[eyko]

It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we need to keep producing. More so in the current geopolitical climate.

And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.

[aylmao]

+1, exactly. Focusing too much in the money makes you forget about the power. At a national leadership level, there isn't much power in having a local Warhammer industry, fishing is much more strategic.

In broad terms, this is related to the error the USA made. Manufacturing in China was a very profitable deal for the USA. A lot of companies view labour first and foremost as expense, wealth as as the goal, and power in wealth— so it's not surprising as a whole the industry opted to "contract out" labour across the globe.

A lot of power lays in labour though. Money doesn't produce, invent, move, feed, etc— money is only good if someone will take it at the amounts you have it to do that specific labour you need for you.

[seanmcdirmid]

This is a bit harsh: the USA didn't devalue labor in general, just manufacturing. They hired software engineers from all over the world, along with a lot of higher value engineering and product development jobs. The error the USA made was in pushing the workforce up the value chain faster than everyone could handle, and a lot of Americans got left behind.

China is moving up the value chain also, they are being forced to by their demographics, and they are investing heavily in the change ATM (just like they started investing heavily in green energy 10 years ago) so I don't think they will make the same mistake as the Americans are making right now.

[lmpdev]

That’s the biggest thing I took away from the whole Boeing corporate disaster

You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas

If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money

Those sectors you let die might not matter right now, but they might matter later. And you might have to scale up fast.

[2Gkashmiri]

We buy local brands of shoes that are in inr 300-2000 range and that solves like 70% of the shoes market in India. From shoes to skippers to formal shoes to ladies heels and such. Then you gave INr 3000-8000 that are considered really really expensive.

Convert that to usd and you will see how much premium is being charged.

[pjc50]

Perhaps. But does a subsidized industry retain competence, or retain incompetence? After all, if you're making a profit no matter what, what incentive is there to do well?

Many of the EU farming and fishing subsidies are to NOT produce anything.

[cratermoon]

> You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas

This is exactly what Dr. L. J. Hart-Smith wrote in "Out-Sourced Profits – The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting", a paper from 2001 https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646...

See also How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/, where the author asks, "In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain?"

Once you've outsourced everything except the management work, the organization forgets how to do the thing they're supposed to be managing.

[mapt]

> If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money

I feel like money is overwhelmingly how we denominate value, effort, and agency in our society. Almost every time somebody says "You can't just throw money at the problem", they are arguing that we shouldn't even try that, contrary to all established reasoning about how society works.

There are diminishing returns to funding, but the people who use this expression are typically at a tiny fraction of where we would expect to hit them.

If you want to have a fishing industry because fish are your idealized heritage, then choose to subsidize it heavily either to continue to exist, and/or to expand it into waters and economies of scale where you can still fish profitably. Like the Japanese and the Chinese do, respectively.

[flir]

While not disagreeing with you, I don't think we've done a great job of maintaining fisheries.

[wongarsu]

Also, continuing overfishing is a terrible long-term strategy. Sure, we will have the boats, fishermen and infrastructure around fishing, but that's of no help if the fish are gone.

[eyko]

Agreed, and the same goes for most strategic sectors: energy, agriculture, animal husbandry, semiconductors, communications, space, the infrastructure to support all these, education, etc.

[alibarber]

Whilst I appreciate that there are national and security interests to consider, I'd still say fish aren't one of them.

I think a lack of seafood would have less of an impact to the general population than say, lack of satellite navigation or communication technology.

[swiftcoder]

It's only ~100 years since seafood was the primary protein source of most coastal regions. The rampant mismanagement of fish/shellfish stocks that put an end to that has had knock-on effects across our entire food supply, that continue to influence agricultural policy to this day

[pjmlp]

Which amid everything, maybe it is time to focus again on our own programming languages and OSes like in the cold war and export regulation days, it will suck for a while, but apparently it is how everything is going.

[butlike]

So wait, you have high environmental standards, so you import instead of producing locally. Wouldn't that implicitly give you lower standards at home?