Weather: trick is to man up and just get out there and do whatever you want to regardless. Assume changeability. Don't bank on anything. But don't let it affect your plans.
You can control if you have the right clothes. So bring and wear the right clothes.
100%. Well said.
First and only time you two will agree on anything in 2024?
I agree with him on more things than you might immediately imagine. There is lots of world out there beyond party politics.
Billions needed for the triple lock, add in many billions for NHS, Education, Defence, Water and Sewage, Social care and someone sometime is going to have to make very unpopular decisions whether it is Starmer or anyone else it has to happen
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
Wealth taxes implemented in the most cackhanded way imaginable seems favourite.
We are spending £181 billion on the NHS and £100 billion on debt interest at present alone
Last Days Of Rome. The West's debt problem cannot be solved, whatever is tried is deckchair shuffling. Its over, frankly
An economic genius on twitter called Richard Murphy reckons we can just print more money to pay it off.
Why waste the opportunity to transfer what remains of public wealth into private hands, slaughter a few million to billion in a big old war and increase authoritarian control over the irradiated remnant drones?!
For me, Professor Murphaloon firmly established himself as a r-sole in the years 2007-2009 when he demsonstrated his incomprehension of basic arithmetic, by his habit of being an abusive bully, and when he predicted the collapse of the UK about 27 times.
My parents got married in 1963 in what was then Hampstead Town Hall. My Mum grew up in Hampstead, first in a flat her parents rented on Mackeson Road then, when they were turfed out of there, on a council estate in Swiss Cottage. Her parents were thrown out of the Mackeson Road place after they could not afford to buy it from the landlord, who was looking to sell. The price was something like £800. God knows how much it would be now!
2 bed flats around £600k, so not unusual for London prices.
Obviously, that's a ridiculous amount of money, but I'm surprised it's not more.
Its not an aspirational area for those in good jobs under 50 anymore, and a 2 bed flat in a house not going to attract the foreign multi millionaire money either.
Billions needed for the triple lock, add in many billions for NHS, Education, Defence, Water and Sewage, Social care and someone sometime is going to have to make very unpopular decisions whether it is Starmer or anyone else it has to happen
Obvious targets are wealth taxes, wage restraints, reduction in many areas of public spending or if not can someone indicate what the magic bullet is
Wealth taxes implemented in the most cackhanded way imaginable seems favourite.
We are spending £181 billion on the NHS and £100 billion on debt interest at present alone
Last Days Of Rome. The West's debt problem cannot be solved, whatever is tried is deckchair shuffling. Its over, frankly
An economic genius on twitter called Richard Murphy reckons we can just print more money to pay it off.
Why waste the opportunity to transfer what remains of public wealth into private hands, slaughter a few million to billion in a big old war and increase authoritarian control over the irradiated remnant drones?!
For me, Professor Murphaloon firmly established himself as a r-sole in the years 2007-2009 when he demsonstrated his incomprehension of basic arithmetic, by his habit of being an abusive bully, and when he predicted the collapse of the UK about 27 times.
Ah yes, the guy who, when people pointed out that the vast majority of The Tax Gap was actually pensions and ISAs, banned them from his blog.
Lots of people getting confused (as usual, when statistics are involved) by life expectancy, which is just the mean of the distribution of how long members of a particular cohort live. Often, you can ignore the shape of the distribution, especially if it's "well-behaved". In the case of the US, it is decidedly not well-behaved, as you have all sorts of extremes to contend with: hugely overweight mid-Westerners, very health-conscious West Coast types, and the massive underclass who can't access healthcare without going bankrupt.
So, waving around life expectancy figures like they're the whole picture is misleading. For what it's worth, I think Leon is more right than wrong in this instance, and many of those attacking him are playing the man rather than the ball.
Also for what it's worth, I think Foxy's assertion that life expectancy is largely a product of infant mortality is mostly untrue when comparing developed economies (obviously when comparing (say) the UK with Angola it would absolutely be the major difference).
While I'm here: whoever said the Jewish community has high instances of consanguinity is about a century out of date, at least when talking about the European-descended groupings that make up about 90% of the UK's Jewish community
Also cousin marriage in people from (etc) Pakistan was being identified as a concern and worked on decades ago (I happened to know someone who was involved in one such programme). No idea if it still is an issue.
