Merging council pensions schemes could unlock a pot of cash to invest in infrastructure/give to middlemen and administrators.
It’s going to happen, isn’t it. Pensions seen by both parties as pots of cash to use. The govt are so good at spending money and investing. Nothing could go wrong.
“A single LGPS with a sophisticated, long-term investment strategy might put up to £40bn into vital infrastructure,” said Tracy Blackwell, chief executive of the PIC. “That could make a big difference to the UK’s economic prospects.”
Consolidating LGPS schemes into a single fund would give Britain “a real sovereign wealth fund” that could be “run and managed to the same professional standards as world-leading schemes like Canada’s,” Blackwell added.
The phrase 'world leading' should ring alarm bells:
The largest shareholder as of July 2023 is the Canadian pension fund Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (Omers) — about 32 per cent.
Why on Earth would a state pension fund invest in 32% of a FTSE100 company, rather than investing in global stock markets in general with a small side of picked stocks?
Well they’re likely to lose several billion, which is not good if you’re a municipal employee in Ontario.
You can be sure that there are people in the Canadian government, UK foreign office and City all telling Reeves that a full bailout must be made or Britain wont be seen as a safe place to invest anymore.
I think she has more sense than that. It will be a test.
Just seems bonkers that a municipal pension fund would so apparently undiversified as this Canadian one is.
The response to the threat is that the pension fund should have been more thorough in checking out the finances of Thames Water when they bought it fully loaded in debt...
One of the problems with very large pension funds, and a combined Local Authority Pension fund would fall into that category, is that it becomes very difficult to make a meaningful difference to their fund. If you invest £5m in X and X doubles in value that gain is a rounding error in the fund as a whole. There is less incentive to look for such opportunities and a stronger tendency to follow the indices.
Smaller pension funds are more nimble and can pay more attention to their individual investments. The "efficiency" of having the funds administered as one can easily be lost elsewhere. Really not sure that is a good idea.
Looking for opportunities (by which you mean stock-picking) means you have to pay managers to do this. Secondly, stock-picking is contrary to the efficient markets hypothesis, which I think is true (market prices reflect existing known information (except in the case if insider-dealing)). Index tracker funds cost pennies to invest in and so without the drag of management costs (and higher transactional costs through increased trading) usually outperform the mean.
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Indeed, they have admitted it. Pelosi apparently had to dislodge him “the hard way”
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
Elon Musk is interesting on kids, I mean how many is he planning on having ? My guess is he'll probably end up with about 20 (More maybe ?) - which means that it's more or less certain everyone has him as an ancestor eventually. I *think* this is why he's doing it.
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Plenty of old photos of VP Harris with children, eg her nieces and grandnieces at the previous inauguration.
The bear thing is an interesting and effective way for women to express how they feel around men.
In response, we have a bunch of middle aged men: "But very few women spend time with bears..." "WELL ACTUALLY, Grizzly bears primarily eat berries and salmon, so it would only be POLAR bears...."
Its a dumb way to express how they feel - we have no shortage of ways to express it - which provoked a dumb reaction, which makes the whole thing absurd and diminishes the very real point about why women feel that way.
So it's not effective in the least, the dumb reaction is part of why it is not effective.
Still, some of the men spotted the logic behind the original response.
The original use of the bear analogy to show how unsafe women could be with strange men was a good shorthand - it’s when people seem to think that it’s actually a genuinely scientific or statistical argument that it’s problematic.
A few years back I was chatting to a female friend about running. I said I often went running early in the morning, before dawn. She said that she dare not do that, and she felt the local roads were unsafe in the dark. I've heard similar comments from another local woman. We do not live in a particularly 'bad' area.
I've never felt that way, and I think it's sad that so many women do feel that way.
I've been running for about 8 months, now 4 times a week (currently following a Garmin coaching program) mostly on trails and I rarely see single women running around here as it is very secluded, but has an excellent network of off road footpaths and canal paths. I've got 4 different 10k routes just outside my door. My wife took up the sport at the same time but she has a much slower pace than me so we can't really run together unless I'm doing low aerobic work, so we coordinate our routes so that I can sort of keep an eye on her. If my plan doesn't give me a run on one of her days, I'll go for a walk and follow her route. She has an SOS button on her phone and watch. Once a week she runs with friends. Over the top? Maybe, but there have been a couple of "flasher" type incidents in the past few years and Loughborough town has its share of assaults. Some of it is me worrying about her. She doesn't like being on her own in the part of the network near Loughborough as it's a really sketchy area and couple of runners have been mugged for their phones and watches there. At least we're not in the US. The question "What do y'all use to carry your Glock whilst out on a run?" must get asked at least once a week by newbie female runners in the groups and forums I'm in!
