Britain isn't raping the world of its resources anymore so it has nothing.
It is very likely that the UK economy will suffer in the short and probably medium term due to Brexit-related changes and the uncertainty while those changes are worked out. In the long term, the economic implications aren't so clear and could be more favourable.
However, the idea that Britain has nothing of value to offer in its own right is just silly. It's a nation with more than 60 million relatively wealthy and relatively well-educated people. It has world class academic and research institutions. It is a global business and finance hub with geographic and linguistic advantages. It has several major industries contributing to its economy beyond the high profile ones like financial services. It is completely implausible that all of this will be catastrophically undermined, even if it takes a long time post-Brexit to sort out new international agreements.
After all, the UK also trades with other nations outside the EU, accepts people from and sends people to other nations around the world, and so on. It already does more trade with non-EU partners than EU ones, and the gap is widening. If the adults sort out the post-Brexit arrangements between the UK and EU, there will still be some form of mutually beneficial trading relationships there, even if they are on somewhat different terms. If the petulant children who seem to have been running the show lately on both sides of the Channel get to call the shots, we will probably wind up with some sort of very hard Brexit. In that case, it seems more likely that the UK will start to rebalance its economy and diplomacy in favour of more trade with non-EU partners, but there is a lot of room to manoeuvre there if you're free of the EU customs union and the like, so that will probably also work out OK in the long term though it may be a much rougher ride for a few years first.
Those of us who are using older Windows versions and concerned about data security and privacy issues did actively prevent the back-ported telemetry updates from installing.
You know what I find works really well when I'm running multiple businesses? Listening to random people on the Internet instead of real lawyers. Particularly ones who claim to be experts on compliance issues, but who immediately confuse the general issue of uploading data with one specific instance in the form of Windows telemetry, even in response to a whole post about how that telemetry isn't really the big concern here.
As I said before, I'm talking about small businesses here. Most small businesses don't even have a dedicated IT guy, and they certainly aren't running enterprise-level admin tools.
Are there lawyers really telling their clients that using Windows 10 may open them to liability simply because of Win 10 telemetry?
There isn't really any question about whether it could open us to liability in principle. Have you ever seen any provision in your country's data protection/privacy laws, or any commercial confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement, or any industry regulations like PCI DSS, or any statutory regulations like those protecting personal health data, that contains any sort of exemption or exclusion for data provided to a third party as a result of software running on local equipment transferring data to remote services for processing? I haven't, and neither has any lawyer I've talked to about this.
The more practical questions are about the risk of a real world breach, the likely consequences if anything did happen, and whether adopting Windows 10 under the current circumstances could be considered negligent. No-one seriously thinks Microsoft is going to deliberately search through telemetry data they acquired after something crashed and exploit any personal data they incidentally collected. The concerns expressed were more around potential future directions with functionality like Cortana, where data very much is deliberately transferred to Microsoft for searching and analysis purposes, and with the fact that the way automatic updates work in Windows 10 potentially leads to a choice between leaving a system unpatched against known security issues or introducing additional functionality that would transfer data out of our organisation, as well as being able to reset existing privacy-related configuration to less secure settings or remove them at any time. With the current direction Microsoft have been taking, little transparency from them about what is really collected or how it is used, and few if any actionable guarantees under their privacy policies or EULAs regarding their future conduct in these areas to provide reassurance, our conclusion was that there are legitimate concerns here.
IMHO, if there was a compelling legal reason that Win10 telemetry actually exposed business users to serious liability, MS wouldn't have put that feature in.
Right. so let's consider the editions of Windows 10 that will typically be used by larger organisations. How much control over software updates do they have? Lots. How much mandatory telemetry do they include? None. Do they use Cortana and remote services for routine searching? No.
I'm not saying (and neither did anyone else in any conversation I've been in) that there is some sky-is-falling threat here or that Microsoft is likely to be actively malicious in exploiting data it gains access to because of Windows 10. But if you handle sensitive data, there is a level of risk with any software features that can transfer data to another system outside your control, and there is a level of risk with any software features that involve automatic updates, and depending on how serious the consequences of a breach could be, some organisations won't be happy with the potential liability that results.
