On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 3:47 PM, Dave Cridland <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8 March 2018 at 20:20, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Since we are about to meet in London participants from the larger Internet
> behemoths might like to consider the fact that much of the wealth of London
> was created by the East India company, a corporation which did not merely
> rival nation states in its power, it eclipsed all but a handful of the
> nation states of its day. The nabobs of the East India company were
> wealthier than the crown.
>
> It took four years for the company to go from being the dominant political
> power in the country to bankrupt.
Somewhat fittingly, given the rest of your email, the docks they once
operated have been filled in for years, and are now home to Telehouse,
as well as several other data centres...
That was the result of containerized transport rather than a political cataclysm.
IT companies tend to make the mistake that political circumstances are irrelevant to them. They are on the look out for emergent technologies.
Governments were not. Not only did HMG not understand the impact of containerization and fail to plan for it, they entirely failed to realize the impact until a decade after it had occurred. The cost of shipping goods dropped by two orders of magnitude because of the box. That is why it is now possible to build cars in the UK using parts from Japan.
Many policy makers have yet to catch up to the impact of containerization. They are cheerfully trying to rewrite the rules of the modern trading system while understanding exactly nothing about its workings.
Arguments of the form 'they can' possibly do X because the result would be Y' are inoperative.
