Your link is now headlining "Bitcoin could lose 80pc of its value amid a “cascade of margin calls” in the wake of the crisis at the FTX crypto exchange, JP Morgan has warned." Which is pretty hair raising.
As for all those Russian assets, that would happen, wouldn't it, if we had been whoring ourselves to the oligarchs as a safe haven for the proceeds of theft for decades?
Somewhat taken aback to find there is an argument on Twitter as to whether Hancock M. or Shipman H. was more of a benefactor to sick people, arising from a tweet by Mr Hodges.
Lord Wolfson: tells BBC that UK should allow more foreigners to come to the UK to fill vacancies. "In respect of immigration, it’s definitely not the Brexit that I wanted, or indeed, many of people who voted Brexit, but more importantly, the vast majority of the country,” he said
"You have to remember, you know, we're all stuck in this Brexit argument. You have to remember that what post Brexit Britain looks like is not the reserve of those people who voted Brexit. It's the it's for all of us to decide."
‘Hard Brexit is good for us says retail king, Lord Wolfson’ -2019
‘’Next boss Lord Wolfson says UK needs more foreign workers’ -Today
Wolfson can go fxck himself. If Brexit was about anything it was lowering immigration regardless of the spin put on that by Leavers . These Leavers now moaning about Brexit need to stfu and accept it’s a shitshow .
As a Remainer I thought it was acceptable for the voters to elect a government that would hold a second referendum and not Brexit at all, so the voters are certainly free to elect a government that will increase immigration, and adjust Brexit, if they so wish.
Indeed, I would go further. I said at the time that we should not reverse Brexit until we had actually fulfilled the mandate from the referendum. But I also said that, though I would disagree with it, it would be perfectly democratic for people to vote to rejoin after we had actually left. I stick by both parts of that statement. I do not want us to reverse Brexit and rejoin the EU but it would be unreasonable to argue that people should not have a vote to do so if that was what they wanted. Same applies to Scottish Independence. These things are for the people to decide and if that puts me on the losing side then that is simply the democratic process.
Agree. However, any subsequent referendum should be on a far more objective basis in the information put to the voters than the biased Remain leaflet sent to every household by the Government. Ditto a second Scottish referendum should be rather more dispassionate in the impact on currency, pensions, EU admission. Trying to appear evenhanded whilst being anything but has been seen through.
As always your logic circuits fail when it comes to Brexit.
As always, it's not my logic that is at fault.
I knew Brexit would be shit. Didn't vote for it. It's shit.
Lord Wolfson wanted it, voted for it. Now whining that it's shit.
Nope he is simply saying what we all knew, which was that post Brexit Britain would be shaped by the leaders and the people who came afterwards rather than solely by those who voted for Brexit. It was what we all knew - or should have done - and indeed is what I wrote thread headers about before and after the referendum.
It is the idiots like you who still want to spend all your time whining rather than doing or saying anything constructive who are out of touch with reality.
Scott, just wish harder and everything will be better. If Brexit isn't working it's entirely the fault of people like you and in no way the fault of the people who lobbied for it, voted for it or implemented it. Got it?
A genuinely stupid comment predicated on the idea that I am unhappy with the way Brexit is going. Which is an utterly false view. As I said back at the time of the vote I had an ideal version of Brexit and so far we have not achieved that but what we have now still beats being a member of the EU by a million miles. Only children like Scott have tantrums when they don't get things exactly the way they want them.
Scott is an "idiot". My comment is "stupid". Scott is "whining" and having "tantrums". Great contributions to the debate on your part, really suggest you are confident in your position.
I am completely confident as I have always been. In case you missed it I have long set out one of the most coherent and consistent arguments concerning Brexit from either side of the debate. I just don't suffer whining fools and nor should anyone else, particularly when their arguments are so one dimensional and fatuous.
You could actually try making coherent contributions to the debate as many of us have, rather than infantile sniping from the sidelines.
I've made many contributions to this debate over the years. I'll also chuck in the occasional sarcky comment when someone makes a silly argument - I think that's preferable to being rude. We are all of us on the sidelines BTW, this is an obscure political blog not the UN Security Council.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
A lot of people are in too poor health by 50 or 55 as well. But we don't decide retirement policy based upon them. You are absolutely right we should increase retirement age. It was set at 65 at a time when life expectancy was only a couple of years more than that. It should certainly have increased somewhat as both life expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy have increased.
But we should also have more immigration as well. This is not an either/or situation.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
A lot of people are in too poor health by 50 or 55 as well. But we don't decide retirement policy based upon them. You are absolutely right we should increase retirement age. It was set at 65 at a time when life expectancy was only a couple of years more than that. It should certainly have increased somewhat as both life expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy have increased.
But we should also have more immigration as well. This is not an either/or situation.
We should have more immigration but we should be seeking to attract skilled migrants on good wages, not minimum wage serfs.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
linked to and partly discussed below, but all the measures are interesting, e.g. enshrining the right to life/to abortion/to bear arms/need a licence to bear arms in state constitutions
The California gambling measures were specific to first native reservations btw.
Somewhat taken aback to find there is an argument on Twitter as to whether Hancock M. or Shipman H. was more of a benefactor to sick people, arising from a tweet by Mr Hodges.
On his original tweet, well it was Hancock's job, wasn't it? Mike Tindall did more* for English rugby than any of the other celebrities sitting round that jungle campfire.
*I'm assuming - I must admit I haven't checked the full contestant list; if Jonny Wilkinson is there too then we can have a debate
As always your logic circuits fail when it comes to Brexit.
As always, it's not my logic that is at fault.
I knew Brexit would be shit. Didn't vote for it. It's shit.
Lord Wolfson wanted it, voted for it. Now whining that it's shit.
Nope he is simply saying what we all knew, which was that post Brexit Britain would be shaped by the leaders and the people who came afterwards rather than solely by those who voted for Brexit. It was what we all knew - or should have done - and indeed is what I wrote thread headers about before and after the referendum.