Depending on your vendor's/manufacturer's willingness to play along, you can still buy machines with 10 preinstalled and downgrade to an older version for another year or so.
Enterprise agreements are a different world entirely.
This happens every new generation of OS - some noob comes by to tell us that people won't upgrade and they are always wrong.
Right. I mean, everyone jumped from XP to Vista, except for almost everyone. And Windows 7 eventually lost so much market share to Windows 8/8.1 that it was only a few times bigger when Windows 10 came out.
As someone with small businesses dealing with sensitive commercial and personal data, not only do we give a crap, so do our lawyers. YMMV, but the telemetry and automatic updates are not a non-issue for those too small to be using the enterprise-level tools.
If that were really true, why were all the serious business PC suppliers still offering Windows 7 Pro preinstalled right up until yesterday, in many cases as the default option when you ordered online ahead of Windows 10? Why did several of them have detailed explanations ready today for how to use downgrade rights to get back to the Windows 7 you actually wanted instead of the Windows 10 that Microsoft now forces them to supply? And why is Windows 7 still by far the largest OS in the marketplace well over a year after 10 was out, despite Microsoft literally giving the latter away and aggressively promoting it to the extent that many people wound up switching to it and then vocally complaining that they hadn't wanted to?
at least to the point where it isn't worth supporting it.
Now we're getting somewhere. Older Windows operating systems do not fit with Microsoft's vision of a service-based, always-online future. Since Nadella is basically betting his business on making that happen (and, to be fair, so far what they're making in other areas seems to outweigh what they're losing in OS revenue) this seems unlikely to change unless and until there is a change in senior management.
I still find it an odd strategy. They're basically playing to the non-geek home users ("Free upgrades! New shinies!") and the enterprise market (Win 10 Enterprise is practically a different OS to the other editions) at the expense of the whole small business, power user and geek level in between. I can see them possibly making a lot of money doing that in the short to medium term. But in the longer term, that middle group is the one that often sets the direction of the industry, and sooner or later a competitor or two will surely exploit that.
Your post freaked me out a little, because it's almost something I could have written myself! Our backgrounds are similar, and I too have found myself looking on in horror more than once as literally months of work went by producing little real benefit, until eventually I just gave up and wrote a basic implementation using old school tools or techniques in less than a day, just to make the point.
On the flip side, every now and then there really is a significant change and a chance to develop skills in a different area, and I'd say there have been at least three of those in recent times.
For one, I've been happy to see some of the useful ideas from functional programming entering the mainstream. I believe there's considerable potential to develop better models for programming with the increased awareness of ideas beyond the previous imperative/OOP focus, and as "software is eating the world", I think this has never been more important.
Secondly, the shift in focus back towards remote execution, mostly thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, has created some interesting opportunities and challenges. Once theoretical knowledge around distributed systems, scalability and security now has everyday relevance, and developing software for that sort of environment is quite different to what we faced before in the era dominated by desktop PCs, native applications and LANs.
Thirdly, partly as a consequence of the previous two points, we are doing much more sophisticated and large scale data processing and analysis today. Things that used to be in the realm of supercomputing can now be achieved by moderately large organisations with significant but not exceptional resources. This has potentially horrifying implications for things like privacy and security, but also great promise in areas from improving the efficiency of transport and communications networks to personalised healthcare.
Unfortunately, it's as true as ever that much real world software is basically a simple interface to a simple database, which is mostly pretty dull to develop even if it's quite useful. There's also a crazy amount of wheel reinvention at the moment, but then maybe there always was and it's just not our generation doing it any more.;-)
It's very clear if you look at the studies on what happens to the brain as it ages.
I suppose it depends on what we mean by "older programmers", but if we're talking about a professional in say their 40s or 50s compared to a mid-20s recent graduate, I've never seen anything that suggests a clear reduction in overall performance, other things being equal. Some things improve with experience, some things deteriorate with age, but can you point me to any studies showing that in practice the older programmer is significantly worse off?
The simple fact is that as we age we become less able to pick up new things easily.