I think the issue there is that those Pakistani marriages were arranged, and in many cases, forced. The latter is a non-issue in the Jewish community; the former is present, but only at fairly low levels, and generally there is an opt-out available.
I was sure I'd heard some R4 programme or other on 'forced' Jewish marriages, and the JC appears to think it's at least an issue to be discussed.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
PB offers a safe space for right wingers in the arts and left wingers in finance alike.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
PB offers a safe space for right wingers in the arts and left wingers in finance alike.
It’s true. And I’m grateful for that
Won’t anybody think of the centrists in terrorism?
Lots of people getting confused (as usual, when statistics are involved) by life expectancy, which is just the mean of the distribution of how long members of a particular cohort live. Often, you can ignore the shape of the distribution, especially if it's "well-behaved". In the case of the US, it is decidedly not well-behaved, as you have all sorts of extremes to contend with: hugely overweight mid-Westerners, very health-conscious West Coast types, and the massive underclass who can't access healthcare without going bankrupt.
So, waving around life expectancy figures like they're the whole picture is misleading. For what it's worth, I think Leon is more right than wrong in this instance, and many of those attacking him are playing the man rather than the ball.
Also for what it's worth, I think Foxy's assertion that life expectancy is largely a product of infant mortality is mostly untrue when comparing developed economies (obviously when comparing (say) the UK with Angola it would absolutely be the major difference).
While I'm here: whoever said the Jewish community has high instances of consanguinity is about a century out of date, at least when talking about the European-descended groupings that make up about 90% of the UK's Jewish community
Also cousin marriage in people from (etc) Pakistan was being identified as a concern and worked on decades ago (I happened to know someone who was involved in one such programme). No idea if it still is an issue.
I think the issue there is that those Pakistani marriages were arranged, and in many cases, forced. The latter is a non-issue in the Jewish community; the former is present, but only at fairly low levels, and generally there is an opt-out available.
I was sure I'd heard some R4 programme or other on 'forced' Jewish marriages, and the JC appears to think it's at least an issue to be discussed.
If you're going to use google to find click-bait headlines to prove people wrong on subjects you know nothing about, it's good practice to at least read all of the first article you find that seems like it might help.
Otherwise, you run the risk of looking like a moron. In this case, "tantamount" in the subheading is the important one, and even that is doing a hell of a lot of work. As you'd know, if you'd read the article.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Why is 'right wing' incompatible with any sane definition of 'woke' ?
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Why is 'right wing' incompatible with any sane definition of 'woke' ?
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
I think mass immigration is now bad for the UK, and I would prefer it if migration was massively reduced. I also favour a scheme like Rwanda (tho not the absolute rubbish version the Tories have failed to enact). I believe migration from Islamic countries is particularly troublesome, as Islam is a very strong, proud, assertive culture which does not easily assimilate: we see this pattern worldwide , with countries like Denmark forced to introduce blasphemy laws, and so on (indeed, we now have a de facto blasphemy law in the UK, cf the Batley schoolteacher)
Am I gonna announce these opinions to the Woke 20-somethings at the New Flint Design Office? Are you kdding??
Lots of people getting confused (as usual, when statistics are involved) by life expectancy, which is just the mean of the distribution of how long members of a particular cohort live. Often, you can ignore the shape of the distribution, especially if it's "well-behaved". In the case of the US, it is decidedly not well-behaved, as you have all sorts of extremes to contend with: hugely overweight mid-Westerners, very health-conscious West Coast types, and the massive underclass who can't access healthcare without going bankrupt.
So, waving around life expectancy figures like they're the whole picture is misleading. For what it's worth, I think Leon is more right than wrong in this instance, and many of those attacking him are playing the man rather than the ball.
Also for what it's worth, I think Foxy's assertion that life expectancy is largely a product of infant mortality is mostly untrue when comparing developed economies (obviously when comparing (say) the UK with Angola it would absolutely be the major difference).
While I'm here: whoever said the Jewish community has high instances of consanguinity is about a century out of date, at least when talking about the European-descended groupings that make up about 90% of the UK's Jewish community
Also cousin marriage in people from (etc) Pakistan was being identified as a concern and worked on decades ago (I happened to know someone who was involved in one such programme). No idea if it still is an issue.
I think the issue there is that those Pakistani marriages were arranged, and in many cases, forced. The latter is a non-issue in the Jewish community; the former is present, but only at fairly low levels, and generally there is an opt-out available.