It is the idiots like you who still want to spend all your time whining rather than doing or saying anything constructive who are out of touch with reality.
Scott, just wish harder and everything will be better. If Brexit isn't working it's entirely the fault of people like you and in no way the fault of the people who lobbied for it, voted for it or implemented it. Got it?
A genuinely stupid comment predicated on the idea that I am unhappy with the way Brexit is going. Which is an utterly false view. As I said back at the time of the vote I had an ideal version of Brexit and so far we have not achieved that but what we have now still beats being a member of the EU by a million miles. Only children like Scott have tantrums when they don't get things exactly the way they want them.
Scott is an "idiot". My comment is "stupid". Scott is "whining" and having "tantrums". Great contributions to the debate on your part, really suggest you are confident in your position.
I am completely confident as I have always been. In case you missed it I have long set out one of the most coherent and consistent arguments concerning Brexit from either side of the debate. I just don't suffer whining fools and nor should anyone else, particularly when their arguments are so one dimensional and fatuous.
You could actually try making coherent contributions to the debate as many of us have, rather than infantile sniping from the sidelines.
You are however trumped by William Glenn who has set out coherent and consistent arguments from both sides of the debate
Your link is now headlining "Bitcoin could lose 80pc of its value amid a “cascade of margin calls” in the wake of the crisis at the FTX crypto exchange, JP Morgan has warned." Which is pretty hair raising.
As for all those Russian assets, that would happen, wouldn't it, if we had been whoring ourselves to the oligarchs as a safe haven for the proceeds of theft for decades?
The 80% is a red herring though, they are targeting $13,000, 80% down from last year’s peak but only 20% down on the current price.
When a country, any country, runs a massive balance of payments deficit, they have to balance this with incoming foreign currency - whether that’s foreigners buying exports, buying property, or buying shares in British businesses. The only way to stop this happening, is for everyone to stop buying so much imported stuff.
Your link is now headlining "Bitcoin could lose 80pc of its value amid a “cascade of margin calls” in the wake of the crisis at the FTX crypto exchange, JP Morgan has warned." Which is pretty hair raising.
As for all those Russian assets, that would happen, wouldn't it, if we had been whoring ourselves to the oligarchs as a safe haven for the proceeds of theft for decades?
The 80% is a red herring though, they are targeting $13,000, 80% down from last year’s peak but only 20% down on the current price.
When a country, any country, runs a massive balance of payments deficit, they have to balance this with incoming foreign currency - whether that’s foreigners buying property, or buying shares in British businesses. The only way to stop this happening, is for everyone to stop buying so much imported stuff.
Shit, you are right. Headline "Bitcoin forecast to plunge 80pc as JP Morgan warns over ‘cascade’ of crypto margin calls" is simply false. Appalling journalism.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
Surely people don't crypto with leverage*. Can hardly think of a more dangerous investment. I mean if you buy one bitcoin and the value halves, you'll still own one bitcoin. If you buy five bitcoins with one bitcoin worth of cash then you'll still own 5 bitcoins but you'll also owe the bank ~$41,000 if the value were to halve.
This year's more ironic than usual plan for getting people to buy things they and the recipients don't want with money they haven't got. John Lewis get first prize.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
Surely people don't crypto with leverage*. Can hardly think of a more dangerous investment. I mean if you buy one bitcoin and the value halves, you'll still own one bitcoin. If you buy five bitcoins with one bitcoin worth of cash then you'll still own 5 bitcoins but you'll also owe the bank ~$41,000 if the value were to halve.
*Agatha wink meme...
But what if you use shares in the bank as your collateral to the bank?
Surely people don't crypto with leverage*. Can hardly think of a more dangerous investment. I mean if you buy one bitcoin and the value halves, you'll still own one bitcoin. If you buy five bitcoins with one bitcoin worth of cash then you'll still own 5 bitcoins but you'll also owe the bank ~$41,000 if the value were to halve.
*Agatha wink meme...
It’s the same if you buy one Twitter, with loans secured against your shares in Tesla.
If the Tesla shares fall in value, perhaps because the CEO takes his eye off the ball, then there’s likely to be margin calls on the loans.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
In rural France, employing too many furriners gets your barn/business/car/lorry burnt. I'm not sure that is the methodology we should apply here.
France has quite a few problems with wage deflation for some groups, by the way. This is why Le Pen and Co. are popular in some areas.
The French, in addition, have long encouraged such investment with big breaks for capital investments.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
Though there is a persistent thing with hiring, illegally, workers to do manual tasks, in France. Cash-in-hand sort of stuff.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
The "Polish Plumber" meant very different things to different people.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
Having an unlimited pool of low value labour absolutely contributed to low productivity. All of the bitching right now is because companies can't throw bodies at it. For example, if I look at the Next website for careers I can see "Delivery assistant" listed as a job, but the description is essentially an entry scanner and then placing the item into the correct box to keep deliveries ready. That is a job ripe for centralisation and automation, but requires a level of capital investment that Next doesn't want to spend because previously they could throw bodies at it. Eventually they will be forced to invest the money and automate because that kind of job has little to no incremental value any more.
This year's more ironic than usual plan for getting people to buy things they and the recipients don't want with money they haven't got. John Lewis get first prize.
I posted the John lewis ad above. Are they selling the idea of buying stuff? Not really. Are they selling the idea they're a good bunch of human beings? Yes. But then they are - JLP has been working with care charities and children who've been in care for a long time, and this is a continuation of that partnership. As an adopter, I've more than a passing acquantaince with the care system and fostering, and this is a wonderful and powerful piece of work. Be cynical all you like, but this isn't cynical, or ironic.
Can’t they actually lock up these morons, I thought there was a legislation change recently to expand the definition of disruptive behaviour?
Bottom line up front - these protestors only recognise fire as fire. The Native Americans knew distinction between good fire, bad fire.
So what the protesters are achieving is two fold.