I've yet to see much evidence of that. I see a trend for more experienced people to be less willing to learn lots of new things all the time, but that's partly because they better at recognising potential. They know that a lot of the heavily hyped new things in the tech industry aren't really new at all and/or probably won't last five minutes. They know there will be plenty of time to learn the ones that do have staying power, if and when they need them. In the meantime, they tend to prioritise using and learning those things that will actually help to get the job done or done better. This, grasshopper, is the difference between knowledge and wisdom.:-)
But... How will the product owner stay in the loop as you work through your backlog items so they know what to put in the plan for you to do during the next sprint?
And what do you mean you just turned off your phone, mail, Slack, Basecamp, Skype and HipChat?
Oh, you just established the requirements and then built something to meet them? Already? Never mind, then.
I don't know how you can possibly read anything about EU subsidies into anything I've written here, but if it makes you feel any better, my businesses have never taken any form of EU subsidy. In fact, from the point of view of my own businesses, the EU probably does more harm than good as things stand today, and in isolation we'd be a bit better off without it. But of course we're not operating in isolation, so the interesting questions are really about whether the EU is a net win or net loss in the big picture, and those are much harder to answer (despite the number of people who seem to think it's an easy question and if you voted the other way from them you're obviously some sort of clueless idiot).
The EU operates what is termed a "single market" or "internal market", which actually includes the EU member states plus a few others via separate international agreements. This is a region in which the "four freedoms" apply: goods, services, labour and capital may be moved freely between the participating states as if within their own country.
This relatively close relationship is generally seen as good for trade between members of that single market. It means there are no government-imposed tariffs on imports/exports, there are common standards and regulations for what you're allowed to sell throughout the market, and so on. This is why some people in the UK are currently arguing that on leaving the EU as a whole, we should seek an agreement to remain within the single market (a form of "soft Brexit").
However, membership of that single market isn't necessarily a win in all respects.
One issue is that the freedom of movement of labour means member states can't limit immigration from other member states. This has been controversial recently for a number of reasons. In the UK specifically, some people argue that immigration is putting an unsustainable burden on our national infrastructure. Others argue that immigrants are both helpful and in some cases necessary to keep our economy running and support that very infrastructure. Some point out that while we receive many immigrants from elsewhere in the single market, many of our own citizens also choose to work or retire abroad, and that travelling within the EU without visas is beneficial. Across the EU more widely, there is an issue at the moment with the number of refugees from elsewhere in the world who are entering member states close to troubled areas but then able to move around within the EU relatively freely. And on top of all of this, there are all the "free movement, but with strings attached" arrangements where the politicians and diplomats have been trying to dance around the problems without giving up the benefits.
There has probably been more objectively wrong nonsense said about immigration than any other issue around Brexit, but unfortunately it's long been a difficult subject and a certain part of the population in most EU states, including the UK, isn't very nice when it comes to foreigners. And just to throw one more ingredient into the mix, of course the UK also has people moving to and from non-EU states, but our visa and immigration system is overcomplicated, dysfunctional and a huge burden on those people and businesses involved. The natural assumption is that the same currently awful system would apply to those coming from the EU in the event of a "hard Brexit" where we cut ties like single market membership as part of leaving the EU, which some people see as too high a price to pay pragmatically, even if they don't in principle mind immigration from the EU being subject to the same rules as from anywhere else.
Another issue with the single market is that it is also what is called a "customs union". That means that while trade within the market is free, any member state importing from outside the market is required to impose a certain level of tariffs, regulations, and so on. That is usually seen as bad for trade with partners outside the EU single market, for much the same reasons that trade within the market is good. For the UK specifically, although it does a lot of trade with the EU, it actually does a bit more now with other partners outside the EU, and the external trade is also growing a bit faster. And of course a lot of goods and services are both provided and consumed internally within the UK. As long as the UK is within the scope of the EU arrangements, it therefore has to apply the EU rules even to internal matters and to trade with non-EU partners. Depending on who you ask and what line of business they're in, this is either no big deal or a crippling burden on trade and our national economy.