I was sure I'd heard some R4 programme or other on 'forced' Jewish marriages, and the JC appears to think it's at least an issue to be discussed.
If you're going to use google to find click-bait headlines to prove people wrong on subjects you know nothing about, it's good practice to at least read all of the first article you find that seems like it might help.
Otherwise, you run the risk of looking like a moron. In this case, "tantamount" in the subheading is the important one, and even that is doing a hell of a lot of work. As you'd know, if you'd read the article.
Touchy, very touchy. You appear not have read 'at least an issue to be discussed'. The strain of defending Bibi and the most moral army in the world getting to you?
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Why is 'right wing' incompatible with any sane definition of 'woke' ?
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
I'd say 'slavery bad' would be an opinion (almost) everyone can share. The identarian left however explicitly do not share the 'equal at birth' view; their entire worldview is about privileging certain groups over others.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Why is 'right wing' incompatible with any sane definition of 'woke' ?
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
I think mass immigration is now bad for the UK, and I would prefer it if migration was massively reduced. I also favour a scheme like Rwanda (tho not the absolute rubbish version the Tories have failed to enact). I believe migration from Islamic countries is particularly troublesome, as Islam is a very strong, proud, assertive culture which does not easily assimilate: we see this pattern worldwide , with countries like Denmark forced to introduce blasphemy laws, and so on (indeed, we now have a de facto blasphemy law in the UK, cf the Batley schoolteacher)
Am I gonna announce these opinions to the Woke 20-somethings at the New Flint Design Office? Are you kdding??
But heres the thing. Maybe some of those "woke" 20 somethings are also just pretending to be woke to fit in. Hardcore wokeists are only a small percent of the population. Maybe many are waiting for a strong leader such as yourself Leon to follow. Please dont deny them that.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Why is 'right wing' incompatible with any sane definition of 'woke' ?
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
I'd say 'slavery bad' would be an opinion (almost) everyone can share. The identarian left however explicitly do not share the 'equal at birth' view; their entire worldview is about privileging certain groups over others.
I might suggest that you consider the opposite viewpoint as well, Jacob-Rees Worm...
There are occasional stories of local Coucnillors who have migrated to various Timbuctoos and keep their positions for months or years.
I'm not sure that's true. There is a requirement to attend a Council meeting every six months. I imagine it might have been possible during the pandemic to attend remotely from some where else but normally it's a legal requirement to physically attend one meeting every six months or be disqualified.
As to how long the process of organising a by election to find a replacement that can take a while.
I'm beginning to think a late June or early July election is most likely. He's going to try and get a flight to Rwanda off then call it after the inevitable confidence vote after May 2. If he accepts its over for closing the gap to HP he will go earlier and try and minimise damage. Tory GE 2024 is 'operation get as close to 30% as possible'
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Why is 'right wing' incompatible with any sane definition of 'woke' ?
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
I think mass immigration is now bad for the UK, and I would prefer it if migration was massively reduced. I also favour a scheme like Rwanda (tho not the absolute rubbish version the Tories have failed to enact). I believe migration from Islamic countries is particularly troublesome, as Islam is a very strong, proud, assertive culture which does not easily assimilate: we see this pattern worldwide , with countries like Denmark forced to introduce blasphemy laws, and so on (indeed, we now have a de facto blasphemy law in the UK, cf the Batley schoolteacher)
Am I gonna announce these opinions to the Woke 20-somethings at the New Flint Design Office? Are you kdding??
But heres the thing. Maybe some of those "woke" 20 somethings are also just pretending to be woke to fit in. Hardcore wokeists are only a small percent of the population. Maybe many are waiting for a strong leader such as yourself Leon to follow. Please dont deny them that.
lol
If I didn't have kids and an enduring need to earn money I might consider something like that
I agree there are probably quite a few conservatives in that cohort, but they can't admit it as it is social death. This is becoming less true in other countries, hopefully the UK will belatedly follow
We should all remember that in @Leon's mind, the only good 'foreigner' is one who will accept his money for sex. But even then, only after he has had one of his little blue pills.
Hence explaining why he spends so much time abroad...
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
On consanguinity, while there is an increased risk of congenital anomalies (from memory ~2x that of unrelated couples) it's only comparable to the risk from being an older mother. I forget the cross-over point (10 years older rings a bell) but an e.g. young, related, imported bride might not have greater risk of a child with congenital anomaly compared to an older, unrelated British mother.