Firstly, if you believed in their causes, like insulate Britain asap, and so willing to explain it to your mates in a bar before these protests, you are less likely too now, hence they are killing their own cause and making it less likely to happen. Secondly, the only thing they are empowering to happen is a Bill to limit right to protest and clamp down harder on protests being introduced by government and passed by parliament. So they are wrecking freedom for everyone else.
The politics of someone like Braverman benefits from the actions of these protestors.
Having an unlimited pool of low value labour absolutely contributed to low productivity. All of the bitching right now is because companies can't throw bodies at it. For example, if I look at the Next website for careers I can see "Delivery assistant" listed as a job, but the description is essentially an entry scanner and then placing the item into the correct box to keep deliveries ready. That is a job ripe for centralisation and automation, but requires a level of capital investment that Next doesn't want to spend because previously they could throw bodies at it. Eventually they will be forced to invest the money and automate because that kind of job has little to no incremental value any more.
A few decades ago we actually changed the rules on corporation tax allowances specifically to encourage "more labour-intensive methods of production", as opposed to capital investment, to get more people into work so it's not as if this phenomenon wasn't understood.
Surely people don't crypto with leverage*. Can hardly think of a more dangerous investment. I mean if you buy one bitcoin and the value halves, you'll still own one bitcoin. If you buy five bitcoins with one bitcoin worth of cash then you'll still own 5 bitcoins but you'll also owe the bank ~$41,000 if the value were to halve.
*Agatha wink meme...
I don't do this but usually this is purely based on collateral, so you can't lose more than you put up. The platforms don't expect to be able to take your house if you can't meet a margin call. On the centralized platforms the additional risk is taken by the margin lenders, who are lending (eg) USD and getting a fairly attractive interest rate in exchange for the risk that they'll be wiped out if the price of the bit-coin totally tanks.
The way defi started out was to use leverage to create a stable asset. The first platform to do this was Maker, who made a program designed to create a synthetic dollar without a trusted party using ETH (a volatile cryptocurrency) as collateral. Their currency is called DAI - if you want to pay someone at the end of the month in a stable currency but using a cryptocurrency system to do the transfer and without involving a bank, you can buy a token called DAI and be reasonably confident that it'll be worth $1 at the end of the month. This is done by matching your need for stability with some degenerate gambler who wants volatility (ie they want leverage). This looks to you like you're buying and selling a currency worth $1, but effectively you're "lending" the degenerate $1 worth of ETH, and they have to pay you back $1 of ETH on demand, collateralized by the ETH that they put in. If the value of the ETH drops too much, the program will make them put up more collateral to make sure the program is always able to pay you back your $1.
This system has actually worked pretty well over the years (with some reservations) and the peg has survived quite extreme drops in the value of the collateral. What went wrong this year was that some bright spark thought it would be good to make the same kind of system, but instead of putting up say $2 worth of ETH for every $1 issued, you'd only have to put up 50 cents. This all worked out exactly as you'd expect it to, and each of the various collapses of companies run by degenerate gamblers that we've see since has been the result of that initial collapse.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
Having an unlimited pool of low value labour absolutely contributed to low productivity. All of the bitching right now is because companies can't throw bodies at it. For example, if I look at the Next website for careers I can see "Delivery assistant" listed as a job, but the description is essentially an entry scanner and then placing the item into the correct box to keep deliveries ready. That is a job ripe for centralisation and automation, but requires a level of capital investment that Next doesn't want to spend because previously they could throw bodies at it. Eventually they will be forced to invest the money and automate because that kind of job has little to no incremental value any more.
And yet other European economies with the same pool at their disposal manage to have far higher productivity. The mentality of British firms is the problem, and Brexit won't fix it. The new immigration rules don't just deter low skilled immigration, BTW. I have heard anecdotally of quite major organisations not being able to bring skilled people in because of the delays in getting visas. The whole economy is getting gummed up in Brexit red tape, and the effect will be lower productivity.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
Having an unlimited pool of low value labour absolutely contributed to low productivity. All of the bitching right now is because companies can't throw bodies at it. For example, if I look at the Next website for careers I can see "Delivery assistant" listed as a job, but the description is essentially an entry scanner and then placing the item into the correct box to keep deliveries ready. That is a job ripe for centralisation and automation, but requires a level of capital investment that Next doesn't want to spend because previously they could throw bodies at it. Eventually they will be forced to invest the money and automate because that kind of job has little to no incremental value any more.
And yet other European economies with the same pool at their disposal manage to have far higher productivity. The mentality of British firms is the problem, and Brexit won't fix it. The new immigration rules don't just deter low skilled immigration, BTW. I have heard anecdotally of quite major organisations not being able to bring skilled people in because of the delays in getting visas. The whole economy is getting gummed up in Brexit red tape, and the effect will be lower productivity.
Do other EU nations really have that much better productivity? A bit, yes, but the EU as a whole has been sclerotic and underperforming since the EEC turned into the EU.
Even France and Germany are not doing well compared to the rest of the developed world in GDP/capita growth over the last few decades.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
So Labour protections improve productivity? We should do more of it...
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
Having an unlimited pool of low value labour absolutely contributed to low productivity. All of the bitching right now is because companies can't throw bodies at it. For example, if I look at the Next website for careers I can see "Delivery assistant" listed as a job, but the description is essentially an entry scanner and then placing the item into the correct box to keep deliveries ready. That is a job ripe for centralisation and automation, but requires a level of capital investment that Next doesn't want to spend because previously they could throw bodies at it. Eventually they will be forced to invest the money and automate because that kind of job has little to no incremental value any more.
And yet other European economies with the same pool at their disposal manage to have far higher productivity. The mentality of British firms is the problem, and Brexit won't fix it. The new immigration rules don't just deter low skilled immigration, BTW. I have heard anecdotally of quite major organisations not being able to bring skilled people in because of the delays in getting visas. The whole economy is getting gummed up in Brexit red tape, and the effect will be lower productivity.
