Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

Raab: “No leadership challenge next week” – politicalbetting.com

1468910

Comments

  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    edited June 2022

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.

    Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
    "Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    I think you have just proved my point. Kicking out the beastly furriners will not put up the wages of the low paid, particularly as many of the low paid do not want the jobs that said furriners did.
    Nowhere is “kicking out the beastly furriners”, as you put it.

    We should be investing in machines to do the jobs that people don’t want to do, or that can’t be done productively with minimum wage laws in place.
    I thought your argument was about it not being a problem if Brexit has caused a labour shortage? That it might increase pay of the lower paid (which is almost certainly dubious)?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 14,089
    edited June 2022
    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    And yet, every working-age cohort now considers the 2016 decision to have been a mistake. Every region now has "wrong to leave" beating "right to leave".

    C2DE respondents are exactly balanced on the question.

    The only demographic group in the latest YouGov poll on the matter who think that the UK made the right decision on Brexit are those aged 65+. Either working people are silly, or there are other factors they are considering.

    https://twitter.com/DavidHerdson/status/1531982646951165954

    Nobody wants to re-open the decision, sure. Not now. But it increasingly looks like something that matters a lot to the immediate post-war generation that their offspring and their offspring aren't buying into.

    Must be all that pro-Brussels brainwashing from 1973 to 2019.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Similarly, I also pay a barista to make me expensive coffee, whereas only 20 years ago I was able to enjoy “instant” granulated weasel shit for tuppence.
  • ApplicantApplicant Posts: 3,379

    Is inflation noticeably lower in the Single Market?

    Senior Tory MP Tobias Ellwood says government should mitigate the cost of living by rejoining the single market (Norway model)

    Brexit isn't what "most people imagined" & "sector after sector" is "strangled by the red tape we were supposed to escape from"

    https://politicshome.com/thehouse/article/we-can-upgrade-brexit-and-ease-the-cost-of-living-by-going-back-to-the-single-market


    https://twitter.com/adampayne26/status/1532019589349101571

    It's a bit lower in the EU27 than in the UK but not much lower. Brexit is likely to have led to higher prices in the UK but this a price level effect not something that would push up the rate of inflation indefinitely.
    I read somewhere that core inflation in the EU27 (excluding fuel, energy etc.) is currently half that in the UK
    You mean, excluding the things that are actually dominating inflation...
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Similarly, I also pay a barista to make me expensive coffee, whereas only 20 years ago I was able to enjoy “instant” granulated weasel shit for tuppence.
    Hang on, it's the weasel shite that is the expensive stuff.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    Carnyx said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Similarly, I also pay a barista to make me expensive coffee, whereas only 20 years ago I was able to enjoy “instant” granulated weasel shit for tuppence.
    Hang on, it's the weasel shite that is the expensive stuff.
    Haha
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    At least they no longer do it using pappardelle and penne!
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766
    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.

    Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
    "Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
    Because of RoW immigration. OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    Infection rates going down (and another one Nicola won’t be mentioning wrt England)

    https://twitter.com/ONS/status/1531988252760195073
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    Carnyx said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Similarly, I also pay a barista to make me expensive coffee, whereas only 20 years ago I was able to enjoy “instant” granulated weasel shit for tuppence.
    Hang on, it's the weasel shite that is the expensive stuff.
    Business plan -

    1) Blue Mountain coffee is uniquely expensive, prized (various grades etc).
    2) Civet coffee is also insanely expensive (various grades etc)
    3) Combined them - feed Civets Blue Mountain, and price at the multiple of the price of 1 and 2
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.

    How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?

    If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.

    Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.

    £30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    You know where hasn’t attracted many migrants? Scotland.

    Some of the consequences of that may be seen in the latest SNP budget.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Retail banking is a quasi oligopoly, featherbedded by regulation.

    That’s true in most countries, though,
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.

    How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?

    If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.

    Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.

    £30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
    They did it in 30 mins. I still can't quite tell the central thrust of your argument. Fundamentally it is a business. I suspect they are all family members. They are not going to get rich, but they are industrious and seem to be happy. Who are you to look down on them?
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.

    How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?

    If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.

    Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.

    £30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
    1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely.
    (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    It is higher productivity that lets @Foxy laze around in hospitals, treating the dying, rather than having to do a proper job, like scything the harvest.

    Until Russia/Ukraine introduced modern mechanised agriculture, they had a massive food deficit. Despite doing things like sending the university students to help with the harvest. With the end of Communism, within a few years, they were exporting food on a vast scale.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    You know where hasn’t attracted many migrants? Scotland.

    Some of the consequences of that may be seen in the latest SNP budget.

    Net migration into Scotland from overseas is 20,000 in a population of 5.45 million.

