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Microsoft May Halt the Expansion of a UK Datacenter Due To Brexit (onmsft.com)
On Monday, Microsoft hosted an online event to discuss the impact of the UK's departure from the European Union on the tech industry. The company currently has two large datacentres in the UK, and it is expanding those in response to vigorous demand for cloud services. But Brexit could throw a spanner in the works. From a report: Microsoft's UK Government Affairs Manager Owen Larter said, "We're really keen to avoid import tariffs on any hardware. Going back to the datacenter example, we're looking to build out our datacenters at a pretty strong lick in the UK, because the market is doing very well. If all of a sudden there are huge import [tariffs] on server racks from China or from eastern Europe, where a lot of them are actually assembled, that might change our investment decisions and perhaps we build out our datacenters across other European countries." Simply put, if they cannot build in Britain, then they will build surrounding it. Currently, the data is shared freely between the EU countries without any issues. This is because they all have similar security between them. However, if the UK leaves the EU, then this could cause even more issues for Microsoft.
The UK hasn't left the EU yet. Thus your point is... pointless.
Not really, it may have been meant to service Western Europe and once you aren't part of the EU some businesses may not be able to store data there. Typical head in the sand brexiter, it's ok to think the UK will be better off outside the EU but you shouldn't pretend there won't be negative aspects.
It's roughly 17.5% more expensive to import from outside the UK now. I don't think MS is sourcing any of the hardware from within the UK so go figure.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
The British goverment can't be that stupid.
Erm, have you ever seen the British government?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Erm, have you ever seen the British government?
You are aware Bozo the Clown is our Foreign Secretary
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
The UK hasn't left the EU yet. Thus your point is... pointless.
Which then makes the article pointless.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
But the UK is under EU law, which means you can fulfill EU data protection regulations (necessary for ANYTHING holding personal data in the UK, which is literally every online service you use).
Under Brexit, the UK won't be sufficient, even if the data protection laws NEVER change. It's literally no longer an EU-DP compliant country. Thus all that investment that could have serviced the entire EU is wasted, you need to be an EU datacenter anyway, and the UK one sits and hold UK data only.
As such, it's not stupid reporting. Microsoft are doing what EVER OTHER DATA PROCESSOR in the country is doing. I work for a school. We use an EU off-site location for backups. When Brexit strikes, that will likely have to stop.
For the same reason we cannot use iCloud as they refuse to give any guarantees that UK data will only ever stay within the EU (unlike Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Dropbox, etc. who ALL guarantee that).
UK and EU data protection laws are much stricter than you might think. Literally, cloud-based services will now have to have an EU datacenter and a UK one, whereas before Brexit just a UK one could have done both jobs.
They may change the laws, but that would require EU co-operation to allow EU data to be sent to a non-EU country, and those kinds of things generate lawsuits (it's why the EU-US aircraft travel data sharing regulations were revoked, for instance)
If the UK chooses what seems to be an inevitable hard Brexit AND repels all EU laws that means that a lot of the standard business practices Microsoft streamlines across Europe will now have to have special considerations.
Depending on how idiotic Brexit becomes all multinational business will be forced to rethink their UK strategy.
The UK is not simply closing shop but it may, via Brexit, stop conducting business in the same way it previously had and in some cases that will be worse than closing shop for all the planning
Here's just one simplistic hypothetical; if the UK decides for instance that your company must now employ at least 60% British people (or limit net migration from EU countries to force you into such a position because you cannot find the workforce locally) you might go out of business or have to lower your profit margin expectations which in turn will make you wish to close down.
The Brexit the UK seems to be heading towards is not the Brexit everyone wanted. It's now almost certainly going out of the single European market and ending free movement.
Like so many you did not think far enough along the path before you called BS and used words like "stupid".
Brexit is an unknown. Some people hope for the best believing it will be for the best but they do not know. 52% have put the other 48% in it for an unknown. -not even knowing the odds.
You wanna know what's stupid? -that 13 people can force 12 others into this mess. That's stupid.
(13 to 12 is the ratio people that wanted to leave against the ones wanted to remain)
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Not really, it may have been meant to service Western Europe and once you aren't part of the EU some businesses may not be able to store data there. Typical head in the sand brexiter, it's ok to think the UK will be better off outside the EU but you shouldn't pretend there won't be negative aspects.