Other European economies don't have the same flexible labour market, companies here can hire and fire basically at will and previously had a large pool of zero or low minimum working hours contractors, or worse spurious self employment at rates below minimum wage with no employee protections at all. Our labour market exists to exploit low value workers and we had an unlimited pool of them previously. Now we don't have that, companies will adapt or die.
Agree on the second bit, the Home Office isn't fit for purpose, but what else is new. We're bringing in a data scientists from Israel, it's taken us 3 months to get the paperwork resolved, we'd have him working out there but as it's client data we can't. This is a someone who will be in the additional rate tax bracket and is extremely skilled.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
So Labour protections improve productivity? We should do more of it...
No, they increase unemployment. The unproductive are simply left out of the market incapable of developing into productive workers.
A group of economists has questioned UK assertions that a "black hole" in the public finances will need to be filled with austerity measures and tax rises.
The Progressive Economy Forum said the £50bn "hole" disappears entirely if the debts are calculated differently.
A group of economists has questioned UK assertions that a "black hole" in the public finances will need to be filled with austerity measures and tax rises.
The Progressive Economy Forum said the £50bn "hole" disappears entirely if the debts are calculated differently.
A group of economists has questioned UK assertions that a "black hole" in the public finances will need to be filled with austerity measures and tax rises.
The Progressive Economy Forum said the £50bn "hole" disappears entirely if the debts are calculated differently.
Austerity is a political choice, not economic necessity.
But the economists said that "fiscal hole" is merely the difference between an uncertain forecast - of how much the government will spend and borrow in future under current plans - and what it can afford to do if it is to hit an arbitrary target - that debt starts to fall as a proportion of the economy three or five years from now.
Yes, if you don't care about ever reducing debt then you can just borrow and borrow.
No surprise to see Will Hutton on the membership list...
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
So Labour protections improve productivity? We should do more of it...
Only if ‘productivity’ is your most important metric - as opposed to, say, economic output. Unemployment in France is much higher than in the UK too, because companies don’t like hiring people.
I say let the boss of Next jump up and down, until he realises the minimum wage isn’t a maximum, and he pays the going rate.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
So Labour protections improve productivity? We should do more of it...
Only if ‘productivity’ is you most important metric - as opposed to, say, economic output. Unemployment in France is much higher than in the UK too, because companies don’t like hiring people.
GDP/capita in USD UK $47,334.36 France $43,518.54
Unemployment Rate UK 3.5% France 7.3%
Productivity stats in the way used by Foxy there are a bit flawed as obviously the unemployed are excluded from the statistics, rather than included but at a productiveness of 0.
A group of economists has questioned UK assertions that a "black hole" in the public finances will need to be filled with austerity measures and tax rises.
The Progressive Economy Forum said the £50bn "hole" disappears entirely if the debts are calculated differently.
Austerity is a political choice, not economic necessity.
Have you not learned the lesson from the brief Truss?
The markets will only let you borrow what is realistic not some fantasy hopecasting economic plans.
The problem is that Truss/Kwarteng did not even hopecast. There were no forecasts, and the OBR was not allowed to publish. That is why markets were spooked by a relatively small sum in unfunded tax cuts.
According to the report, what is needed is not some complex financial trickery but merely reverting to the conventions used as recently as last year, when Rishi was Chancellor.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
Having an unlimited pool of low value labour absolutely contributed to low productivity. All of the bitching right now is because companies can't throw bodies at it. For example, if I look at the Next website for careers I can see "Delivery assistant" listed as a job, but the description is essentially an entry scanner and then placing the item into the correct box to keep deliveries ready. That is a job ripe for centralisation and automation, but requires a level of capital investment that Next doesn't want to spend because previously they could throw bodies at it. Eventually they will be forced to invest the money and automate because that kind of job has little to no incremental value any more.
And yet other European economies with the same pool at their disposal manage to have far higher productivity. The mentality of British firms is the problem, and Brexit won't fix it. The new immigration rules don't just deter low skilled immigration, BTW. I have heard anecdotally of quite major organisations not being able to bring skilled people in because of the delays in getting visas. The whole economy is getting gummed up in Brexit red tape, and the effect will be lower productivity.
Other European economies don't have the same flexible labour market, companies here can hire and fire basically at will and previously had a large pool of zero or low minimum working hours contractors, or worse spurious self employment at rates below minimum wage with no employee protections at all. Our labour market exists to exploit low value workers and we had an unlimited pool of them previously. Now we don't have that, companies will adapt or die.
Agree on the second bit, the Home Office isn't fit for purpose, but what else is new. We're bringing in a data scientists from Israel, it's taken us 3 months to get the paperwork resolved, we'd have him working out there but as it's client data we can't. This is a someone who will be in the additional rate tax bracket and is extremely skilled.
The Home Office is a total mess. My wife was quoted 6-8 weeks for a visit visa, hopefully it arrives in time for the planned Christmas trip!
For an established company hiring someone on a six-figure salary, it should be damn well nearly automatic, just a quick check on the wanted list and stamp his passport.
They have been okay with Ukranian refugee visas though.
Can’t they actually lock up these morons, I thought there was a legislation change recently to expand the definition of disruptive behaviour?
Bottom line up front - these protestors only recognise fire as fire. The Native Americans knew distinction between good fire, bad fire.
So what the protesters are achieving is two fold.
Firstly, if you believed in their causes, like insulate Britain asap, and so willing to explain it to your mates in a bar before these protests, you are less likely too now, hence they are killing their own cause and making it less likely to happen. Secondly, the only thing they are empowering to happen is a Bill to limit right to protest and clamp down harder on protests being introduced by government and passed by parliament. So they are wrecking freedom for everyone else.
The politics of someone like Braverman benefits from the actions of these protestors.
A group of economists has questioned UK assertions that a "black hole" in the public finances will need to be filled with austerity measures and tax rises.
The Progressive Economy Forum said the £50bn "hole" disappears entirely if the debts are calculated differently.
