Slashdot Mirror
Can the UK Create Something To Rival Silicon Valley?
An anonymous reader writes "Hoping to bring together ambition, creativity and energy in one place, the UK government hopes to grow East London so that we can benefit from the same sort of success that has been seen in California; jobs, tax revenue, highly skilled workers and takeovers. If it works, the country would massively benefit, with something to rival other established industries."
A good start would be not offering to arrest and deport people who broke no law in your country.
The UK doesn't have any PC manufactures.. ..Because they have not yet found a way to make PCs leak oil.
I am one of those people who came to the UK to jump form a successful startup (Playfish) to another successful startup (Plumbee), but my main problem is finding a place to stay that works out. I want a place that is: - Close to the office - Got decent standards - Is affordable - I can have for a long term In London I can only choose two from that list. Then there are extremely greedy landlords and sleazy estate agents that will only want to fool you of your money in a not so well regulated business. This is practically making it impossible for me to be able to save up money and continue to do my job here, and is the main reason for me wanting to move away from London as soon as possible and leave this wreck of a housing market behind.
If I were the UK, I would not want to model anything after California.
Anything modeled after California is known to cause cancer in the State of California. But only slightly more seriously, there's a subtle distinction between comparing what happened in California with what happened to California. The company with the largest market capitalization of any on earth is located there. Ten years ago, The Company Which Must Not Be Named was barely a blip on anyone's radar. There are many success stories to come out of Silicon Valley, and understandably, many business-minded folks would like to replicate that success.
Unfortunately, they're suffering from a massive case of survivor bias. It's true that silicon valley has birthed some of the largest, most successful tech firms out there. It's also true that the valley is littered with the corpses of failure. During the dot com bust, companies were erecting fences to keep creditors from repossessing the cars out of company lots. Silicon Valley's success story should be likened to another California success story: The California gold rush. You can't discuss success without also discussing the odds of failure.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
so that we can benefit from the same sort of success that has been seen in California
Yes, and for free, if you order now, you will also receive:
*Crushingly high real estate prices
*Monstrously overcrowded prisons
*Bankrupt schools
BUT WAIT! THERES MORE! Be one of the first 100 callers and receive, as our special gift to you:
*Shortages of electricity and water!
*Political leadership totally devoid of morality, consistency, or backbone!
But seriously, California is a "hotbed" for ONE single reason: The weather is nice pretty much all year long. Anyone who lives there and tries to sell you on something else is lying to themselves. People go for the nice weather, and they put up with the constant bullshit because hey, it like never snows, unless you live in the mountains, which are only like 2 hours' drive away from the beaches... So why not live there? Right? And once you get enough smart people in one place (they are bound to turn up when you have 30 million people to start with) things just sort of take shape.
So, UK, you want your own Silicon Valley? Get a warm-weather generator, a couple of nice schools, a semi-pristine coastline, then fill it over the top with people, and wait 50 years. You will probably get something like that, or hey maybe you will end up with something like Haiti. Could go either way.
I think that Silicon Valley and innovation these days mostly means software development and services on the Internet, and not so much hardware devices and operating system.
I also wonder why technologically minded people would want to move to a place and innovate when you get arrested for a tweet. Now before +Troll, think about it for a second. Most people responsible for innovation these days don't like regulations constraining the Internet, and certainly not regulations and laws that get users thrown in jail.
The UK truly is a pit of shit right now as far the Internet, freedom, privacy, freedom of speech, etc. is concerned. Not exactly attractive to most of the talent in the rest of the world. If you are already there you are just making the best of it.