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
Literally, I mean literally, he phoned in to a Harris event within 24 hours of standing down supporting her, unless you think that was some sort of impersonator and he does have covid.
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Indeed, they have admitted it. Pelosi apparently had to dislodge him “the hard way”
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
Simplest remains the best hypothesis - not wanting to distract attention (and having a break too).
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Indeed, they have admitted it. Pelosi apparently had to dislodge him “the hard way”
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
For someone who bores PB with claims about his intelligence you are incredibly dense.
Perhaps the reason you haven’t seen Biden is that he is still self isolating with Covid.
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Indeed, they have admitted it. Pelosi apparently had to dislodge him “the hard way”
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
For someone who bores PB with claims about his intelligence you are incredibly dense.
Perhaps the reason you haven’t seen Biden is that he is still self isolating with Covid.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Indeed, they have admitted it. Pelosi apparently had to dislodge him “the hard way”
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
For someone who bores PB with claims about his intelligence you are incredibly dense.
Perhaps the reason you haven’t seen Biden is that he is still self isolating with Covid.
I don;'t think there's much meat in these rumours.
But if they are true, and Biden either dies or stands down as President, that means Harris becomes president with less than four months until election day. Given that's essentially f-all time to do anything policy-wise, how would that affect her position? Would it make a Harris win in November more or less likely?
(I assume she'd have to choose a vice president very quickly, who would almost certainly become her running mate?)
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Indeed, they have admitted it. Pelosi apparently had to dislodge him “the hard way”
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
For someone who bores PB with claims about his intelligence you are incredibly dense.
Perhaps the reason you haven’t seen Biden is that he is still self isolating with Covid.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
Merging council pensions schemes could unlock a pot of cash to invest in infrastructure/give to middlemen and administrators.
It’s going to happen, isn’t it. Pensions seen by both parties as pots of cash to use. The govt are so good at spending money and investing. Nothing could go wrong.
“A single LGPS with a sophisticated, long-term investment strategy might put up to £40bn into vital infrastructure,” said Tracy Blackwell, chief executive of the PIC. “That could make a big difference to the UK’s economic prospects.”
Consolidating LGPS schemes into a single fund would give Britain “a real sovereign wealth fund” that could be “run and managed to the same professional standards as world-leading schemes like Canada’s,” Blackwell added.
The phrase 'world leading' should ring alarm bells:
The largest shareholder as of July 2023 is the Canadian pension fund Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (Omers) — about 32 per cent.
I recall the occasion (drunk at a garden party) where I sold the idea of growing peanuts in Africa to make biofuel as the solution to the climate crisis. To an MP…
He was all fired up to see the minister, vote for the idea….
I have seen similar with too many “leaders” - they seem extremely vulnerable to a plausible pitch from the last guy they spoke to. Whereas I think in terms of “OK, nice idea. What are the draw backs? Downsides? Why isn’t this happening already?”
Edit: BritVolt was a recent, perfect example of this. They were obviously heading for failure.
Merging council pensions schemes could unlock a pot of cash to invest in infrastructure/give to middlemen and administrators.
It’s going to happen, isn’t it. Pensions seen by both parties as pots of cash to use. The govt are so good at spending money and investing. Nothing could go wrong.
“A single LGPS with a sophisticated, long-term investment strategy might put up to £40bn into vital infrastructure,” said Tracy Blackwell, chief executive of the PIC. “That could make a big difference to the UK’s economic prospects.”
Consolidating LGPS schemes into a single fund would give Britain “a real sovereign wealth fund” that could be “run and managed to the same professional standards as world-leading schemes like Canada’s,” Blackwell added.
The phrase 'world leading' should ring alarm bells:
The largest shareholder as of July 2023 is the Canadian pension fund Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (Omers) — about 32 per cent.
Why on Earth would a state pension fund invest in 32% of a FTSE100 company, rather than investing in global stock markets in general with a small side of picked stocks?
Well they’re likely to lose several billion, which is not good if you’re a municipal employee in Ontario.
You can be sure that there are people in the Canadian government, UK foreign office and City all telling Reeves that a full bailout must be made or Britain wont be seen as a safe place to invest anymore.
I think she has more sense than that. It will be a test.
Just seems bonkers that a municipal pension fund would so apparently undiversified as this Canadian one is.
The response to the threat is that the pension fund should have been more thorough in checking out the finances of Thames Water when they bought it fully loaded in debt...
Also, is OMERS actually very undiversified here? They own 32% of Thames Water (which they've already written off on their books as worthless back in May, incidentally), but they manage 124 billion Canadian dollars of assets total, so my back of the envelope math suggests Thames Water was maybe 1% or so of their total fund. So crap investment, but it's not like the pension fund is about to go down the drain as a result.