I wish my experience were similar, because I'm also the kind of person who doesn't buy cheap tat and does do his research. I only buy from reputable sources. I typically buy mid-range products at minimum, and often towards the higher end. And I have still encountered dramatically more failures generally but also dramatically more deliberate crippling of products in recent years.
I do agree that there is some element of modern technology simply being more complex and/or working on smaller scales and so inherently having less margin for error. Whether I really need a more vulnerable 4TB hard drive instead of a more robust 1TB drive if I only have a few hundred GB of data to store anyway is a different question, of course, but bigger numbers presumably shift more boxes so that's what everyone supplies.
There is probably also an element of dumb luck in my personal anecdotes. I had an amazing lack of failures for many years, with not so much as a hard drive giving out on me during its working lifetime across many different machines. Statistically, I was well into the long tail for that period, and what I've seen more recently may in part just be reverting to the mean.
But that doesn't excuse things like printers that decide your ink/toner has run out after a fixed number of pages when you can see there's plenty of supply left, or tablets that get security patches for barely a year or two before some OS update designed for newer hardware leaves them barely able to run any more, or cars where diagnosing a warning light on the dash means an expensive visit to a dealer but adding a simple report of the underlying fault code to the already pathetically bad onboard UI would mean owners could fix the problem and the clear the error in five minutes themselves without paying. These kinds of trends are rampant in their respective industries, even among big name brands and high-end products, and they are nothing but customer-hostile cash grabs.
Indeed. Don't forget how important it is to seal up things like phones as well, so it's extra-difficult to extract and recycle any rare elements inside.
I'm sure you're right and that's part of it. My worry is that we'll go so far that you can no longer buy decent quality products at any price, even if you want to.
Slashdot Mirror
Britain isn't raping the world of its resources anymore so it has nothing.
It is very likely that the UK economy will suffer in the short and probably medium term due to Brexit-related changes and the uncertainty while those changes are worked out. In the long term, the economic implications aren't so clear and could be more favourable.
However, the idea that Britain has nothing of value to offer in its own right is just silly. It's a nation with more than 60 million relatively wealthy and relatively well-educated people. It has world class academic and research institutions. It is a global business and finance hub with geographic and linguistic advantages. It has several major industries contributing to its economy beyond the high profile ones like financial services. It is completely implausible that all of this will be catastrophically undermined, even if it takes a long time post-Brexit to sort out new international agreements.
After all, the UK also trades with other nations outside the EU, accepts people from and sends people to other nations around the world, and so on. It already does more trade with non-EU partners than EU ones, and the gap is widening. If the adults sort out the post-Brexit arrangements between the UK and EU, there will still be some form of mutually beneficial trading relationships there, even if they are on somewhat different terms. If the petulant children who seem to have been running the show lately on both sides of the Channel get to call the shots, we will probably wind up with some sort of very hard Brexit. In that case, it seems more likely that the UK will start to rebalance its economy and diplomacy in favour of more trade with non-EU partners, but there is a lot of room to manoeuvre there if you're free of the EU customs union and the like, so that will probably also work out OK in the long term though it may be a much rougher ride for a few years first.
Those of us who are using older Windows versions and concerned about data security and privacy issues did actively prevent the back-ported telemetry updates from installing.
Which edition of Windows 10?
Where did that "without hardware" qualifier come from?
You know what I find works really well when I'm running multiple businesses? Listening to random people on the Internet instead of real lawyers. Particularly ones who claim to be experts on compliance issues, but who immediately confuse the general issue of uploading data with one specific instance in the form of Windows telemetry, even in response to a whole post about how that telemetry isn't really the big concern here.
Windows 7 barely hit 15% it's first year. Windows 10 is at 22% in it's first year.
And all they had to do to get there was literally give it away and try to trick users into migrating, which of course a lot of users didn't.
In any case, your cherry-picked data point doesn't contradict my original point. Windows 7 was and is still plenty popular in the market.
As I said before, I'm talking about small businesses here. Most small businesses don't even have a dedicated IT guy, and they certainly aren't running enterprise-level admin tools.
When that silly interface talks to a remote service to do whatever it does and transfers our data to that remote service in the process, quite a lot.