Doctors seek out postings to places like Bradford so that they get the chance to deal with conditions that you would not normally see.
Interesting that this kind of anti-immigrant stuff seems to get such free rein now.
Another group in which marriages between cousins are quite common is the Jewish community. Do people here generally think that "importing Jews is importing problems", I wonder?
I merely shared an anecdote. And what would I know? My brother in law only worked at Bradford Royal Infirmary for 30 years. And he's an immigrant.
An anecdote posted in response to a discussion about immigrants being responsible for congenital abnormalities, implying that congenital abnormalities in a particular area with high immigration are so much higher that doctors actively seek out appointments there as a kind of pathological freak show?
How could anyone have suspected it was anything other than a perfectly innocent remark, I wonder?
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Marvellous. I must subscribe to the Gazette. Does your primary occupation offer mates rates?
Endillion said: "In the case of the US, it is decidedly not well-behaved, as you have all sorts of extremes to contend with: hugely overweight mid-Westerners, very health-conscious West Coast types, and the massive underclass who can't access healthcare without going bankrupt."
"Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 85 million low-income and disabled people as of 2022;[3] in 2019, the program paid for half of all U.S. births.[4] As of 2017, the total annual cost of Medicaid was just over $600 billion, of which the federal government contributed $375 billion and states an additional $230 billion.[4] States are not required to participate in the program, although all have since 1982. In general, Medicaid recipients must be U.S. citizens or qualified non-citizens, and may include low-income adults, their children, and people with certain disabilities.[5] As of 2022 45% of those receiving Medicaid or CHIP were children." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
It is, I think, fair to conclude that 85 million include most of the "massive underclass". Given the increase in numbers and costs since 2017, it seems likely that Medicaid now spends more than $8,000 per recipient, each year. (Endillion will want to compare that number with the current
But that's not all. Many elderly are elgible for both Medicaid and Medicare.
It is certainly true that there are people in the US who can't "access health care" without substantial costs. But to say that this is true of an entire "massive underclass" ignores easily obtainable facts..
On topic - the triple lock has solved the problem of pensioner poverty. It is now unsustainable economically and grossly unfair to the young. It has to go.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Why is 'right wing' incompatible with any sane definition of 'woke' ?
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
“Slavery is bad” is not a woke position. It’s a view shared by the majority of voters.
“Slavery is bad and we need to pay a gazillion trillion billion in compensation for the evils of the past (but ignore the role of anyone else in the process” is a woke position.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
Until they consider that in almost every other country in the world they wouldn't have access to a free national health service. And the fact that Britain is the only place in the world with more than 6 million people where the police don't have guns. And so on.
Is that true? It sounds remarkable, but I've never see the claim before.
If I was under 30 I think that the triple lock would have me looking seriously for emigration. It is an outrageous penalty on the young and poor for the benefit of the old and comfortable.
The full state pension is currently a meagre £10,600 pa, lower than most (all?) comparable countries, and not much to live on if a pensioner has no other significant source of income. It would be better policy to maintain the triple lock until the differential narrows further, while at the same time using the tax system to claw back much more money from those who also benefit from a significant private/public sector pension and/or large savings.
It isn't a lot.
However, imagine a world with 30 people in it. 10 are pensioners. 5 are stay at home parents or otherwise not working. 5 are children. And 10 are in work.
In that scenario, £10k of every worker's income goes off to pay pensions, before *any* other expenses.
The issue is not the size of the pension, it is the fact that what was affordable when you had lots of people of working age, and few pensioners, becomes very unaffordable if you have rising life expectancy and a low birth rate.
The alternative is to raise the retirement age of course (having duly notified everyone as per the WASPI women who seem strikingly uninterested in any news).
Before we raise the pension age too far, is it actually feasible to have 70-year-old brickies, roofers and firefighters? It's a bit like the PB Covid WFH discussion when we've all got cosy white collar jobs and the most strenuous thing we do all day is open a laptop. How many 70-year-old nurses does it take to turn a patient over?
Also unless things change, currently life expectancy has peaked and isn't growing any more, actually it might be falling.
So why is future pensioners retirement age being lifted to pay for current pensioners getting increases?
Especially given its the boomer generation that is unaffordable and didn't save and public savings for their own retirement despite knowing about the demographics for decades.