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Indeed, they have admitted it. Pelosi apparently had to dislodge him “the hard way”
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
She got his campaign managers to show him some up to date polling.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
The TwiX rumours are superbly wild. Some claim he’s already dead
Some in the MSM are literally wetting their knickers with excitement about Harris.
There’s a video of her dancing, badly, with children which has got many very very excited. Slightly embarrassing.
It is quite strange that we haven’t seen Biden at all
PBers will know that I am deeply averse to hyperbole and hate conspiracy theories, but I don’t think it’s too far fetched to believe that he was *pressured* to quit
I would think that’s a cast iron certainty.
I am also sure, 36 hours before Biden stood down endorsing Harris, the photo op of her grinning with two kids at tan ice cream stall was staged with this in mind.
Indeed, they have admitted it. Pelosi apparently had to dislodge him “the hard way”
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
For someone who bores PB with claims about his intelligence you are incredibly dense.
Perhaps the reason you haven’t seen Biden is that he is still self isolating with Covid.
I refer you to the conclusions of the honourable @kjh
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
I think this misses another important factor: support structures. If a couple live far away from both sets of parents and family, they miss out on a heck of a lot of babysitting and other general help - I know we do. Talking to friends, the lack of these support structures is a significant factor in not having kids, or having them later in life when they are more settled.
Support structures, and the local culture. The TSMC example speaks to that.
Hungary spends something like 4% of GDP trying to incentivise childbearing, and has barely shifted the dial.
A country discovers that spending money on something doesn’t guarantee results. Part XXXXXXXXVI
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
What are the figures for ladies with multiple cats?
On topic, I don't think you can automatically add all those new voters to the 2029 Labour column. But there's not much to argue about over the subtractions.
Trade your Beshear position for Whitmer ? (I cashed out my VP positions last night, as I can't begin to predict her pick.)
Harris' campaign has requested vetting materials from potential VPs, including Cooper (NC), Kelly (AZ), Shapiro (PA), Whitmer (MI), Walz (MN) + Pritzker (IL), according to a person familiar. Beshear told CNN he hasn't been asked to submit info at this point. https://x.com/KThomasDC/status/1815556874063790575
I can’t see it being Whitmer. Hasn’t she also indicated she’s not interested?
If Beshear doesn’t seem to be in the frame I’d think Shapiro would be the one to watch.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
The Dems want all this to go away quickly now. The way they just did away with Biden, who is now in a coma in a secure bunker in Montana, with a deepfake making his “phone calls”
Trouble is I’m not sure it will go away. Indeed now that Biden has retired for undisclosed and presumably sudden “health reasons” that they won’t explain, it could get worse, once they get over the Kamalagasm
It's a bit like sending Edward VIII to France.
The truth will be that he's super depressed about getting old/ill and losing the Presidency. We should invite him to Balmoral/Sandringham for holibobs.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And their nephews and nieces.
Same as the Tories did by confining the Nil Rate Band of IHT to Ideologically Sound Nuclear Family Parents, and only later admitting their error.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
And in any case auntie shares the blessings and burdens: looks after the little dears, has them to stay, helps out with their university costs, etc.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
For a very smart guy (and Vance is that) it’s an incredibly dumb thing to say
The Dems want all this to go away quickly now. The way they just did away with Biden, who is now in a coma in a secure bunker in Montana, with a deepfake making his “phone calls”
Trouble is I’m not sure it will go away. Indeed now that Biden has retired for undisclosed and presumably sudden “health reasons” that they won’t explain, it could get worse, once they get over the Kamalagasm
It's a bit like sending Edward VIII to France.
The truth will be that he's super depressed about getting old/ill and losing the Presidency. We should invite him to Balmoral/Sandringham for holibobs.
One of the unsettling things about NOW is that voice cloning technology has got so good that stagey phone call to Kamala really could have been a fake. I am not saying it is, I am saying we have passed the point where we can tell
We can no longer determine what is true from what we see and hear with our own senses. It’s quite a moment
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
For a very smart guy (and Vance is that) it’s an incredibly dumb thing to say
Dont that lot believe in *not* helping childless women to have babies, even married women? All the more sensitive therefore. (Not sure what Mr Vance himself says, but if he runs with that lot ...)
So, my wife is still technically in Queen's Med A&E , coming up for 48 hours (albeit now in the Urgent Treatment Unit in a cubicle). There is no bed available on a ward for her and they also want to keep her away from genpop. The doctor thinks it is bacterial meningitis and they started treatment (steroids/painkillers/antibiotics via a drip) late on Sunday night after blood tests and she's been hooked up ever since and to be fair, she's now really very perky. Just around the corner is the madhouse that is A&E proper. As I left last night, the place was full, 3 coppers had a bloke in handcuffs on the floor while his hangers on were recording it on their phones. The staff said it was quieter than usual!