    Anyone care to estimate the overall UK rate for comparison?
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    Sandpit seems to know a hell of a lot about the carwash business.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 14,089

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    Unfortunately for the UK, we have stumbled into putting it into ever-higher house prices.
  • BurgessianBurgessian Posts: 2,395

    You know where hasn’t attracted many migrants? Scotland.

    Some of the consequences of that may be seen in the latest SNP budget.

    It's actually a big problem. Scotland's demographic profile is pretty bleak. And Scot Nattery doesn't help as it definitely puts off investors worried about potential loss of access to UK market.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.

    Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
    "Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
    Because of RoW immigration.
    ROW immigration positive
    EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.

    You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.

  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
    But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    Unfortunately for the UK, we have stumbled into putting it into ever-higher house prices.
    Yes; and in the US, health costs and - as far as I can tell - the stockpiling of vast amounts of tat inside their large houses.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    The hint is in the McDonalds experiments with automating cooking - they put people in the front, helping customers etc, rather than reducing the workforce to zero.

    Historically, automation has meant increased wealth, leading to higher employment. Not less.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
    Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.

    Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
    "Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
    Because of RoW immigration.
    ROW immigration positive
    EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.

    You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.

    The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .

    Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    It really depends what you are doing and why.

    Certainly it's a very low productivity means of obtaining a jumper for my nephew, to knit the thing myself over a considerable number of weeks. However, for all the jumpers my nephew will wear that aren't handcrafted labours of love, it surely does make sense to use as little labour in their production as possible.

    This is why I am the sort of person who can spend €€€ on a hand-turned wooden yarn bowl, and also much less than that for the cheapest wooden coffee table offered by IKEA.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
    Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    edited June 2022

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.

    How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?

    If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.

    Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.

    £30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
    1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely.
    (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
    £40 for an inside and out car clean, including polish, at our local carwash. Takes two of them about 20-30mins so I'd say one man hour tops. Those pressure washes increase productivity a lot.

    (I still worry about exploitation though.)
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
    But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
    They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.

    Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
    "Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
    Because of RoW immigration.
    ROW immigration positive
    EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.

    You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.

    The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .

    Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
    There has not been a net loss of 500,000 EU nationals.

    If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.

    There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    The hint is in the McDonalds experiments with automating cooking - they put people in the front, helping customers etc, rather than reducing the workforce to zero.

    Historically, automation has meant increased wealth, leading to higher employment. Not less.
    Increased wealth I get. Higher employment, I doubt.

    I spent my career developing IT systems for financial services companies and I do appreciate the massive benefits.

    But it's not all benefit. And it cannot go on infinitely, at some point we are going to have to find other ways of pursuing happiness.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,773

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    I think the airport situation is quite simple. 20 years ago working at an airport paid really well, stupidly so in many respects for all the retail, cleaning etc etc, supposed making up for all that inconvenience of weird shifts and anti-social hours.

    With the influx of cheap labour its now nowhere near as well paid but still all downside including extremely high cost of housing near airports. Then everything stopped and people have gone why the hell do i actually do this, and very difficult to attract them back.

    The FOM aspect is a bit of a red herring, remember any EU national working here could easily have got right to remain and millions did. Its more likely went back to home country during covid, reevaluated living 10 to a house in Crawley to earn poor wages while having to start work at 4am every day.

    I had no idea that airport work was ever particularly attractive in terms of pay. That's news to me.
    Mrs U as a teenager worked at one. Her retail job paid a very large premium compared to working in the same shop in the local town. The pay was so good it was very difficult to ever actually get your foot in the door, it was always my mate knows such and such will give you in.
    And this should continue because?

    Of course people should be paid properly and to the extent airport managers have been shafting lower paid workers they deserve what has come to the them,

    But consumers have to pay for this somewhere down the line - in higher landing charges or higher prices.
    Sounds like an argument for FOM keeping wages down, so consumers can have cheaper travel on the back of others low pay

    I think you have unwittingly just made the case for Brexit and controlled immigration
    Not at all.

    I’m just noting that wage increases are paid for by everyone eventually, especially those in the non-tradeable (ie non-exporting) sector.

    As I said upthread, most economists (but not all) believe that immigration increases wages over time, by increasing firm productivity.

    There is also a view that immigrants, by taking lower paid jobs, allow native born workers to move up into high paid positions.
    Yes, that’s a common economic theory seen in text books.

    The real world UK, with EU membership, FoM and a non-contributory benefits system, suggested otherwise.

    The theory works in Arabia, where the immigrants will never become citizens, and their visa is tied to their employment. I don’t see anyone advocating a similar system for the UK.
    The evidence from the UK doesn't support the hypothesis that EU immigration pushed down wages, actually.
    Overall that’s correct, but only because of above-inflation rises in the legal minimum wage.

    That the ending of FoM meant the minimum wage became a minimum, rather than a maximum, saw huge pay rises for unskilled British workers.
    There is also a great deal of segmentation in the labour market.