If you had spent any time engaging with Brexiteers you would know that the way to think of this is pretty simple: Brexit always right, EU always wrong. If the UK does what it thinks is best for the UK and crawls out from under the iron boot heel of EU tyranny that's laudable. If however the EU decides that it is going to do what is best for the EU and does not give the UK everything the UK wants that's the EU unfairly punishing the UK. If a company leaves the UK for the EU that's tantamount to treason even if said company is not a UK business and set up shop in the UK in the first place because the UK was part of the EU common market. However, now that the UK will be leaving the EU said company either has to move operations into the EU common market or stay in the UK and have a hard time competing with competitors that are inside the common market and do not have to wade through red tape and pay import tariffs after hard Brexit where the UK looks set to revert to WTO rules.
With the announcement by May that she wants a hard Brexit, companies have started to announce that they are either leaving or starting to plan for that eventuality. HSBC has already announced 1000 jobs moving to France.
It's highly relevant because now is the time that we really need to fight to set the goals of the negotiation. Today's High Court ruling is only a partial victory for the ignored majority who don't want hard Brexit. We need to lobby our representatives now, by the time we leave in a couple of years it will be way too late.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
UK didn't simply close up shop
As far as being an engineering and product producing capital serving some 500million people, ... yes they most definitely did. You don't just threaten companies with tariffs on the vast majority of their products, supplies, reduce their labour access, and generally horrendously fuck with the political stability of your manufacturing only to call the companies who investigate leaving "stupid".
No. Unequivocally and absolutely not. You have no idea how I voted.
If I had 25 kids and 13 wanted to go live in France and 12 did not then we'd not go anywhere.
Most democracies would give need a large majority to force a minority. Say 60% of the votes, sometimes more. A clear and reasonably wide enough majority.
For such a critical decision I think, in fairness, two thirds of voters would need to decided to go one way or another. I could not in good conscious force practically the other half of people my choice or way of life.
But you see the idea of taking 12 unwilling kids to France is FAR BETTER. Why? because France is a known quantity. Leaving the EU is not.
Thank fuck parliament gets to vote if article 50 is triggered AND the final deal once decided. At lease we'll know if "France" is really some dictatorship banana republic.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Was there anything in that Brexit referendum that drew such a nuanced line b/w a 'hard' Brexit vs a 'soft' Brexit?
Yes. Depending on which Leave campaigner you asked (there was an official campaign, an unofficial campaign, a lots of random people weighing in) they were either demanding an extremely hard Brexit or trying to reassure people that it would be a soft Brexit and little would really change.
There is no mandate for a hard Brexit. The Leave side only won by 52% to 48%, and it's doubtful that everyone who voted to leave also wanted a hard Brexit. At best, the question wasn't even asked.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Then why did majority leave towns then ask if they will still get EU funding? -if it was SO CLEAR.
I jest. It was clear but some leavers had no clue. They still think 350 million is on its way as soon as Westminster slices the pie...you know, because historically they invested SO MUCH into those rural areas but I digress.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
I get your sentiment, but I think that is unfair. A lot of brexiters I have met when I used to travel around up North for work, were quite well meaning people who had simply been fed the lie that the EU causes all their problems for the last twenty years. Anytime their politicians stuffed up, went back on a promise or just flat out neglected them, along would come UKIP or a tabloid to start blaming the EU for the problem, and successive Labour and Tory governments quietly stepped aside to let it happen.
Many parts of England have never recovered from being decimated by Thatcher (I think many of the reforms were required, but they simply left towns to rot, rather than help with any sort of transition), and the convenient scape-goat for politicians doing nothing about this has been the EU. It has been the ultimate case of getting caught in a lie, and it amazes me that rather than anyone admitting that areas outside London have been neglected and need more focus, they are just going through with the foot shooting operation.
As they are clowns, they have a clown car, there are probably about 20 of them in the car, total IQ of about 1/2 a person.
