End of an Era

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Living in Newcastle, in the North East of England, I have watched the steady decline of heavy industry, which once powered this area with skilled jobs...sadly, this part of the UK has the highest percentage of unemployment in the whole of the UK (currently 11%) these days.

 

And news that a further 400 jobs are to go at the Armstrong Works (BAE) as the factory is closing, adds to this percentage.

 

The original tanks used in WW1 were all built here, and more recently the Challenger Tank....but, the World is changing...Tanks are becoming less and less in demand (which many, including me, would say that's not such a bad thing)...but, another part of World History comes to an end

Edited May 31, 2012 by UK_Widowmaker

[tranquillo 10]

Yes, the world must move on. The unemployment is a real bummer though. Something I only found out yesterday is that unemployed people pay higher car insurance premuims than employed people - how fair is that.

[Olham 164]

Living in Newcastle, in the North East of England, I have watched the steady decline of heavy industry, which once powered this area with skilled jobs

I heard that OPEL will move the production of one of their models to northwest England - I think it was Elsmere Port.

4000 jobs will move from Germany to England.

That's what the Lords of Industries - or maybe the financial markets - always do: go where people work for less.

That's okay, as sooner or later, we should be balanced; but it may take a while, until our car companies, shipyards,

electronics producers etc. etc. will find the same level of income everywhere.

Only then we can say, we got there.

Edited May 31, 2012 by Olham

[Flyby PC 23]

Well, knowing some of the unemployed around here, it does make some sense. Do quad bikes count as second vehicles?

 

I'm just kidding really.

 

None of the unemployed around here have any insurance at all.

 

 

 

Bugs the hell out of me that industries like coal, steel, ship building, car making, can all go to the wall with barely a whimper for the Government in support, but when the Banking Industry loses a fortune as a direct consequence of its one greed, it just opens it's fat gob and the government pours in billions. How fair is that?

Edited May 31, 2012 by Flyby PC

[+Lothar of the Hill People 6]

Bugs the hell out of me that industries like coal, steel, ship building, car making, can all go to the wall with barely a whimper for the Government in support, but when the Banking Industry loses a fortune as a direct consequence of its one greed, it just opens it's fat gob and the government pours in billions. How fair is that?

It's not fair, but you must realize the vast majority of money is credit. If the banking system fails, all that money just disappears, which makes more people default on their loans and more banks fail so more money disappears... a deflationary cycle that results in a Great Depression with people hoarding money under the mattresses and burying it in their yards, while prices fall so producers everywhere cut back so it's not just coal/steel/manufacturing jobs that go poof.

 

In other words, we've seen this movie before.

 

The good news is, most of it isn't 'bailouts' but loans the banks repay when the system stabilizes. It's the bailouts of manufacturers like GM and Chrysler and 'clean' energy subsidies that cost taxpayers real billions.

[Hauksbee 103]

Yes, whoever would thought that the tank would go out of military fashion. Now at the pinnacle of development; they're fast, pack enormous firepower, they can fire moving over rough terrain, Cobham armor will turn most anything and along comes the 'platter' shaped-charge, and hand held anti-tank missiles.Suddenly the Queen of Battle becomes a very expensive dinosaur. One writer recently suggested the the Platter Charge might change warfare just as the tank itself did in WWII and the machine gun in WWI.

Edited May 31, 2012 by Hauksbee

[Hasse Wind 46]

There's also the fact that tanks become pretty much useless when someone else has air superiority.

 

We have come a long way from the days when these beasts rumbled on the battlefields of the Western front:

 

[dsawan 624]

LAV'S are the current and future and of course drones

[Flyby PC 23]

I don't pretend to know about Banking, but if your government can afford to bail out a bank for multiple billions, it occurs to me you could have let that failing bank with it's poisonous assets go to the wall, and using the same billions, financed a completely new Bank without the tarnished reputation, and set that bank the task to help those left in trouble by the failed Bank. We're always told how a free market economy is best for us all, best that is right up until it's a bank in trouble and suddenly we're handing them billions, which they lap up and laugh at us as they squander great lumps of it away in bonuses. Save the banking system? It's rotten to the core. These clowns crippled my customers, slashed my turnover to near 10% of its former peak, and then have the damn cheek to look down their nose at my business looking for some help to restructure ourselves and get ourselves back on the front foot.