    World wide, there is a shortage of highly educated professionals. So if you are a highly paid professional, total FOM has nearly no effect on your wages - the market is failing to clear, very often, despite big wage increases. So a high skilled professional sees only upsides to FOM.
    Not really true. In many professional fields there is a bigger shortage locally than globally, so FOM might have depressed wages for these people. My own field of economists in finance for instance is full of European and global talent taking up jobs in London. It probably didn't have this effect, for the same reasons it didn't depress wages more generally. But the idea that skilled professions are uniquely shielded from globalisation is bollocks.
    I think there's two factors working in tandem here:

    - more economists (or programmers) means a deeper labour pool, which means lower wages
    - a deeper labour pool means that people will look to open companies (or increasing hiring), which increases demand

    And, fwiw, while it's more pronounced with the highly skilled, it happens with low skilled workers too. Look at Las Vegas - by far the biggest low skilled immigration magnet in the US, but that hasn't resulted in wages falling, it's resulted in companies springing up that benefit from a large pool of unskilled labour.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Indeed.

    The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
  • Macron has given Her Maj a nice horse for the Jubilee. I wonder what she'll do with it.

    https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Politique/Jubile-d-Elizabeth-II-Voici-le-cadeau-d-Emmanuel-Macron-a-la-Reine-1809092

  • ApplicantApplicant Posts: 3,379

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
    But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
    They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
    And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,718
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
    Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
    As one of the resident OAPs I can do all the banking I need to on line, topped up with a very occasional phone call.
    I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too.
    When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,773

    Is inflation noticeably lower in the Single Market?

    Senior Tory MP Tobias Ellwood says government should mitigate the cost of living by rejoining the single market (Norway model)

    Brexit isn't what "most people imagined" & "sector after sector" is "strangled by the red tape we were supposed to escape from"

    https://politicshome.com/thehouse/article/we-can-upgrade-brexit-and-ease-the-cost-of-living-by-going-back-to-the-single-market


    https://twitter.com/adampayne26/status/1532019589349101571

    It's a bit lower in the EU27 than in the UK but not much lower. Brexit is likely to have led to higher prices in the UK but this a price level effect not something that would push up the rate of inflation indefinitely.
    I read somewhere that core inflation in the EU27 (excluding fuel, energy etc.) is currently half that in the UK
    I think that reflects EU27 wages are rising less quickly than in the UK - partly due to lower labour market participation (i.e. greater slack), and partly due to labour market rigidities than mean prices move less quickly.

    What that means is that - in much of the EU - the cost of living crisis is going to be worse than in the UK.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable

    Lol - GE32 slogan: 'Tax the robots'!

    Won't those robots want a vote if we start taxing them?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,263

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    DALLE-3 and GPT4 are going to take away ALL the jobs of everyone; brace
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    Watching Top Gun, first time my other half has seen it :D
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    What party has been in government during this revolution, which has been very widely commented on, for instance by the Consumers' Association/Which who have been fighting a major campaigm about it? What age group does it crucially depend on for its votes?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,773

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    UK productivity growth slowed after the GFC by exactly the same extent as productivity growth in the EU. Productivity growth fell in all the advanced economies including the US at the same time. Economists still don't fully understand the reasons for it, but it is so generalised that it is highly unlikely that an idiosyncratic factor like EU FOM was the reason in the UK.
    It is certainly true that the experience in Japan, the US, the EU and the UK post 2008 have all been remarkably similar, despite very different immigration profiles.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.

    Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
    "Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
    Because of RoW immigration.
    ROW immigration positive
    EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.

    You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.

    The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .

    Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
    There has not been a net loss of 500,000 EU nationals.

    If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.

    There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
    There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Even if your gilded lily argument is correct, 100000 is a lot of change. It is rate of change in employment that matters. In the non-ONS real world, ability to respond to changes in workforce is what counts. It takes significantly longer to replace than it takes for someone to give notice. It is like the difference between deceleration and acceleration in a queue of traffic. You can play with stats as much as you want, but Brexit has contributed to labour challenges. But hey, we were promised so many benefits. Jam tomorrow eh?
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969
    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766
    Beautiful! M. Macron has some taste in some areas.
  • ApplicantApplicant Posts: 3,379

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.

    Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
    "Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
    Because of RoW immigration.
    ROW immigration positive
    EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.

    You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.

    The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .

    Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
    There has not been a net loss of 500,000 EU nationals.

    If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.