Actually that's a lie, Boris is quite bright and, in my opinion, sociopathic: https://www.theguardian.com/co... see last few paragraphs, an evil clown therefore. Trump, don't know, but I fear the worst.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
I appreciate your cynicism. Many people don't consider the negative effects of consolidating countries into a larger entity. The countries lose control. Look at how many "Syrian migrants" have been pushed into the EU, where there is no work available, leading to ghettos and crime. The EU seems to have put the most extreme laws of it's various countries into widespread effect, instead of asking its citizens what they want. The EU is less of a democracy then it used to be.
The Leave voters wanted the immigrants to leave so they:
1. Would get their jobs back
2. Would stop terrorism
3. Would not have to deal with others culture
Of course it didn't work that way, but that's why Brexit happened.
This is one of the most frustrating things about Brexit. Business is full of uncertainties, but now we have this convenient scapegoat to blame for everything. It's hard to determine whether businesses are actually suffering as a result of either changes due to the Brexit issue or genuine uncertainty around them, or whether those businesses are just trying to find a politically acceptable place to assign blame for other problems/failures. Likewise, it's hard to determine whether Brexit plans are really causing a lot of problems, or whether businesses are just blowing smoke and hoping to get more favourable treatment from the UK government in some way by threatening to leave/downsize/whatever.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Doesn't work that way because remaining would be the default situation.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The trouble with this argument is that a "soft Brexit" by triggering Article 50 but somehow remaining within the single market and customs union is actually the opposite extremist point of view.
Under any plausible arrangement that meets those three criteria, the UK would inevitably remain subject to a large part of EU law and regulations and under the jurisdiction of the ECJ, it would remain unable to limit immigration from other EU member states (and might actually wind up with less control than it had before depending on the deal), it would continue making substantial financial contributions to the EU, and it would remain unable to make its own independent trade deals with non-EU partners and continue to be required to impose tariffs on non-EU imports according to EU rules.
It's easy to understand why someone who didn't want to leave the EU in the first place would be willing to accept those things in order to retain the benefits of EU membership, but what exactly do those people think any leave voters were voting for if it wasn't any of legislative independence, immigration control, reduced financial contributions, or autonomy in international relations with non-EU nations? What is left that makes Brexit anything but a name at that point?
I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with a government minister on much of anything these days, but I do agree with the suggestion that "soft Brexit" and "hard Brexit" are just propaganda terms at this point. They are mostly being used to describe, respectively, no real Brexit at all and a complete cut-off with no real ties left. They present a false dichotomy that is entirely unhelpful to reaching a reasonable agreement that might be mutually beneficial for both the UK and the EU at the end of the process.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
> rather than anyone admitting that areas outside London have been neglected and need more focus
One of the most fundamental tenants of Progressive politics, worldwide, is that rural cultures are bad and must be destroyed. Ignoring areas outside of London isn't a bug, it's a feature.
No, it is natural. When you move past a post-industrial base, it becomes harder and harder to sustain small communities. Whether you are in the US, the UK, Japan, Mexico, or Russia, the farther you are from a sufficiently large urban center, the harder it is to have or find a diverse job market.
And I'm not talking "diverse job market" as "market with good jobs." I'm talking about "market that has any jobs". You can work multiple part-times in an urban area if you have to (not ideal, but you do what you must.) In a poor rural town, you don't even get that choice.
It's not a matter that urban people are smart and rural people dumb or any shit like that. It's just how the means of production and services operate nowadays. And in a world where automation and serviceable products are become more and more prevalent, there is no stopping it.
Capitalism dictates that workers move where jobs are. There is no right or wrong in this. It just is. And to presume that a government must "do something" to prevent rural towns from becoming ghost towns is pretty much a tax on urban centers to subsidize a rural life that is no longer feasible.
The question here is how countries and people can grapple with this effectively to the country's benefit (or how it ameliorates the inevitable pains in the transition).
The referendum was the worst possible way to settle this issue.
- The question was too vague. Remain in or leave the EU, but what about the single market? Freedom of movement? What kind of deal should we try to get? Norway model, fall back to WTO rules?
- The "debates" in the run up were awful, a complete shambles.
- The whole thing went post-truth almost immediately.