Looks like it really is true that 119.24% of statistics are made up on the spot...
Are there lawyers really telling their clients that using Windows 10 may open them to liability simply because of Win 10 telemetry?
There isn't really any question about whether it could open us to liability in principle. Have you ever seen any provision in your country's data protection/privacy laws, or any commercial confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement, or any industry regulations like PCI DSS, or any statutory regulations like those protecting personal health data, that contains any sort of exemption or exclusion for data provided to a third party as a result of software running on local equipment transferring data to remote services for processing? I haven't, and neither has any lawyer I've talked to about this.
The more practical questions are about the risk of a real world breach, the likely consequences if anything did happen, and whether adopting Windows 10 under the current circumstances could be considered negligent. No-one seriously thinks Microsoft is going to deliberately search through telemetry data they acquired after something crashed and exploit any personal data they incidentally collected. The concerns expressed were more around potential future directions with functionality like Cortana, where data very much is deliberately transferred to Microsoft for searching and analysis purposes, and with the fact that the way automatic updates work in Windows 10 potentially leads to a choice between leaving a system unpatched against known security issues or introducing additional functionality that would transfer data out of our organisation, as well as being able to reset existing privacy-related configuration to less secure settings or remove them at any time. With the current direction Microsoft have been taking, little transparency from them about what is really collected or how it is used, and few if any actionable guarantees under their privacy policies or EULAs regarding their future conduct in these areas to provide reassurance, our conclusion was that there are legitimate concerns here.
IMHO, if there was a compelling legal reason that Win10 telemetry actually exposed business users to serious liability, MS wouldn't have put that feature in.
Right. so let's consider the editions of Windows 10 that will typically be used by larger organisations. How much control over software updates do they have? Lots. How much mandatory telemetry do they include? None. Do they use Cortana and remote services for routine searching? No.
I'm not saying (and neither did anyone else in any conversation I've been in) that there is some sky-is-falling threat here or that Microsoft is likely to be actively malicious in exploiting data it gains access to because of Windows 10. But if you handle sensitive data, there is a level of risk with any software features that can transfer data to another system outside your control, and there is a level of risk with any software features that involve automatic updates, and depending on how serious the consequences of a breach could be, some organisations won't be happy with the potential liability that results.
Depending on your vendor's/manufacturer's willingness to play along, you can still buy machines with 10 preinstalled and downgrade to an older version for another year or so.
Enterprise agreements are a different world entirely.
This happens every new generation of OS - some noob comes by to tell us that people won't upgrade and they are always wrong.
Right. I mean, everyone jumped from XP to Vista, except for almost everyone. And Windows 7 eventually lost so much market share to Windows 8/8.1 that it was only a few times bigger when Windows 10 came out.
As someone with small businesses dealing with sensitive commercial and personal data, not only do we give a crap, so do our lawyers. YMMV, but the telemetry and automatic updates are not a non-issue for those too small to be using the enterprise-level tools.
More like the market stopped buying it...
If that were really true, why were all the serious business PC suppliers still offering Windows 7 Pro preinstalled right up until yesterday, in many cases as the default option when you ordered online ahead of Windows 10? Why did several of them have detailed explanations ready today for how to use downgrade rights to get back to the Windows 7 you actually wanted instead of the Windows 10 that Microsoft now forces them to supply? And why is Windows 7 still by far the largest OS in the marketplace well over a year after 10 was out, despite Microsoft literally giving the latter away and aggressively promoting it to the extent that many people wound up switching to it and then vocally complaining that they hadn't wanted to?
at least to the point where it isn't worth supporting it.
Now we're getting somewhere. Older Windows operating systems do not fit with Microsoft's vision of a service-based, always-online future. Since Nadella is basically betting his business on making that happen (and, to be fair, so far what they're making in other areas seems to outweigh what they're losing in OS revenue) this seems unlikely to change unless and until there is a change in senior management.
I still find it an odd strategy. They're basically playing to the non-geek home users ("Free upgrades! New shinies!") and the enterprise market (Win 10 Enterprise is practically a different OS to the other editions) at the expense of the whole small business, power user and geek level in between. I can see them possibly making a lot of money doing that in the short to medium term. But in the longer term, that middle group is the one that often sets the direction of the industry, and sooner or later a competitor or two will surely exploit that.