A group of economists has questioned UK assertions that a "black hole" in the public finances will need to be filled with austerity measures and tax rises.
The Progressive Economy Forum said the £50bn "hole" disappears entirely if the debts are calculated differently.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
Having an unlimited pool of low value labour absolutely contributed to low productivity. All of the bitching right now is because companies can't throw bodies at it. For example, if I look at the Next website for careers I can see "Delivery assistant" listed as a job, but the description is essentially an entry scanner and then placing the item into the correct box to keep deliveries ready. That is a job ripe for centralisation and automation, but requires a level of capital investment that Next doesn't want to spend because previously they could throw bodies at it. Eventually they will be forced to invest the money and automate because that kind of job has little to no incremental value any more.
And yet other European economies with the same pool at their disposal manage to have far higher productivity. The mentality of British firms is the problem, and Brexit won't fix it. The new immigration rules don't just deter low skilled immigration, BTW. I have heard anecdotally of quite major organisations not being able to bring skilled people in because of the delays in getting visas. The whole economy is getting gummed up in Brexit red tape, and the effect will be lower productivity.
As mentioned above, the tax rules were specifically set to encourage employing more workers than investment in machinery, in the UK.
Strangely, this incentive resulted in the employment of more workers and less investment in productivity.
When Sunak introduced the massive incentive for investment, certain mandarins complained that this overturned the former policy.
There are a number of fascinating little features in the system like this. Such as the differential taxation upon imports of electrical components and finished items.
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
So Labour protections improve productivity? We should do more of it...
Only if ‘productivity’ is your most important metric - as opposed to, say, economic output. Unemployment in France is much higher than in the UK too, because companies don’t like hiring people.
I say let the boss of Next jump up and down, until he realises the minimum wage isn’t a maximum, and he pays the going rate.
Or invests in automation, he should be talking to the likes of Ocado rather than hiring £9.50/h delivery packers.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
Having an unlimited pool of low value labour absolutely contributed to low productivity. All of the bitching right now is because companies can't throw bodies at it. For example, if I look at the Next website for careers I can see "Delivery assistant" listed as a job, but the description is essentially an entry scanner and then placing the item into the correct box to keep deliveries ready. That is a job ripe for centralisation and automation, but requires a level of capital investment that Next doesn't want to spend because previously they could throw bodies at it. Eventually they will be forced to invest the money and automate because that kind of job has little to no incremental value any more.
And yet other European economies with the same pool at their disposal manage to have far higher productivity. The mentality of British firms is the problem, and Brexit won't fix it. The new immigration rules don't just deter low skilled immigration, BTW. I have heard anecdotally of quite major organisations not being able to bring skilled people in because of the delays in getting visas. The whole economy is getting gummed up in Brexit red tape, and the effect will be lower productivity.
Other European economies don't have the same flexible labour market, companies here can hire and fire basically at will and previously had a large pool of zero or low minimum working hours contractors, or worse spurious self employment at rates below minimum wage with no employee protections at all. Our labour market exists to exploit low value workers and we had an unlimited pool of them previously. Now we don't have that, companies will adapt or die.
Agree on the second bit, the Home Office isn't fit for purpose, but what else is new. We're bringing in a data scientists from Israel, it's taken us 3 months to get the paperwork resolved, we'd have him working out there but as it's client data we can't. This is a someone who will be in the additional rate tax bracket and is extremely skilled.
The Home Office is a total mess. My wife was quoted 6-8 weeks for a visit visa, hopefully it arrives in time for the planned Christmas trip!
For an established company hiring someone on a six-figure salary, it should be damn well nearly automatic, just a quick check on the wanted list and stamp his passport.
They have been okay with Ukranian refugee visas though.
'I have line managed the managers of two of the UK’s largest visa departments abroad. Over twenty years I witnessed first hand the systematic deprofessionalisation of the immigration service, which has continued apace since I left.'
His critiques of the modern workplace are also worth reading. Hiring inadequate people on low wages to replace those with decades of experience is not helping our productivity mess.
I'm sensing we'll be winning all the World Cups in rugby cricket and football between now and Christmas. Be remarkable if it happens. Really put a smile on all our faces as this rather difficult year draws to a close.
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
If I get a category 2 I am opening a bottle and putting My Way on the stereo. Nature's way of telling you time is up, and why spend your last 16 hours in an ambulance queue?
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
So Labour protections improve productivity? We should do more of it...
Only if ‘productivity’ is you most important metric - as opposed to, say, economic output. Unemployment in France is much higher than in the UK too, because companies don’t like hiring people.
GDP/capita in USD UK $47,334.36 France $43,518.54
Unemployment Rate UK 3.5% France 7.3%
Productivity stats in the way used by Foxy there are a bit flawed as obviously the unemployed are excluded from the statistics, rather than included but at a productiveness of 0.
The GDP stats present a dilemma, not only because they increasingly seem out of kilter with how rich or poor a country "feels" (not just here and in Western Europe but in other developed countries too) and because the per capita numbers have been going on a wild ride. For example the 2021 figure which you quote above was 15.7% up on 2020 - a little higher than the bounce back in total GDP from Covid hence meaning the population shrank a little. At a guess that is due to a bit of emigration and Covid deaths.
The gap with median household income is a long-running oddity. The figure for the UK in 2021 was $46,691 at PPP. The figure for the same period in France was $61,020. That's a long-established gap. So an average family in France feels significantly better off than an average family in the UK.
Both sets of stats - GDP and median income - are correct. The implication is that the UK median is suppressed vs GDP because of inequality or specifically the very rich at the top end pushing up the GDP per capita number. The gap was actually narrowing up to around 2017 but has been flat since.
My Twitter feed is full of gleeful, exultant Pakistan fans. They really don’t get on
Tomorrow Leon learns water is wet.
What is this language I keep seeing on Indian cricket Twitter?