Yes as Foxy rightly pointed out peoples health is now deteriorating. The point foxy made about covid damaging peoples frontal lobes is extremely worrying. We could both be looking at lower life expectancy and economic decline.
What utter tosh:
People under the age of 40 are dramatically healthier than their parents, they don't smoke, they dribk less and they are much more likely to exercise.
If you look at metrics like blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc., then the young adults of today are in dramatically better shape than their parents.
Have you seen the levels of obesity about now. Your argument may just hold in a global city like London but not in the rest of the uk. Look at photos from the 1970s people were much slimmer. They were also much more active pre computers and smartphones.
All the data is publicly available, and - yes - we are (on average) a bit fatter.
But that is literally the only stat that has moved in the wrong direction. Every other measure of public health, particularly for the young, has moved for the better.
And that's true everywhere in the UK, not just in London.
British lige expectancy has fared worse than any other major economy 🤷
A lot of this (but not all) is immigration. We are importing people from poor countries with bad health and bad diets, and a tendency to do dysgenic things, so the overall life expectancy goes down, child mortality goes up, and so on
Ditto America
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing bad habits and terrible diets. And some, I assume, are good people.”
What I am saying is not controversial
We have a lot of immigration from Pakistan. In Pakistan life expectancy is 66
If you import a lot of Pakistanis then UK national life expectancy will, on average, decline. Ditto African countries, India, Bangladesh, and so forth. As the migrants assimilate one can hope that their life expectancy will improve, but it won't if they keep importing brides and husbands from the homeland, and it really won't improve if these spouses are first cousins
You strain quite hard to blame immigrants for an awful lot of things. Not sure why. Bit of 'lib baiting' perchance? Like with all the "importance of IQ" talk. Yes, very possibly. I prefer that explanation to the main alternative anyway.
Just reading Trump's quote again, though, it's pretty hilarious. "They aren't sending their best. They aren't sending YOU" he says ... directly to the teeming mass of bottom drawer knuckle-draggers who make up his MAGA rally crowds.
It's just a fact. A lot of our gravest problems - from housing to healthcare - stem from an insane policy of mass immigration into an already crowded country with already creaking infrastructure. Migration is at lunatic levels now - 1.4m in two years. This is utterly unsustainable (and the Tories must take the blame for much of this, they've had 14 years to fix it and actually made it worse)
This might make effete lefties like you uncomfortable, but it is the case. I'm not saying it to "bait" anyone, I'm saying it because it is the truth, and until the nation faces up to this, things will only get worse. Importing millions of people, as a matter of policy, is a Ponzi scheme
it will be very interesting to see where Starmer goes on this
It is not a 'fact' that a lot of our gravest problems stem from immigration. It's an opinion arising from a mental image. In this case the mental image is that of 'us' here on 'our' little island being compromised and crowded out by too many of 'them' from places 'we' have no affinity for. That's where you start, because that's how you feel, and you go looking for 'data' and 'argument' to support it. But it's the feeling that's authentic not the data or the argument.
So you think we can import 1.4m people every two years for ever and ever, and it will never cause problems. That is the reductio ad absurdam of your stance
You're not a serious person, really, are you? You are a cluster of quasi-fashionable opinions, to which you have never really applied much thought
No, that rate isn't tenable for long. I doubt anybody thinks otherwise.
I don't know about how 'serious' a person I am. I do often find myself more interested in why people say certain things than I am in what they are saying.
Eg here with you and immigration.
Has it ever occurred to you that my life would be MUCH easier if I just went with the flow and agreed with all the feeble Woke bollocks that you believe? For a quiet life?
Because it would make things a whole lot simpler. For me. Flint knapping is a very left wing industry, and anyone with even vaguely right of centre opinions treads a significantly dangerous path. I could therefore just pretend to be a Woke idiot, and have a much easier time. I have friends who do exactly that, I know they are Tory or rightwing or have firm views on culture wars, migration, trans, etc etc etc, but they zip their mouths because they work in media/arts/academe/law, and they pretend they are leftwing, or they pretend they are neutral and have no political beliefs at all
However, I cannot deny what I see with my own eyes, and I am not going to dumb myself down
What do you risk, intellectually and professionally, being yet another lefty in Hampstead? Absolutely nothing
You are very typical of your late Boomer/early Gen X age cohort - Johnny Rotten, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Toby Young, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg etc etc.