Don't worry, now that CETA has been signed, Canadian businesses will soon be able to deal with that same threat across Europe as well!
Your post freaked me out a little, because it's almost something I could have written myself! Our backgrounds are similar, and I too have found myself looking on in horror more than once as literally months of work went by producing little real benefit, until eventually I just gave up and wrote a basic implementation using old school tools or techniques in less than a day, just to make the point.
On the flip side, every now and then there really is a significant change and a chance to develop skills in a different area, and I'd say there have been at least three of those in recent times.
For one, I've been happy to see some of the useful ideas from functional programming entering the mainstream. I believe there's considerable potential to develop better models for programming with the increased awareness of ideas beyond the previous imperative/OOP focus, and as "software is eating the world", I think this has never been more important.
Secondly, the shift in focus back towards remote execution, mostly thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, has created some interesting opportunities and challenges. Once theoretical knowledge around distributed systems, scalability and security now has everyday relevance, and developing software for that sort of environment is quite different to what we faced before in the era dominated by desktop PCs, native applications and LANs.
Thirdly, partly as a consequence of the previous two points, we are doing much more sophisticated and large scale data processing and analysis today. Things that used to be in the realm of supercomputing can now be achieved by moderately large organisations with significant but not exceptional resources. This has potentially horrifying implications for things like privacy and security, but also great promise in areas from improving the efficiency of transport and communications networks to personalised healthcare.
Unfortunately, it's as true as ever that much real world software is basically a simple interface to a simple database, which is mostly pretty dull to develop even if it's quite useful. There's also a crazy amount of wheel reinvention at the moment, but then maybe there always was and it's just not our generation doing it any more. ;-)
It's very clear if you look at the studies on what happens to the brain as it ages.
I suppose it depends on what we mean by "older programmers", but if we're talking about a professional in say their 40s or 50s compared to a mid-20s recent graduate, I've never seen anything that suggests a clear reduction in overall performance, other things being equal. Some things improve with experience, some things deteriorate with age, but can you point me to any studies showing that in practice the older programmer is significantly worse off?
You also probably wouldn't use Basecamp, Slack and HipChat together.
Apparently spotting sarcasm is also a skill that changes over time. :-/
The simple fact is that as we age we become less able to pick up new things easily.
I've yet to see much evidence of that. I see a trend for more experienced people to be less willing to learn lots of new things all the time, but that's partly because they better at recognising potential. They know that a lot of the heavily hyped new things in the tech industry aren't really new at all and/or probably won't last five minutes. They know there will be plenty of time to learn the ones that do have staying power, if and when they need them. In the meantime, they tend to prioritise using and learning those things that will actually help to get the job done or done better. This, grasshopper, is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. :-)
But... How will the product owner stay in the loop as you work through your backlog items so they know what to put in the plan for you to do during the next sprint?
And what do you mean you just turned off your phone, mail, Slack, Basecamp, Skype and HipChat?
Oh, you just established the requirements and then built something to meet them? Already? Never mind, then.
I don't know how you can possibly read anything about EU subsidies into anything I've written here, but if it makes you feel any better, my businesses have never taken any form of EU subsidy. In fact, from the point of view of my own businesses, the EU probably does more harm than good as things stand today, and in isolation we'd be a bit better off without it. But of course we're not operating in isolation, so the interesting questions are really about whether the EU is a net win or net loss in the big picture, and those are much harder to answer (despite the number of people who seem to think it's an easy question and if you voted the other way from them you're obviously some sort of clueless idiot).
It's not quite that simple, unfortunately.
The EU operates what is termed a "single market" or "internal market", which actually includes the EU member states plus a few others via separate international agreements. This is a region in which the "four freedoms" apply: goods, services, labour and capital may be moved freely between the participating states as if within their own country.
This relatively close relationship is generally seen as good for trade between members of that single market. It means there are no government-imposed tariffs on imports/exports, there are common standards and regulations for what you're allowed to sell throughout the market, and so on. This is why some people in the UK are currently arguing that on leaving the EU as a whole, we should seek an agreement to remain within the single market (a form of "soft Brexit").