“10 saal se padh rhe h exam mai fail ho jaate h. Class test mai top karte hain. Itne attempts to duniya ke kisi exam mai ni milte inhe kyu mil rhe hain.”
“Nahi ye powerplay me 6 ki average chalayenge. BC utna to test me rehta hai ab.”
Is it Hinglish? Or some special cricket creole? Intriguing
Which pillock scheduled much of this tournament for Melbourne in October and early November? Akin to holding the final at Old Trafford in late April / early May in terms of rainfall risk. Stupidity.
My Twitter feed is full of gleeful, exultant Pakistan fans. They really don’t get on
Tomorrow Leon learns water is wet.
What is this language I keep seeing on Indian cricket Twitter?
“10 saal se padh rhe h exam mai fail ho jaate h. Class test mai top karte hain. Itne attempts to duniya ke kisi exam mai ni milte inhe kyu mil rhe hain.”
“Nahi ye powerplay me 6 ki average chalayenge. BC utna to test me rehta hai ab.”
Is it Hinglish? Or some special cricket creole? Intriguing
Hindi, says google translate - detect language
"I have been studying for 10 years, the exam may fail."
I'm sensing we'll be winning all the World Cups in rugby cricket and football between now and Christmas. Be remarkable if it happens. Really put a smile on all our faces as this rather difficult year draws to a close.
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
Do you mean you think COVID deaths are being understated at the moment?
I'm sensing we'll be winning all the World Cups in rugby cricket and football between now and Christmas. Be remarkable if it happens. Really put a smile on all our faces as this rather difficult year draws to a close.
That would make for a great triple bet.
We won't win the football. We might win one or both of the other two.
A group of economists has questioned UK assertions that a "black hole" in the public finances will need to be filled with austerity measures and tax rises.
The Progressive Economy Forum said the £50bn "hole" disappears entirely if the debts are calculated differently.
Austerity is a political choice, not economic necessity.
But the economists said that "fiscal hole" is merely the difference between an uncertain forecast - of how much the government will spend and borrow in future under current plans - and what it can afford to do if it is to hit an arbitrary target - that debt starts to fall as a proportion of the economy three or five years from now.
Yes, if you don't care about ever reducing debt then you can just borrow and borrow.
No surprise to see Will Hutton on the membership list...
I'm a sound money nut but there is a good debatable point here about how the numbers - upon which it's decided to do very real and painful things - are highly sensitive to subjective forecasting and accounting methodologies.
I'm sensing we'll be winning all the World Cups in rugby cricket and football between now and Christmas. Be remarkable if it happens. Really put a smile on all our faces as this rather difficult year draws to a close.
That would make for a great triple bet.
Odds-on for both the cricket and the women's rugby. Find an offshore bookie for the football because UK bookies always have England too short at major tournaments.
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
Do you mean you think COVID deaths are being understated at the moment?
No. Excess deaths are due to a collapsed Ambulance and Emergency dept. system.
As a Remainer, I long held the view that, because of the disparity in the shortages/surpluses of workers in the skilled and unskilled categories, a large chunk of the political class was driving us off a cliff.
That is, celebrating immigration is all well and good. For the skilled and highly educated, the world wide shortages of equivalent labour means that we are protected against wage deflation, even if you had completely open borders. For the unskilled/low skilled the reverse is true. The minimum wage became the maximum wage in a range of jobs.
If you want a policy to work in a democracy, saying Fuck You to large chunks of the population ends in one way.
Which is why I support massively increasing training - see Starmer and the NHS - and investment in productivity. And I also support controls on the entry of labour to portions of the UK labour market.
Such controls could have been created inside the EU. But this would have resulted in wage inflation. Which means the nanny and the gardner would have cost more.....
Personally I have always been happy to pay people whatever they want. We had a nanny/babysitter for a while, we paid her well above the London living wage. She was British anyway. The problem now is that sometimes it's hard to find anyone at any price. Perhaps this will resolve itself over time, but what we have seen in the last few years is actually a fall in labour force participation. In an ageing society we are going to see increasing labour shortages. The obvious solution if you don't want immigration of younger workers is to raise the retirement age to 70 or something. But a lot of people are in too poor health by that age to work.
The better solution is increasing mechanisation and other productivity improvements. This, combined with training, moves the labour market to higher paid jobs.
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
Sure, we can do that too and there are plenty of examples of that happening, eg fast food ordering screens. It's interesting that France has managed to achieve these kinds of productivity improvements while being in the EU single market and Schengen, and thus presumably beset by serfs pulling local wages down to starvation levels. UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
The French ‘efficiency’ exists because the labour laws there make it almost impossible to fire people - so no-one gets hired until everyone else in the business is over-working themselves. The US is the opposite extreme, where in many states hiring and firing takes place ‘at will’.
So Labour protections improve productivity? We should do more of it...
Only if ‘productivity’ is you most important metric - as opposed to, say, economic output. Unemployment in France is much higher than in the UK too, because companies don’t like hiring people.
GDP/capita in USD UK $47,334.36 France $43,518.54
Unemployment Rate UK 3.5% France 7.3%
Productivity stats in the way used by Foxy there are a bit flawed as obviously the unemployed are excluded from the statistics, rather than included but at a productiveness of 0.
The GDP stats present a dilemma, not only because they increasingly seem out of kilter with how rich or poor a country "feels" (not just here and in Western Europe but in other developed countries too) and because the per capita numbers have been going on a wild ride. For example the 2021 figure which you quote above was 15.7% up on 2020 - a little higher than the bounce back in total GDP from Covid hence meaning the population shrank a little. At a guess that is due to a bit of emigration and Covid deaths.
The gap with median household income is a long-running oddity. The figure for the UK in 2021 was $46,691 at PPP. The figure for the same period in France was $61,020. That's a long-established gap. So an average family in France feels significantly better off than an average family in the UK.