- Most voters were extremely ill informed, by design. They wanted to know things like what the economic consequences would be, what sort of deal we would try to get, and the leave campaign was careful to avoid offering a plan that could then provide answers to those questions.
- The while EU issue was conflated with immigration, which we could control today without leaving if we wanted to.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
In fairness, remaining in the EU is hardly a known quantity either. It's not as if the EU today is what people were voting on several decades ago, and it's not as if most of the EU has no interest in ever closer union in the future. So while I might agree with your general constitutional point about not changing the status quo for a less well understood alternative without some form of supermajority, in this case I also don't think remaining in the EU deserved that sort of special protection. I think the worst mistake was in hastily and crudely assembling a referendum on a single question that didn't actually give anyone much of a clear mandate for anything useful afterwards, not in accepting a simple majority decision.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That is, stop attending the meetings, stop paying the fees, stop letting in filty immgrunts and repeal the EC act.
Seriously? While we're at it, perhaps if we hooked enough rowing boats to the UK and paddled really, really hard we could move the entire country away from Europe and next door to some other international pariah with a reputation for behaving like a moody teenager and being impossible to do business with - North Korea maybe? Or, give our New Best Friend Trump a few more months. As someone who's opinion you, presumably, respect said:
Of course, if you act like a total dickhead to your trading partners by not honouring prior agreements, they're unlikely to want to do much negotiating with you since you've proven untrustworthy.
That's called a reason why we can't just take our ball and go home.
I don't see what's wrong with that.
What's wrong with that is that the EU Council & Parliament just need to filibuster for a couple of years and they can give us a "take it or leave it" deal that only has to be better than the default...
Why, if we're leaving, do you think we're owed some sort of special treatment?
Its not "special treatment" because no other state has seceded from the EU, so there's no "usual treatment" to compare it with. None of the non-EU states with existing agreements (Norway, Switzerland) were in the EU to start with. The EU is a lot more complicated than a trade deal (and those take a decade to negotiate). What about EU citizens living in the UK? What about UK citizens living in the EU - do they get shipped back? Arrested as illegal immigrants? Oh, and those immigrants you are so worried about - many of them currently get stopped by border controls in the EU. EU companies with offices and assets in the UK? UK companies with offices in the EU? Tourists currently in the EU (who have no right to be there the second we leave the EU)? Students? What happens to the lorries full of imports and exports passing between UK and EU docks if nobody knows on what terms they are allowed in or out?. Even if we don't actually get concessions, long-term, at the very least we need some sort of orderly plan and timetable for making the transition without overnight chaos - unless we want to re-enact the Berlin air lift?
You know all those stupid, stupid horror stories and ridiculous threats of economic cataclysm that Camoron and Osbourne built their pathetic "remain" campaign around? The reason that everybody thought they were stupid and ridiculous was that people assumed that there's be some sort of civilised negotiation about the terms of departure that would anticipate and mitigate - or at least plan for - those problems. You start saying "well, we could just tell the EU to fuck off" and suddenly all that FUD starts sounding plausible.
This was a well known and understood consequence of leaving.
Not according to the "Leave" campaign who told everybody that the Europeans would be so desperate to trade with us that they'd let us stay in the single market and custom union at the same time as "taking back control", and that anybody who suggested that there might be any downside was "running down Britain".
I have no quarrel with the minority of Brexit voters who weighed up the arguments, did the research and decided it was all worth the risk. However, if you think such people swung the Brexit vote then I have this brilliant scheme for using our EU contributions to fund the NHS that you may like...
Still trying to work out how handing a huge victory to the hard right, richest minority of the Conservative party struck a blow for the little guy against elitism...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Those who didn't vote don't deserve any say, whatsoever. They've pretty much implicitly stated that they are fine whichever way it goes
You think manufacturing exporters who just got a 10-20% windfall through the exchange rate changes are going to be scared about the risk of WTO tariffs that will be an order of magnitude smaller in most sectors? It still seems like you're overstating the case here.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's not why I voted, you lying scum.
Yes it is you lying xenophobe.
The leave campaing was centred entirely around the issue of immigration. They wouldn't even talk about jobs because they knew that if they did they'd have to discuss the fact there would be fewer jobs in the UK post Brexit.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.