However, membership of that single market isn't necessarily a win in all respects.
One issue is that the freedom of movement of labour means member states can't limit immigration from other member states. This has been controversial recently for a number of reasons. In the UK specifically, some people argue that immigration is putting an unsustainable burden on our national infrastructure. Others argue that immigrants are both helpful and in some cases necessary to keep our economy running and support that very infrastructure. Some point out that while we receive many immigrants from elsewhere in the single market, many of our own citizens also choose to work or retire abroad, and that travelling within the EU without visas is beneficial. Across the EU more widely, there is an issue at the moment with the number of refugees from elsewhere in the world who are entering member states close to troubled areas but then able to move around within the EU relatively freely. And on top of all of this, there are all the "free movement, but with strings attached" arrangements where the politicians and diplomats have been trying to dance around the problems without giving up the benefits.
There has probably been more objectively wrong nonsense said about immigration than any other issue around Brexit, but unfortunately it's long been a difficult subject and a certain part of the population in most EU states, including the UK, isn't very nice when it comes to foreigners. And just to throw one more ingredient into the mix, of course the UK also has people moving to and from non-EU states, but our visa and immigration system is overcomplicated, dysfunctional and a huge burden on those people and businesses involved. The natural assumption is that the same currently awful system would apply to those coming from the EU in the event of a "hard Brexit" where we cut ties like single market membership as part of leaving the EU, which some people see as too high a price to pay pragmatically, even if they don't in principle mind immigration from the EU being subject to the same rules as from anywhere else.
Another issue with the single market is that it is also what is called a "customs union". That means that while trade within the market is free, any member state importing from outside the market is required to impose a certain level of tariffs, regulations, and so on. That is usually seen as bad for trade with partners outside the EU single market, for much the same reasons that trade within the market is good. For the UK specifically, although it does a lot of trade with the EU, it actually does a bit more now with other partners outside the EU, and the external trade is also growing a bit faster. And of course a lot of goods and services are both provided and consumed internally within the UK. As long as the UK is within the scope of the EU arrangements, it therefore has to apply the EU rules even to internal matters and to trade with non-EU partners. Depending on who you ask and what line of business they're in, this is either no big deal or a crippling burden on trade and our national economy.
Crucially, the UK is also not free to negot
I wish my experience were similar, because I'm also the kind of person who doesn't buy cheap tat and does do his research. I only buy from reputable sources. I typically buy mid-range products at minimum, and often towards the higher end. And I have still encountered dramatically more failures generally but also dramatically more deliberate crippling of products in recent years.
I do agree that there is some element of modern technology simply being more complex and/or working on smaller scales and so inherently having less margin for error. Whether I really need a more vulnerable 4TB hard drive instead of a more robust 1TB drive if I only have a few hundred GB of data to store anyway is a different question, of course, but bigger numbers presumably shift more boxes so that's what everyone supplies.
There is probably also an element of dumb luck in my personal anecdotes. I had an amazing lack of failures for many years, with not so much as a hard drive giving out on me during its working lifetime across many different machines. Statistically, I was well into the long tail for that period, and what I've seen more recently may in part just be reverting to the mean.
But that doesn't excuse things like printers that decide your ink/toner has run out after a fixed number of pages when you can see there's plenty of supply left, or tablets that get security patches for barely a year or two before some OS update designed for newer hardware leaves them barely able to run any more, or cars where diagnosing a warning light on the dash means an expensive visit to a dealer but adding a simple report of the underlying fault code to the already pathetically bad onboard UI would mean owners could fix the problem and the clear the error in five minutes themselves without paying. These kinds of trends are rampant in their respective industries, even among big name brands and high-end products, and they are nothing but customer-hostile cash grabs.
Indeed. Don't forget how important it is to seal up things like phones as well, so it's extra-difficult to extract and recycle any rare elements inside.
I'm sure you're right and that's part of it. My worry is that we'll go so far that you can no longer buy decent quality products at any price, even if you want to.