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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

We were talking about this at work yesterday and trying to add up how many new LHC each UK government foul up could have bought.

- HS2 rail : about five LHC - Liz Truss Budget: about two - Energy suppliers: only half - we stopped at this point

Honestly it’s depressing how much we want to nickel and dime Scientific research yet are hilariously incompetent elsewhere

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Thank you for the perspective. My gut reaction to the headline was "Are particle colliders really the biggest bang for the buck science we can do?"

And you are kinda right, it doesn't have to be the biggest bang for the buck we can do in science. Its just nice it is not wasted on bridges to nowhere.

Agreed - and it’s one of those things that we know there is an ROI but the R rarely makes it to the original I, or even on a viable timescale.

I mean giving Einstein an education is probably the highest ROI made in the past 120 years. But how do we ascribe that?

Or more recently South Africa has made noises along the lines of “we raised you Elon, where’s the tax revenue now?”

> Or more recently South Africa has made noises along the lines of “we raised you Elon, where’s the tax revenue now?”

Source?

UK is also a massively failing economy though. Being bought by the middle east piecemeal.

It's not massively failing, just relatively stagnant, and it's not being bought by the middle east, that's just not the case.

Quatar (or "its ruling family") does own £10bn in properties?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2022/nov...

Yeah that's not that much, certainly not enough to warrant being called a "massively failing economy", otherwise so too was the US a massively failing economy in the 80s when Japan was buying everything up. Total property assets in the UK are worth £8.7 trillion. It says more about Qatar than it does about the UK, other than that the UK is a liberal capitalist democracy.

And it's quite the turnaround for Qatar in the last 50 years considering how they were once part of the British Empire. The Qataris still have a fascination with British things (e.g. Harrods).

Well, they have oil.

More like returning to a normal state, for a small ass island population with limited resources (all currently over concentrated in London). It's pure luck UK didn't end up like Madagascar.

I completely agree that it's returning to its "normal state" but disagree with the pure luck part. The UK is a declining empire, much like Spain and Portugal of past. They massively expanded their empire / Colonial holdings from the late 16th century all the way up to the WW1/2 era, at their peak holding sway over something like 25% of the world's population.

That wasn't luck, even if you consider it lucky that they are an island and were able to isolate themselves (while still being involved!) from the conflicts of continental Europe.

Now the empire is more or less gone and they've shot themselves in the foot with Brexit, they will become much like any other relatively isolated (economically) and resource poor developed nation.

My take on the Industrial Revolution is there was something valuable about the British … I am going to use the word … culture (#). That empire crumbled in the two wars (or one war with a half-time break) but the second “empire” of the USA picked up more or less the same place (Suez usually is the hand over point)

So yeah. We had a massive empire with global excess capital draining into London - now it’s mostly into NYC and SV.

(#) no that’s not supposed to be code for “white”. The Bank of England funded the monarchy’s wars so middle class capital held enough sway to hold the monarch off parliament which gave enough regional autonomy, courts supported capital investment over government, a growing middle class, widespread education, I mean it’s incredible it all held together. But I think a lot of what worked got sent by virus to the American Colony so by 1776 there were two simikar “cultures”.

not just the government...how many new LHC's for Brexit?

Brexit is more or less agreed as reduced 4% of the UK GDP - so that’s about 100bn less money sloshing around - something like 2/3 NHS or half welfare state. Or one HS2!

As an aside my take on Brexit is it was like a middle aged man thinking a divorce would “free him up” for a bright future of sexy young girlfriends. I mean it’s possible but it would mean a massive painful overhaul (whatever the nationhood equivalent of dieting, hitting the gym, doubling your salary, and giving your personality an uplift might be. And maybe plastic surgery and fixing those teeth. possible hardly covers it. )

The problem with Brexiteers is they can always say “we did not try hard enough” as if one more gym round, one more hair dye will bring the girls a’calling.

Spending billions on a collider when the healthcare system is starved of funding and doctors are striking would be massively unpopular and wrong.

Leave the particle colliders for rich countries to fund.

No, it is not wrong. I think your statement comes from a rather short sighted view on scientific and technological developments. We need progress as a society and as humankind to develop and further advance our (currently rather poor) state of affairs (on a global scale). Be it technological (where new tech can actually improve stuff considerably) or 'just' on the understanding of things, i.e. knowledge'.

The comparatively small research budgets would not have any noteworthy impact on dysfunctional systems such as healthcare anyway.

EDIT: Actually, I am not pro this new CERN machine. I think, there are other scientific things where it would make more sense to fund them.

both could be done, they just don't want to

Not really. The amount of money available to spend is not unlimited, especially at these interest rates.

A billion pounds towards hospitals is better than a billion pounds towards a collider. People are struggling to even see a dentist. The NHS is in a deep hole and it needs a lot of money to dig it out of it.

imo nhs and uk's rail network are not failing because pure lack of money, they are failing because uk's govt decided to fail them. Uk does have a lot of money, and a lot of money are spent either unoptimally or entirely wrong. Spending money on a collider is not wrong, deliberately underfunding pub transport and promoting car use for any usecas is wrong because the final costs for maintaining this infra & developing it are much higher.

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