    There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
    There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Even if your gilded lily argument is correct, 100000 is a lot of change. It is rate of change in employment that matters. In the non-ONS real world, ability to respond to changes in workforce is what counts. It takes significantly longer to replace than it takes for someone to give notice. It is like the difference between deceleration and acceleration in a queue of traffic. You can play with stats as much as you want, but Brexit has contributed to labour challenges. But hey, we were promised so many benefits. Jam tomorrow eh?
    You're more than a little like Sir Humphrey - your statistics are facts, but you dismiss CV's facts as just statistics.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    edited June 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    UK productivity growth slowed after the GFC by exactly the same extent as productivity growth in the EU. Productivity growth fell in all the advanced economies including the US at the same time. Economists still don't fully understand the reasons for it, but it is so generalised that it is highly unlikely that an idiosyncratic factor like EU FOM was the reason in the UK.
    It is certainly true that the experience in Japan, the US, the EU and the UK post 2008 have all been remarkably similar, despite very different immigration profiles.
    But what about the CAR WASHES.
    But what about STUART ROSE.
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,088

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
    Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
    Point of order: the move to online banking has undermined the branch network, and that's more about convenience than cost - for consumers, anyway. It might have cost you some money to get to your local bank branch if it wasn't within walking distance, of course, but it's hardly as if they charged entry on the door.

    Of course, banks aren't going to keep an extensive network of these facilities open once most of their customers are no longer bothering to use them. Old people who can't cope with technology will just end up having to spend more time and money getting to the remaining branches.

    This is one example of societal change being stacked in favour of the young and against the old, albeit scant compensation for the fact that your average pensioner is better off than your average worker - and probably vastly better off than people in their twenties, a great many of whom have precious few if any assets and little hope of ever acquiring them either.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
    Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
    As one of the resident OAPs I can do all the banking I need to on line, topped up with a very occasional phone call.
    I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too.
    When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
    Anyone posting on here is, by definition, reasonably computer literate. In contrast, my 90 year old father-in-law has never touched a computer in his life, my late mum was the same.

    They could learn of course (well not my mum anymore obvs!) but they lack the confidence, and perhaps at 90, the motivation or the learning ability.

    There's no real solution beyond waiting for that generation to die out.

    What will be the equivalent for my generation I wonder?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited June 2022

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
    It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.

    As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    Applicant said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
    But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
    They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
    And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
    You see the way he responds to other posters - is it any surprise?
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.

    How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?

    If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.

    Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.

    £30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
    1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely.
    (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
    £40 for an inside and out car clean, including polish, at our local carwash. Takes two of them about 20-30mins so I'd say one man hour tops. Those pressure washes increase productivity a lot.

    (I still worry about exploitation though.)
    I paid £100 for my last car valet. Car in question had transported hay round all winter though.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766
    Applicant said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
    But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
    They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
    And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
    I haven't, it is twats like you who voted for xenophobia back in 2016. Don't try and tell me it was about "sovereignty" and all that bullshit. It was pure and simple small minded xenophobic nationalism. Nothing else.

    Have a nice evening. I won't be around to read your unbelievable protestations lol.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    What party has been in government during this revolution, which has been very widely commented on, for instance by the Consumers' Association/Which who have been fighting a major campaigm about it? What age group does it crucially depend on for its votes?
    Personally if I were Boris I would fine any bank which shuts more than a handful of branches each year
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 14,089
    pigeon said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
    Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
    Point of order: the move to online banking has undermined the branch network, and that's more about convenience than cost - for consumers, anyway. It might have cost you some money to get to your local bank branch if it wasn't within walking distance, of course, but it's hardly as if they charged entry on the door.

    Of course, banks aren't going to keep an extensive network of these facilities open once most of their customers are no longer bothering to use them. Old people who can't cope with technology will just end up having to spend more time and money getting to the remaining branches.

    This is one example of societal change being stacked in favour of the young and against the old, albeit scant compensation for the fact that your average pensioner is better off than your average worker - and probably vastly better off than people in their twenties, a great many of whom have precious few if any assets and little hope of ever acquiring them either.
    Swings and roundabouts though. As mentioned upthread, you can do a lot of routine banking at Post Office counters; I don't think people realise how much.

    My bit of Romford has lost two bank branches (Mon-Fri 9-3) and gained a new Post Office inside a convenience store (open 7 days a week into the evenings). Which model gives better service to more people?
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    What party has been in government during this revolution, which has been very widely commented on, for instance by the Consumers' Association/Which who have been fighting a major campaigm about it? What age group does it crucially depend on for its votes?
    Personally if I were Boris I would fine any bank which shuts more than a handful of branches each year
    Lol.

    No wonder the Tories are fucked.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Indeed.

    The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
    Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable

    Lol - GE32 slogan: 'Tax the robots'!

    Won't those robots want a vote if we start taxing them?
    It is the corporations that employ them that will be taxed until robots start earning a wage
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,929
    The Polling Station video (from Star Sports) is up. Matt Singh this week.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWnijVHC0Iw

    Their biggest market mover in the next PM stakes is [drum roll] Rishi Sunak.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    CBA to read all of that(and I suspect you haven't either unless you have a very dull life), though did notice plenty of ambiguity on my speed read . Fact remains that many EU nationals have left and are discouraged from returning.

