of industry have become powerhouses.
South Korea is a good example. The previous century hasn't been kind to Korea in general. By the 50s, the southern part of peninsula was generally less industrialized than the north, and recovering from horribly destructive war. Threat of another invasion from the north never went away.
And yet, successive governments have turned things around, and turned South Korea into advanced, functional, industrialized country. It has problems with aging population, but who hasn't?
West Germany in the second half of 20th century is another example. Devastated by war, occupied, mistrusted by neighbors, reliant on imported labor. And yet it put itself together. Lately it hasn't been doing so well, but for decades it was a model of prosperity.
Stories like this are abundant. Unfortunately, it takes a significant amount of political courage. Politicians must be willing to withstand short term pain, and plan for the future. They must focus on long term prosperity, not on immediate popularity boosts.
Everyone here, I believe, agrees that the way things have been going is unsustainable and incredibly damaging to the very people it's meant to benefit. It can be fixed, it will take time, but it can be. Because it happened before.
I think the defeatism is generally because there seems to be no way out. The two winning approaches right now are Starmer's “radical change through stability and continuity” and Farage's “Brexit 2: This time with Elon Musk”. Both strategies have clearly failed in the past.
You give two examples of countries that managed to save themselves but there’s far more historical examples of empires that faded and disappeared entirely, or more modern examples of countries in perpetual (so far) decline and failure. No, stories of turning around failing countries are not in fact abundant. There is no reason to believe the UK will be a success story and lots of reasons to believe its time has come and gone. It is in many ways a failing state with no prospects for recovery. Across virtually every metric it looks bleak. And vague comments about withstanding short term pain and planning for the future ignores that they already tried that, and it didn’t work.
Over large, historical periods of time no empire resisted. So, the fact that UK was a great empire is an argument that they will decline in the next immediate period.
That being said, "success" stories appear as much as "failures", and many times on/from the ruins of previous empires.
The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline.
In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.
The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.
Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.
Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.
Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.
There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).
Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.
We are punching way above our weight in arts (disproportionally many Hollywood actors and directors are British), complex engineering (off the top of my head, Rolls Royce, Sheffield Forgemasters, and BAE are good examples), and recently building alliances (Japan's JASDF just made their first European deployment in 71 years). We are unusually constitutionally resilient, still maintaining control of the legislature over the executive, which is becoming rarer and rarer in the west.
But below all of that is bubbling energy and drive to fix and improve things. I saw it at startup meetups, I saw it in thinktanks, I saw it at Labour Conference. I see it in your comment.
There are massive risks to navigate, but I'm optimistic about this country's future.
All this talk about energy independence and not a word on where are the solar cells, batteries and wind turbines made. If your grid is standing on components with short life time and which you can't manufacture at scale, you are not independent. You have just traded one dependence for another.
If you're talking about longevity of solar or wind turbines, given that their lifespan is measured in tens of years, it does give you some ability to respond to some external group cutting your supply off. It's not remotely the same as oil/gas dependency.
Reading this discussion, I can't help but feel a somewhat odd narrative:
"This is hypocrisy! How dare they do to chinese what they criticize chinese for?"
Followed by:
"They always did that. The west was always trying to subvert rules they didn't like!"
And finally:
"The west made these rules to work for them and them only!"
That repeats in various variations, over and over.
Here is my take. The only conclusion from this, is that everyone was dishonest, everyone is dishonest, and we should stop trying to even pretend that we could be more honest. All wrongs are equal, there is no difference between a dictator and inept president. There is no difference in intent, purpose or long term goal. Freedom is just a word, it doesn't exist. Truth is abstract concept, without meaning.
I don't know about you, but I don't think I can subscribe to that.
Instead, I would side with NL government on this. Because there is such a thing as lesser evil. Call me a hypocrite, if you'd like, but at least I'm consistent.
Then there are high energy costs, high salary costs, limited mobility of the workforce (partly due to ongoing housing crisis), entrenched overseas competition that doesn't have to deal with same challenges.
Together, these add to a deadly mix. Paradoxically, software is less affected than other industries. But even here it's bad.
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