I’m really not. A lot of those people started on the left and moved right
Others are from posho Tory families
I was right wing fron the age of about 14 when i realised that it is a better representation of reality. If anything I have mellowed since my early ultra-libertarian days
I do sometimes enjoy being contrary, which makes up for the undoubted hassle and danger of being right wing in my world
I was at school with Toby Young. He hasn't changed.
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
I don't know who you are talking about, my second job is writing for the Gazette. My first job is knapping sex toys, and let me assure you the young staff in most lithic pleasure-gizmo offices are incredibly Woke, it's almost as bad as, say, publishing - where anyone with a vaguely rightwing stance keeps completely quiet if they want a nice career
Why is 'right wing' incompatible with any sane definition of 'woke' ?
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
“Slavery is bad” is not a woke position. It’s a view shared by the majority of voters.
“Slavery is bad and we need to pay a gazillion trillion billion in compensation for the evils of the past (but ignore the role of anyone else in the process” is a woke position.
But by far not the position of all 'woke' people. Far from.
which is the problem with concepts like 'anti-wokeism' - they define 'woke' to be whatever the heck they want.
(And TBF, there are some anti-wokeists who give the impression they would quite like slavery back...)
Comments
T
R
U
S
S
???
https://www.thejc.com/news/call-to-stop-forced-marriages-wusp0wec
Being right wing when we were young was far more normal than it is now.
You have a ready audience for your views in the Spectator, the Telegraph etc. Given how the New Statesman is going, you might even have a chance there. Spruce up and you could make it onto GBNews! And you have made your money, so there is no huge pressure to conform to the whims of younger commissioning editors. It's really not risky for boomers to spout right wing opinions. Most have them. Our generation is the Tories' last bastion - and where would Reform be without blokes over the age of 55?
Otherwise, you run the risk of looking like a moron. In this case, "tantamount" in the subheading is the important one, and even that is doing a hell of a lot of work. As you'd know, if you'd read the article.
https://twitter.com/pmorganbentley/status/1773033316297396603
Wasn't slavery bad? Are we equal at birth, regardless of colour, background, ethnicity, sex, etc?
Am I gonna announce these opinions to the Woke 20-somethings at the New Flint Design Office? Are you kdding??
The strain of defending Bibi and the most moral army in the world getting to you?
NEW THREAD
As to how long the process of organising a by election to find a replacement that can take a while.
He's going to try and get a flight to Rwanda off then call it after the inevitable confidence vote after May 2.
If he accepts its over for closing the gap to HP he will go earlier and try and minimise damage.
Tory GE 2024 is 'operation get as close to 30% as possible'
If I didn't have kids and an enduring need to earn money I might consider something like that
I agree there are probably quite a few conservatives in that cohort, but they can't admit it as it is social death. This is becoming less true in other countries, hopefully the UK will belatedly follow
Hence explaining why he spends so much time abroad...
How could anyone have suspected it was anything other than a perfectly innocent remark, I wonder?
"Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 85 million low-income and disabled people as of 2022;[3] in 2019, the program paid for half of all U.S. births.[4] As of 2017, the total annual cost of Medicaid was just over $600 billion, of which the federal government contributed $375 billion and states an additional $230 billion.[4] States are not required to participate in the program, although all have since 1982. In general, Medicaid recipients must be U.S. citizens or qualified non-citizens, and may include low-income adults, their children, and people with certain disabilities.[5] As of 2022 45% of those receiving Medicaid or CHIP were children."
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
It is, I think, fair to conclude that 85 million include most of the "massive underclass". Given the increase in numbers and costs since 2017, it seems likely that Medicaid now spends more than $8,000 per recipient, each year. (Endillion will want to compare that number with the current
But that's not all. Many elderly are elgible for both Medicaid and Medicare.
It is certainly true that there are people in the US who can't "access health care" without substantial costs. But to say that this is true of an entire "massive underclass" ignores easily obtainable facts..
“Slavery is bad and we need to pay a gazillion trillion billion in compensation for the evils of the past (but ignore the role of anyone else in the process” is a woke position.
which is the problem with concepts like 'anti-wokeism' - they define 'woke' to be whatever the heck they want.
(And TBF, there are some anti-wokeists who give the impression they would quite like slavery back...)