    Meanwhile net immigration (I guess quite a bit questionable or illegal) continues unabated from RoW. And this was one of the big con tricks of the xenophobic propaganda of Farage et al. The reality was that our government could have done something about 50% of migration from because it was not affected by FoM because it came from RoW. Meanwhile, lots of thickies thought "vote Brexit to keep out immigrants". Reality was the government could have controlled 50% but did FA .
    "Fact remains".. yet the ONS statistics show that it is not the case, given that the net migration is near zero.
    Because of RoW immigration.
    ROW immigration positive
    EU immigration flat - only one year of net emigration - 2020.

    You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.

    The discussion was as to whether Brexit had contributed to the Labour shortage; I originally said there was a loss of some 500k+ EU nationals, not discussing whether they have been statistically replaced by Somalis or refugees from Yemen or wherever .

    Sorry to repeat, : OK, let me explain a few truths that maybe even a Brexiteer can understand. If you destabilise your workforce by encouraging a large number to "go back to where you came from" it is only the very very lowest skilled jobs that you can put any unskilled person in from, say Somalia, into. Essentially Brexit has caused a destabilisation of the workforce that will take considerable time to correct. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has been a convenient excuse for those few people that still believe there are any "benefits of Brexit" . These tend to be the same people who believe Boris Johnson is an upstanding figure of honesty and probity.
    There has not been a net loss of 500,000 EU nationals.

    If 500,000 EU nationals left, 500,000 EU nationals came in their place.

    There has been net positive EU migration TO the UK for years - and only one year when there was net return to the EU - 2020, and that under 100,000.
    There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Even if your gilded lily argument is correct, 100000 is a lot of change. It is rate of change in employment that matters. In the non-ONS real world, ability to respond to changes in workforce is what counts. It takes significantly longer to replace than it takes for someone to give notice. It is like the difference between deceleration and acceleration in a queue of traffic. You can play with stats as much as you want, but Brexit has contributed to labour challenges. But hey, we were promised so many benefits. Jam tomorrow eh?
    And you would appear to deal in lies and florid prose when your beautiful theory is destroyed by ugly facts.

    100,000 is less than 2% of the number of EU citizens who have applied to stay in the UK. And that’s “a lot of change”?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    edited June 2022
    pigeon said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
    Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.
    Point of order: the move to online banking has undermined the branch network, and that's more about convenience than cost - for consumers, anyway. It might have cost you some money to get to your local bank branch if it wasn't within walking distance, of course, but it's hardly as if they charged entry on the door.

    Of course, banks aren't going to keep an extensive network of these facilities open once most of their customers are no longer bothering to use them. Old people who can't cope with technology will just end up having to spend more time and money getting to the remaining branches.

    This is one example of societal change being stacked in favour of the young and against the old, albeit scant compensation for the fact that your average pensioner is better off than your average worker - and probably vastly better off than people in their twenties, a great many of whom have precious few if any assets and little hope of ever acquiring them either.
    There is a data that a good deal of the take-up of online banking is among the elderly.

    Not all of them are technophobes.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,263

    Applicant said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
    But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
    They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
    And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
    You see the way he responds to other posters - is it any surprise?

    Lol. I now have an image of @Nigel_Foremain pompously lecturing a bemused Polish couple keen to work in London


    “Pliz. We just want work here, Is good. London good.”

    “No. Don’t you understand, this is a Nazi toilet, you don’t want to work here, everyone hates you”

    “But… people nice?”

    “You stupid Polish thickos, you know nothing! Brexit is terrible!!”
  • ApplicantApplicant Posts: 3,379

    Applicant said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
    But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
    They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
    And why have you been making them feel unwelcome?
    I haven't, it is twats like you who voted for xenophobia back in 2016. Don't try and tell me it was about "sovereignty" and all that bullshit. It was pure and simple small minded xenophobic nationalism. Nothing else.

    Have a nice evening. I won't be around to read your unbelievable protestations lol.
    Oh, do grow up @Nigel_Foremain.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    edited June 2022
    Leon said:

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    DALLE-3 and GPT4 are going to take away ALL the jobs of everyone; brace
    Not in our lifetimes, nor our children's or grandchildren's.

    The @Benpointer dishwasher test is still waiting for a challenger.

    I could also add the 'cook-a-meal-for-four-using-whatever-is-in-the-cupboard' test. Or the 'do-the-gardening' test... etc.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969
    Pulpstar said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Indeed.

    The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
    Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
    The cost for audit letters is a scam.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
    It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.