Both sets of stats - GDP and median income - are correct. The implication is that the UK median is suppressed vs GDP because of inequality or specifically the very rich at the top end pushing up the GDP per capita number. The gap was actually narrowing up to around 2017 but has been flat since.
linked to and partly discussed below, but all the measures are interesting, e.g. enshrining the right to life/to abortion/to bear arms/need a licence to bear arms in state constitutions
The California gambling measures were specific to first native reservations btw.
Prop 26 was for online gambling at tribal casinos and racetracks. Prop 27 was more of a free for all funded by a group of big gambling companies. Both soundly rejected.
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
Do you mean you think COVID deaths are being understated at the moment?
No. Excess deaths are due to a collapsed Ambulance and Emergency dept. system.
What's caused the collapse? People leaving the profession and not being replaced?
I'm sensing we'll be winning all the World Cups in rugby cricket and football between now and Christmas. Be remarkable if it happens. Really put a smile on all our faces as this rather difficult year draws to a close.
That would make for a great triple bet.
Odds-on for both the cricket and the women's rugby. Find an offshore bookie for the football because UK bookies always have England too short at major tournaments.
Back the draw (at 90 mins) is surely the default bet for football? So find a UK bookie because everything else is presumably too long.
I'm sensing we'll be winning all the World Cups in rugby cricket and football between now and Christmas. Be remarkable if it happens. Really put a smile on all our faces as this rather difficult year draws to a close.
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
Do you mean you think COVID deaths are being understated at the moment?
No - its people who might have survived heart attacks or strokes not making it as the ambulance arrives two minutes too late. Its reverse marginal gains.
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
Do you mean you think COVID deaths are being understated at the moment?
No. Excess deaths are due to a collapsed Ambulance and Emergency dept. system.
What's caused the collapse? People leaving the profession and not being replaced?
Are staff still able to be off work due to a positive covid test even though they are not ill?
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
Do you mean you think COVID deaths are being understated at the moment?
No. Excess deaths are due to a collapsed Ambulance and Emergency dept. system.
What's caused the collapse? People leaving the profession and not being replaced?
Are staff still able to be off work due to a positive covid test even though they are not ill?
I think its more that A and E cannot push patients onto the wards as the wards are full of people who should be discharged but social care issues are stopping that.
I'm sensing we'll be winning all the World Cups in rugby cricket and football between now and Christmas. Be remarkable if it happens. Really put a smile on all our faces as this rather difficult year draws to a close.
I'm not sure it would be like that in Scotland...
Guess not! I had my St George hat on there. That's an imaginary hat I stress.
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
Do you mean you think COVID deaths are being understated at the moment?
No. Excess deaths are due to a collapsed Ambulance and Emergency dept. system.
What's caused the collapse? People leaving the profession and not being replaced?
Are staff still able to be off work due to a positive covid test even though they are not ill?
Given the risk to patients because of the synergy of covid with other issues, such as risks of general anaesthesia ...
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes. The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds. The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out. The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller. Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine. These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
Do you mean you think COVID deaths are being understated at the moment?
EDIT: Deleted; answered far more concisely already
I'm sensing we'll be winning all the World Cups in rugby cricket and football between now and Christmas. Be remarkable if it happens. Really put a smile on all our faces as this rather difficult year draws to a close.
Comments
As for all those Russian assets, that would happen, wouldn't it, if we had been whoring ourselves to the oligarchs as a safe haven for the proceeds of theft for decades?
https://twitter.com/MarinaPurkiss/status/1590645579385737217
But we should also have more immigration as well. This is not an either/or situation.
Presenting Nigel Fucking Farage as an expert on anything was a bad idea
Surely the Remainers weren't taken in by him?
For example, on small domestic French building sites, the first thing they setup is a small crane. In the UK, you see things like 10 guys (literally) walking a 500Kg piece of steel around.
linked to and partly discussed below, but all the measures are interesting, e.g. enshrining the right to life/to abortion/to bear arms/need a licence to bear arms in state constitutions
The California gambling measures were specific to first native reservations btw.
*I'm assuming - I must admit I haven't checked the full contestant list; if Jonny Wilkinson is there too then we can have a debate
When a country, any country, runs a massive balance of payments deficit, they have to balance this with incoming foreign currency - whether that’s foreigners buying exports, buying property, or buying shares in British businesses. The only way to stop this happening, is for everyone to stop buying so much imported stuff.
Millions who voted with you were
UK productivity has always been poor because UK firms are badly managed and have a poor record of training people. Brexit won't fix that because being in the EU wasn't the cause.
If you buy five bitcoins with one bitcoin worth of cash then you'll still own 5 bitcoins but you'll also owe the bank ~$41,000 if the value were to halve.
*Agatha wink meme...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63544312
https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/1590400766778671104
If the Tesla shares fall in value, perhaps because the CEO takes his eye off the ball, then there’s likely to be margin calls on the loans.
France has quite a few problems with wage deflation for some groups, by the way. This is why Le Pen and Co. are popular in some areas.
The French, in addition, have long encouraged such investment with big breaks for capital investments.
Buttler 56 (37)
Hales 80 (41)
England 140-0 after 13.
As an adopter, I've more than a passing acquantaince with the care system and fostering, and this is a wonderful and powerful piece of work.
Be cynical all you like, but this isn't cynical, or ironic.
So what the protesters are achieving is two fold.
Firstly, if you believed in their causes, like insulate Britain asap, and so willing to explain it to your mates in a bar before these protests, you are less likely too now, hence they are killing their own cause and making it less likely to happen. Secondly, the only thing they are empowering to happen is a Bill to limit right to protest and clamp down harder on protests being introduced by government and passed by parliament. So they are wrecking freedom for everyone else.
The politics of someone like Braverman benefits from the actions of these protestors.
