Comment by nickdothutton
10 hours ago
Brits more or less completely abandoned space in any meaningful way. Successive governments didn't value it at all in comparison to other areas of policy. Even after we developed our own independent orbital launch capability. The story is much the same today, a couple of satellite companies, very little real primary capability. Our "spaceports" are mostly artist impressions or computer generated imagery. Meanwhile we will spend £250b annually on the health service by 2028, up from £45b in 2000.
What is the point re the health service? We should be enriching people like musk instead of looking after the health of citizens? We spend money on loads of stuff just wondering why you think the NHS needs to be singled out as if it is using resources that could be used to find space exploration/launches.
Healthcare is a bottomless pit. Demand is effectively infinite so no amount of funding will ever be enough. That's not to say we should eliminate it, but there has to be a balance. We shouldn't dump so many resources into healthcare that it strangles other sectors like space launch that are pushing human society forward for the long term. Whether that enriches certain individuals or not is completely irrelevant.
And you present a false choice. No matter what it does, the NHS can only ever have a relatively minor impact on the health of UK citizens. In terms of lifespan — and more importantly healthspan — it's less significant than lifestyle factors: exercise, diet, substance abuse, sleep hygiene, violence, toxin exposure, etc.
The listed figure is about 3,500£ per year per person. Seems quite low for what it is.
For comparison, the US government spends something like $5,500 per year per person on health care, and doesn't come even remotely close to covering the entire population with that spending.
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The NHS consumes about half of all day to day public service spending. It is singular in its ability to suck spending out of UK government.
That seems like a lot. Can I ask where you got that figure? Is "day-to-day" denoting some kind of specific budget?
I just tried to Google it and their AI responded with "The NHS and social care account for roughly half (49%) of all day-to-day public service spending controlled by the Westminster government.", linking me to a report from the The King's Fund [1].
But on reading that report, it seems to say only that 49.5% is the cost of staffing the NHS from its own budget, which it states as £205 billion in 2024/25 - that's more like 20% of the year's public spending [2]. Which seems more in line with what I had assumed.
[1] https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-c...
[2] https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/BriefGuide-M23.pdf
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That’s the second C-suite I’ve seen on here today posting about how your entitlement to things should be directly proportional to your wealth.
Has a new memo gone out? Have we moved on from AI to ultracapitalism as the c-suite talking point?