 

This country needs industry, manufacture and produce to drive our economy, not see it held hostage and sqeezed between some fat parasitic banking industry milking us dry on one hand and an impotent clueless governent taxing us to the hilt every time we move, only to fritter it away on welfare for people who've never worked a day in their life but can somehow afford to raise kids by the dozen, go on holiday twice a year, have a party every other night, and race their quadbikes in the sun all afternoon. It's disgusting and unfair, and inherently unstable.

 

You don't get something for nothing in life, and all these people on the property ladder are suddenly rich (?) but did nothing whatsoever to earn that wealth other than happen to own a property. Darn right it's not real money. The 'real' money was the folding stuff in your wage packet which went towards interest you paid on the mortgage which is now sitting in some off-shore account paying for some blue chip Bankers lifestyle. Think you're going to see it again when you come to sell your house? You might see some of it if you're lucky, but pardon the irony, don't 'bank' on it.

 

OK. As you were gents I'm sorry for being so grim. I've had a long day. Rant is over for today....

Edited May 31, 2012 by Flyby PC

[Pips 5]

LAV'S are the current and future

 

What on earth are LAV's?

[Olham 164]

Light Armoured Vehicles

[MikeDixonUK 5]

It's sad about the loss of jobs, as a result of there being no more orders for what is made there, but in the grand scheme of things it's better than us having a great need to build lots of tanks, because that would probably mean we're at war with someone!

 

The ironic thing about defence these days is that the better you get at it the less demand there is for it, for example say you have the most high tech and sophisticated fighter jet ever designed, which completely outclasses all possible adversaries, which would lead to there being less air combat, and thus less demand for super high tech sophisticated fighter jets, go figure!

 

But as heartless as it may be, war is good for employment.

Edited May 31, 2012 by MikeDixonUK

[Flyby PC 23]

Defence is versatility. You're very unlikely to suffer an attack which your prepared defence is ready for. It's highly likely your initial defences will need to be improvised and adapted. But to improvise, you still need raw resources you can improvise with, something to plug the gap while you get off the ropes.

 

Take 9-11. A horrific attack on the heart of mainland America. There was no defence ready for such an attack, and frontline supertech fighter aircraft were no defence, not until they had clearance and instructions to shoot down civilian aircraft, by which time the damage was already done and the attack had already got through.

 

Ok, perhaps currently we don't need tanks, but we definitely do need the manufacturing skills and capacity to make whatever we do need, and be able to tool up to make them in a hurry. WW2 saw every nation re-tooling it's workshops and foundries to manufacture arms. When your country is an industrial wasteland and your people are accustomed to indolent indulgence, you're already well on the way to losing your next war regardless of what form it will take.

 

When you look at most wars, the winner is the side with the superior industrial output. We should invest in industry and technology, not bankers, and hammer these flyby economists and investment brokers back into the subservient roll supporting our industry where they belong and stop treating them like gods. The dominance of financiers is the tail wagging the dog.

Edited June 1, 2012 by Flyby PC

[Von Paulus 8]

When you look at most wars, the winner is the side with the superior industrial output. We should invest in industry and technology, not bankers, and hammer these flyby economists and investment brokers back into the subservient roll supporting our industry where they belong and stop treating them like gods. The dominance of financiers is the tail wagging the dog.

Amen. And not only the industry, even the tertiary sector, in so many cases, is already out of our countries, out of Europe.

What's funny is when we were sold to the Chinese it was said that we could kept the services. I've come to the conclusion that we must have been sold again.

At least we know where part of our industry is. Somewhere in China. And we all know that we will never be at war with the Chinese... after all they already took in possession a lot of what was ours.

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Amen. And not only the industry, even the tertiary sector, in so many cases, is already out of our countries, out of Europe.

What's funny is when we were sold to the Chinese it was said that we could kept the services. I've come to the conclusion that we must have been sold again.