The way defi started out was to use leverage to create a stable asset. The first platform to do this was Maker, who made a program designed to create a synthetic dollar without a trusted party using ETH (a volatile cryptocurrency) as collateral. Their currency is called DAI - if you want to pay someone at the end of the month in a stable currency but using a cryptocurrency system to do the transfer and without involving a bank, you can buy a token called DAI and be reasonably confident that it'll be worth $1 at the end of the month. This is done by matching your need for stability with some degenerate gambler who wants volatility (ie they want leverage). This looks to you like you're buying and selling a currency worth $1, but effectively you're "lending" the degenerate $1 worth of ETH, and they have to pay you back $1 of ETH on demand, collateralized by the ETH that they put in. If the value of the ETH drops too much, the program will make them put up more collateral to make sure the program is always able to pay you back your $1.
This system has actually worked pretty well over the years (with some reservations) and the peg has survived quite extreme drops in the value of the collateral. What went wrong this year was that some bright spark thought it would be good to make the same kind of system, but instead of putting up say $2 worth of ETH for every $1 issued, you'd only have to put up 50 cents. This all worked out exactly as you'd expect it to, and each of the various collapses of companies run by degenerate gamblers that we've see since has been the result of that initial collapse.
The new immigration rules don't just deter low skilled immigration, BTW. I have heard anecdotally of quite major organisations not being able to bring skilled people in because of the delays in getting visas. The whole economy is getting gummed up in Brexit red tape, and the effect will be lower productivity.
Even France and Germany are not doing well compared to the rest of the developed world in GDP/capita growth over the last few decades.
Looks like they learned the lessons of the Sri Lanka game.
Agree on the second bit, the Home Office isn't fit for purpose, but what else is new. We're bringing in a data scientists from Israel, it's taken us 3 months to get the paperwork resolved, we'd have him working out there but as it's client data we can't. This is a someone who will be in the additional rate tax bracket and is extremely skilled.
Cannot believe anyone doubted England and Chris Jordan.
A group of economists has questioned UK assertions that a "black hole" in the public finances will need to be filled with austerity measures and tax rises.
The Progressive Economy Forum said the £50bn "hole" disappears entirely if the debts are calculated differently.
The government previously used a different measure of debt, and going back to using that would leave £14bn to spare, they said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63573989
Austerity is a political choice, not economic necessity.
This could revolutionise cricket!
The markets will only let you borrow what is realistic not some fantasy hopecasting economic plans.
Yes, if you don't care about ever reducing debt then you can just borrow and borrow.
No surprise to see Will Hutton on the membership list...
https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-charles-michel-europe-eu-g20-summit-european-council-commission/
I say let the boss of Next jump up and down, until he realises the minimum wage isn’t a maximum, and he pays the going rate.
UK $47,334.36
France $43,518.54
Unemployment Rate
UK 3.5%
France 7.3%
Productivity stats in the way used by Foxy there are a bit flawed as obviously the unemployed are excluded from the statistics, rather than included but at a productiveness of 0.
According to the report, what is needed is not some complex financial trickery but merely reverting to the conventions used as recently as last year, when Rishi was Chancellor.
For an established company hiring someone on a six-figure salary, it should be damn well nearly automatic, just a quick check on the wanted list and stamp his passport.
They have been okay with Ukranian refugee visas though.
He's just worried about his Mum. And his eyes
https://twitter.com/Bobby_D_2/status/1590038910629183488
£116 at 10.0 available now if you want to back Laxalt. I think he loses but I'm not so confident I'd offer that price.
Just get the hell out of our land!
🎶 Led Zeppelin @ledzeppelin
https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1590666327361986561
Strangely, this incentive resulted in the employment of more workers and less investment in productivity.
When Sunak introduced the massive incentive for investment, certain mandarins complained that this overturned the former policy.
There are a number of fascinating little features in the system like this. Such as the differential taxation upon imports of electrical components and finished items.
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1590644684837117952
"Category 2 calls include suspected heart attacks and strokes.
The England average for October was the worst ever: 1 hour 1 minute and 19 seconds.
The target is 18 minutes.
Category 1 are immediate life-critical situations: not breathing, cardiac arrest, bleeding out.
The system prioritises them at all costs: if they don't get there, people die in front of the caller.
Only London anywhere near target of 7 minutes.
As for something that "merely" requires urgent treatment in an acute context (Category 3s) your mean wait is 3 hours 34 minutes - with 1 in 10 people waiting more than 8 hours forty-nine.
These and Category 4s (if clinically stable: more than 4 hours on average) all worst ever.
(I’ve said it a good few times but those puzzling non-COVID excess deaths in England and Wales … just don’t think they’re very puzzling)"
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/11/rampant-deprofessionalisation/
'I have line managed the managers of two of the UK’s largest visa departments abroad. Over twenty years I witnessed first hand the systematic deprofessionalisation of the immigration service, which has continued apace since I left.'
His critiques of the modern workplace are also worth reading. Hiring inadequate people on low wages to replace those with decades of experience is not helping our productivity mess.
The gap with median household income is a long-running oddity. The figure for the UK in 2021 was $46,691 at PPP. The figure for the same period in France was $61,020. That's a long-established gap. So an average family in France feels significantly better off than an average family in the UK.
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/macroeconomic/median-household-income-in-the-united-kingdom/#:~:text=Median Household Income in the United Kingdom (2010,$46,691 and was lowest in 2010 at $34,179
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/macroeconomic/median-household-income-in-france-2010---2021-/#:~:text=The median household income (PPP) in France was,$60,907 and was lowest in 2010 at $57,223
Both sets of stats - GDP and median income - are correct. The implication is that the UK median is suppressed vs GDP because of inequality or specifically the very rich at the top end pushing up the GDP per capita number. The gap was actually narrowing up to around 2017 but has been flat since.
“10 saal se padh rhe h exam mai fail ho jaate h. Class test mai top karte hain. Itne attempts to duniya ke kisi exam mai ni milte inhe kyu mil rhe hain.”
“Nahi ye powerplay me 6 ki average chalayenge. BC utna to test me rehta hai ab.”
Is it Hinglish? Or some special cricket creole? Intriguing
"I have been studying for 10 years, the exam may fail."
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589626278680072193.html