    As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
    You espouse socialism.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969
    Just got so deeply involved in the post I'm writing on the confidence vote / leadership election that I accidently left my youngest in the bath for an hour. I think it's time to accept I have a problem.

    https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1532041795890200576
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,773

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.

    How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?

    If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.

    Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.

    £30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
    1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely.
    (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
    You've clearly never had @Dura_Ace and @Leon have parties in your vehicle.
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,088
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
    It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.

    As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
    Interesting.

    1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this?
    2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    What party has been in government during this revolution, which has been very widely commented on, for instance by the Consumers' Association/Which who have been fighting a major campaigm about it? What age group does it crucially depend on for its votes?
    Personally if I were Boris I would fine any bank which shuts more than a handful of branches each year
    Lol.

    No wonder the Tories are fucked.
    You could use the money to give funds for deposits for property purchases to the young. It would be very popular with old and young alike
  • carnforthcarnforth Posts: 3,056

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    God no, automatic car wash machines leave scratches.

    Handwashing is the best.
    Yes, of course the hand wash is the superior product. There was no reason why it suddenly became cheaper than the automatic wash, as it did 15 years ago.
    Really? The guys that do the hand car wash near me charged me £30 today (all furriners I am afraid), whereas the scratchy automatic one owned by poor old BP down the road only costs £5 to strip the top layers of paint off very efficiently.
    Okay. £30 for a car wash. £25 + VAT.

    How many man-hours are involved in that car wash? 1.5 maybe?

    If each person is earning minimum wage of £9.50, and their employer is paying Employer NI, rent on their space, cost of materials, costs of business, and profits to the shareholders, either they have a bunch of 16 year olds (paid a lesser wage) working for them, or they’re not working legally.

    Most likely, as with farmers, they’ll say the staff are being paid minimum wage, with extensive and expensive documentation to back that up, but you’ll find that the staff are paying £200 a week for a bunk bed in the business owner’s house several miles away, from which the bus to work leaves every day.

    £30 manual car valets are not a good thing.
    1.5 man hours=3 people working for half an hour to clean one car? Seems unlikely.
    (I clean my own car so I don't have first hand knowledge on this PB perennial but I would have 0.5 man hours as the upper limit on what seems plausible).
    £40 for an inside and out car clean, including polish, at our local carwash. Takes two of them about 20-30mins so I'd say one man hour tops. Those pressure washes increase productivity a lot.

    (I still worry about exploitation though.)
    I use one in a Tesco car park, sanctioned by Tesco. It’s independent, but they take credit cards. That means they are probably paying VAT, and possibly corporation tax. Doesn’t necessarily mean they are paying staff properly though.

    Here’s an example of the explotation that can occur:

    https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/human-trafficking-ringleaders-found-guilty-of-car-wash-exploitation
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    Pulpstar said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Indeed.

    The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
    Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
    The cost for audit letters is a scam.
    A chap I used to work for, opined that the Richardsons "Firm" offered better financial services for the businesses under their "care" than the High Street Banks. Lower interest rates for a start.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,408

    Macron has given Her Maj a nice horse for the Jubilee. I wonder what she'll do with it.

    https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Politique/Jubile-d-Elizabeth-II-Voici-le-cadeau-d-Emmanuel-Macron-a-la-Reine-1809092

    A good choice of gift nonetheless.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    pigeon said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
    It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.

    As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
    Interesting.

    1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this?
    2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
    1 As I said I would fine banks that shut too many branches

    2 Youth clubs depend on volunteers, I am for the big society
  • ApplicantApplicant Posts: 3,379

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    Once again, most (but not all) economists believe that migration increases productivity.

    UK productivity is a v interesting topic.

    There’s a paper just published which suggests that issues have been largely in finance and the oil energy (post the financial crash), and long-term underperformance in manufacturing.

    The car wash anecdote doesn’t really cut it.

    It seems to me that British firms serially under invest in capital goods for reasons that have very little to do with migration. Probably taking their lead from the UK government which spends considerably less than OECD peers on R&D…
    France has much bigger tax allowances etc for investment in machinery.

    Hence even a small, domestic, building site in France generally starts with the setting up of a mini-crane. On a UK site....

    In finance, I have spent a good deal of my professional career on automating jobs out of existence, there. The number of people who copy & pasta from one system into Excel, do some fiddling and pasta the result to another system....
    To be specific, the productivity problems in finance are basically about reduced output caused by loss of demand / market share after the financial crisis rather than what the everyday person would call “lack of productivity”.
    There are quite a few banks that still have floors of people doing these kind of jobs - you'd think that automated flows would have been bought in, but no....

    Shame however the banks are not able to still retain a branch in every high street if they wish to stay traditional
    Their lunch is being eaten by the alt-banks. Who are 100% online - often mobile only, now.