At least we know where part of our industry is. Somewhere in China. And we all know that we will never be at war with the Chinese... after all they already took in possession a lot of what was ours.

 

In the words of JRR Tolkein

 

"A new power rises in the East"

[Von Paulus 8]

Yes! Mordor, the scum of Chicago school of economists and our rotten politicians/rulers.

[Flyby PC 23]

I don't 'blame' the far Eastern economies. It's the nature of things that are fed to grow, and the nature of things that are starved to fail. In the UK, we've been starving our industries of investment and patronage for as long as I can remember.

[Von Paulus 8]

It's the nature of things that are fed to grow

But at what expenses? Just an example... Can you compete with much, much, much lower salaries? Is it really a fair competition?

We give them advantages. And we're still giving them. In a way we're repeating the same mistakes before WW2. If some of the purpose is to avoid a war, I'm afraid that might not be enough, unless we give them all what they want.

[Flyby PC 23]

It depends. We're always told that cost is the bottom line, but what if it isn't? What if we've got that completely wrong? We're born and bred to think like economists and value everything on lowest possible cost. That's the supermarkets way of way of thinking but it doesn't deliver value, it delivers cheapness, which isn't the same thing at all.

 

Follow that argument, and we are destined to suffer unemployment until life here is so cheap and desperate here that we become attractive cheap labour for foreign investors to recruit. Is that really a dilligent way for any government to run an economy? Why are we compelled to stand by and watch it happen? Hellfire, we even had one elected 'milk snatching' leader right here making the process happen overnight!

 

I think most of our Western economies have not been well run for decades. We're all driving along the same roads, reacting to what we see on the road, but there's no roadmap giving a bigger picture for the whole journey. We're just going to keep chugging along until we run out of fuel or we breakdown.

 

Subsidy is a dirty word, and I don't approve of the context, but I don't have to call it a subsidy if I tax cheap imports up to the same price as my home grown domestic prices. How is it unfair to do that if I truly understand and respect the value of human dignity? "Go ahead and pay your workforce peanuts, but you won't profit by it selling your goods in the UK". Sounds a better message to be sending out to me than "Got any more of that cheap stuff?"

 

We kid ourselves we're all being green these days, and doing out bit for the environment, but we turn a blind eye when the Asian markets plunder the worlds resources to make us all ipods, 3D TVs and laptops. OK, we reduce the carbon footprint of our own domestic energy consumption, but we spend all our wealth paying others to pollute their part of the world on our behalf. It's insane, the process is destabilising our economies, destroying our planet, and it's all getting faster and faster. It's stupid!!!

 

Look at 'cost' again. What are we doing but investing heavily in the dirtiest sweatshop economies? We're rewarding most, those ecomonies we criticise the most for their pollution and employment conditions, and the best answer we can come up with to reverse the trend is undercutting them on price? Wow. What genius thought that up? Call me a cynic, but I don't think that's going to work.

 

I want to see a world market where clean and green production and manufacturing is valued and rewarded and there is competent, repeat competent, fiscal management to offset the market imbalances created by economies which cut corners and don't produce goods to the same environmental and social benchmarks which I demand of my own industry. Things get better when you raise the bar, not lower it.

 

Pipe dream? Yes........ but only for now.

Edited June 1, 2012 by Flyby PC

[ConradB 0]

Living in Newcastle, in the North East of England, I have watched the steady decline of heavy industry, which once powered this area with skilled jobs...sadly, this part of the UK has the highest percentage of unemployment in the whole of the UK (currently 11%) these days.

 

And news that a further 400 jobs are to go at the Armstrong Works (BAE) as the factory is closing, adds to this percentage.

 

The original tanks used in WW1 were all built here, and more recently the Challenger Tank....but, the World is changing...Tanks are becoming less and less in demand (which many, including me, would say that's not such a bad thing)...but, another part of World History comes to an end

 

The auto industry and every industry in Detroit is so rotten, that we call it "The Used To Be Motor City"!

 

Check out some of the vids on youtube of Detroit. Looks like a bombed out city in places. My mom's old neighborhood looks like the aftermath of Stalingrad, to where you expect to see machinegun nests in abandoned homes and buildings.