    On alt-bank (consumer) I worked with had a single system. For the entire bank. An equivalent high street bank has 100s. Which don't talk to each other properly.
    Still not great for the elderly and pensioners in particular who want a local branch, it is also easier to discuss complex matters in branches than on the phone
    As one of the resident OAPs I can do all the banking I need to on line, topped up with a very occasional phone call.
    I can pay in, on the rare occasions I need to, via the Post Office. Longer hours, too.
    When, a few years ago, I was Secretary of a u3a, dealing with their on-the-ground bankers was a total pain.
    Anyone posting on here is, by definition, reasonably computer literate. In contrast, my 90 year old father-in-law has never touched a computer in his life, my late mum was the same.

    They could learn of course (well not my mum anymore obvs!) but they lack the confidence, and perhaps at 90, the motivation or the learning ability.

    There's no real solution beyond waiting for that generation to die out.

    What will be the equivalent for my generation I wonder?
    It must be close to died out already. Computer literacy as an essential for existence in society has been unarguable for at least 15 years, and almost anyone who lacked the learning ability then will no longer be with us.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    Making a universal basic income funded by a robot tax inevitable

    Lol - GE32 slogan: 'Tax the robots'!

    Won't those robots want a vote if we start taxing them?
    It is the corporations that employ them that will be taxed until robots start earning a wage
    Good grief @HYUFD, should we have a whip-round to buy you a sense of irony?
  • Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    When did net half a million people leave these islands?

    Both British and EU net migration are estimated to be close to zero in the year ending June 2021.

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/june2021
    You're forgetting the very many EU folk who filled in the bumf to become a subject of HMtQ, to keep their options open, but went home anyway.
    When did they leave? The only year the ONS estimated there was net EU migration out of the UK was 2020 and that was for 94,000 - in 2021 they estimate it was flat. I can find no source for the claimed half a million people leaving (unless it ignores the ~ half a million people arriving).
    They'll appear on the ONS records as Brits, no? How do they do it, otherwise?
    ONS records as “place of birth” - so whatever their current citizenship they’ll be recorded as EU if that was where they were born. In any case, in the most recent stats both EU and British migration was flat. EU net migration slowed - but remained significantly positive after the Brexit vote and has remained positive until COVID in 2020 where it showed a slight decline, which last year turned flat. There is no evidence of a “mass exodus” of EU citizens from the UK.
    But the records won't show where they are living and working now, do they? People with dual nationality can mostly only live and work in one place at a time.
    They are in denial. Anecdotally (at risk of sounding like Leon) I have spoken to a number of continental Europeans (albeit highly skilled ones) who said that while they would have considered roles in the UK prior to 2016, they would not bring their families to somewhere where they were unwelcome now. It is our loss.
    Conveniently, zero is a number.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
    It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.

    As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
    You espouse socialism.
    No traditional Conservativism ie respect for tradition and the local community. I am not proposing nationalising all the banks permanently which a socialist would do
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281

    Pulpstar said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Indeed.

    The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
    Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
    The cost for audit letters is a scam.

    How much do No Confidence letters cost? Just asking
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,263
    edited June 2022

    Leon said:

    algarkirk said:

    Sandpit said:

    Farooq said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Perhaps the ridiculous @Gardenwalker, who is convinced that Brexit is to blame for everything, including Barbary slavers and execrable Georgian supermarket tonic water, might explain the frazzled and veteran Greek tour operator I met in preveza about ten days ago.

    We sat down to chat all things travel over some tsiporou and after her third class she went into a very amusing rant about all her young staff - 100s of people - leaving her restaurants and hotels “because they got used to doing nothing during the plague and now they won’t work”

    Brexit impact on her staff? Zero. She told me she doesn’t even get British tourists, her biz Is all Dutch and German. Yet somehow she had exactly the same staffing problem as everywhere else in the world, including Britain

    I think you should go easy on calling people "ridiculous" or I may have to refer to psychological projection again.

    Anyone who suggests that over half a million people leaving these islands has not created a labour shortage is either economically illiterate (you maybe), stupid (you are not) or as big a fibber as Boris Johnson (is such a thing possible?). Brexit has been a significant contributory factor to a labour shortage. Saying la la la I can't hear you does not change that.
    Yes, Brexit has been a contributory factor to the labour shortage.

    To millions of low-paid workers, and to the government paying in-work benefits, this is a good thing.
    Forgive me, but that is somewhat simplistic. Many organisations will simply go for greater automation for low skills. It could easily have the opposite effect.
    The UK productivity figures have been terrible for the past couple of decades, purely because labour was so cheap due to FoM.

    Pity the guy who spent £200k on an automatic car wash two decades ago, who found his business screwed by teams of immigrants, many of dubious legal status, who would valet a car inside and out for a tenner.

    Car washes should be automatic (as they were two decades ago!), so should fruit picking.
    What things shouldn't be automatic?
    As little as possible shouldn’t be automatic. McDonalds are replacing order-takers with computers, although I’ve not yet seen a pub with an automatic beer-dispensing machine. That should only be a matter of time, if they can’t find staff.
    It all depends what you want to achieve. If the objective is maximising human happiness there are lots of things that could be automated that make people feel less happy. Like all sorts of personal services in hospitality and other spheres.

    There is a lot of loneliness in maximal efficiency. Sometimes to replace the person behind the bar with an automatic beer dispenser may be as useful as replacing the customer with an automatic drinker. Happiness can consist in production as well as consumption.

    The blind pursuit of ever higher productivity is madness. It's the goal of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
    Not at all.

    In the long run, it’s only productivity that pays the baker for his bread.

    What we choose to do with productivity is up to us.
    How did the baker get paid for his bread during former times of lower productivity?

    I'm not saying automation hasn't been a good thing; I am merely saying it should not be the be-all and end-all. We lose sight of the things money cannot buy.

    Here's a question. If we assume the population has a range of abilities from quite low to genius over-achievers, given automation tends to take out the simpler jobs what do those people a the lower end of the ability spectrum do?

    Answer, they end up existing on benefits with unless they are lucky enough to find undemanding jobs that haven't yet been automated.
    DALLE-3 and GPT4 are going to take away ALL the jobs of everyone; brace
    Not in our lifetimes, nor our children's or grandchildren's.

    The @Benpointer dishwasher test is still waiting for a challenger.

    I could also add the 'cook-a-meal-for-four-using-whatever-is-in-the-cupboard' test. Or the 'do-the-gardening' test... etc.
    But, QED

    Your claim was “automation tends to take out the simpler jobs”

    This is my argument just expressed differently, I’m just extrapolating trends. Automation took out the simpler jobs until about 20 years ago, that has been less true for a while, and going forwards it will be the opposite of the case. It will be the brainier jobs, from journalist to solicitor to doctor to graphic designer to illustrator to pilot to lawyer to general to surgeon - which get taken out, from now on

    Note the jobs you say can’t be replaced. Dishwasher stacker, spontaneous house chef, basic gardener?

    These are the low IQ but high human contact jobs which might survive, because it will take a long time for robots to achieve the extremely fine motor skills to do them. But even they might go, in the end
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
    It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.

    As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
    You espouse socialism.
    No traditional Conservativism ie respect for tradition and the local community. I am not proposing nationalising all the banks permanently which a socialist would do
    Traditional Conservatism is all about letting businesses operate without needless interference from the state.
  • FenmanFenman Posts: 1,047
    pigeon said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
    It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.

    As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
    Interesting.

    1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this?
    2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
    I'm not generally against intervention in a free market but I understand the isles of Scilly no longer have a bank!
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    HYUFD said:

    pigeon said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Plenty of elderly people are not online, especially those on lower incomes and after you have spent an age getting through bank phone security you waste double the time you could have spent had you actually spoken to someone in person at the bank
    Tough, running branches costs money, if it is uneconomical then the banks will have to do what is best for them not for a handful of customers.
    It is perfectly economical to have 1 bank branch in all reasonably sized towns. Epping only has 1 bank left and they are cutting them in Loughton too.

    As a Conservative not a free market Libertarian like you the banks slashing their number of branches is something I firmly oppose
    Interesting.

    1. Would you favour the state forcing the last bank in any given locality to stay open? If not, why not? If you would, then why hasn't the Conservative Government done this?
    2. Would you apply the same logic to youth clubs? The national network of those has been butchered in the last decade as well.
    1 As I said I would fine banks that shut too many branches

    2 Youth clubs depend on volunteers, I am for the big society
    Why not fine buildings that don't employ lift operators?
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969

    Pulpstar said:

    If you want personal banking, then you can always pay for it. People vote with their feet, for the cheaper option.

    I've seen some stats, and 98% of in branch visits can be done over the phone or online.

    Given how pre pandemic branch footfall has dropped, a branch may only have a dozen queries a week can be done in branch, that's uneconomical.

    Post Offices are picking up the slack.
    Indeed.

    The next thing (which I have been trying to push) is a revolution is Small Business Banking. At the moment it largely consists of trying to push loans at credit card rates on businesses....
    Banking for SMEs is appalling. Particularly when it comes to letters of credit and bank guarantees
    The cost for audit letters is a scam.

    How much do No Confidence letters cost? Just asking
    I am prepared to write them pro bono publico.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,929

    Beautiful! M. Macron has some taste in some areas.
    President Macron is trolling us. Remember the French puppy incident in Yes, Prime Minister (that could not be accepted owing to quarantine regulations, and was a device to secure concessions in negotiations over the Channel Tunnel).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DERkHtpgRgE
This discussion has been closed.