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
For a very smart guy (and Vance is that) it’s an incredibly dumb thing to say
Dont that lot believe in *not* helping childless women to have babies, even married women? All the more sensitive therefore. (Not sure what Mr Vance himself says, but if he runs with that lot ...)
If I was Vance I’d come out and claim they deepfaked it and he didn’t say it
So, my wife is still technically in Queen's Med A&E , coming up for 48 hours (albeit now in the Urgent Treatment Unit in a cubicle). There is no bed available on a ward for her and they also want to keep her away from genpop. The doctor thinks it is bacterial meningitis and they started treatment (steroids/painkillers/antibiotics via a drip) late on Sunday night after blood tests and she's been hooked up ever since and to be fair, she's now really very perky. Just around the corner is the madhouse that is A&E proper. As I left last night, the place was full, 3 coppers had a bloke in handcuffs on the floor while his hangers on were recording it on their phones. The staff said it was quieter than usual!
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Good god
Some snakes for hair and she'd be turning libtards and wokesters to stone.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
For a very smart guy (and Vance is that) it’s an incredibly dumb thing to say
The danger of the cultural/media bubble lifestyle.
Vance has bought into the Rad Trad Catholic thing, and if it has brought him peace, then peace be with him.
But if he runs for office on that basis, a lot of people are going to shuffle away nervously. Including quite a lot of Catholics.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Good god
Some snakes for hair and she'd be turning libtards and wokesters to stone.
Vance looks like Christopher Pike in The Cage. Only a bit more psychotic.
Trade your Beshear position for Whitmer ? (I cashed out my VP positions last night, as I can't begin to predict her pick.)
Harris' campaign has requested vetting materials from potential VPs, including Cooper (NC), Kelly (AZ), Shapiro (PA), Whitmer (MI), Walz (MN) + Pritzker (IL), according to a person familiar. Beshear told CNN he hasn't been asked to submit info at this point. https://x.com/KThomasDC/status/1815556874063790575
I can’t see it being Whitmer. Hasn’t she also indicated she’s not interested?
If Beshear doesn’t seem to be in the frame I’d think Shapiro would be the one to watch.
I honestly can't call it.
A GA/NV/AZ/NC strategy seems a viable play for Harris (in contrast with Biden), so PA isn't as critical. Kelly or Coper wouldn't be daft picks.
Would Buttigieg need vetting, given he'll already have undergone the process for the cabinet post ?
Judging from his media activity over the last 24 hours or so, Beshear really wants it.
Since Harris has enough pledged delegates for the nomination, the only way Obama could do it is by being chosen as Harris' running mate and Harris dying so Obama then assumes office.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
For a very smart guy (and Vance is that) it’s an incredibly dumb thing to say
Dont that lot believe in *not* helping childless women to have babies, even married women? All the more sensitive therefore. (Not sure what Mr Vance himself says, but if he runs with that lot ...)
If I was Vance I’d come out and claim they deepfaked it and he didn’t say it
Two problems with that.
One is that it would be a lie, wouldn't it? And whilst that wouldn't bother Trump, I think it would bother Vance. (How he reconciles his integrity with serving the liar-in-chief I will leave to him and his confessor.)
The other is that pitying childless women to death is consistent with his prescription for society's ills. All that has changed is the platform from which he is saying it.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
The thread is quite relevant to me personally as with my health issues I would be delighted to be able to cast my vote in GE29
However, I think it is fair to say the change to renters, rather than home owners, is laying the foundation for very difficult problems as these renters retire with rent still to pay unlike most retiring mortgage free home owners
I do not know the solution and even if the conservative party of the next GE will be unrecognisable to many of us, but there will be a party of the centre right in some form or other
It’s worth emphasising the size of the problem - when you own a house and retire your mortgage is likely paid off so you outgoings relative to when you were previously working will be lower.
That isn’t the case if you are still renting your home. You still need to find the £700-2000 a month to pay the rent. It’s going to be a truly massive problem in 2 decades or so time.
Indeed and of course little inheritance for their families
That isn’t the problem - the question is who is going to be paying that £2000 in rent because I suspect it will very quickly become the state’s problem..
I’ve been flagging this as the next disaster for quite a while.
If you are renting there is zero point investing in a pension - the best approach would be to pull it out when you are 55 and spend it before the time the state pension kicks in...
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
And in any case auntie shares the blessings and burdens: looks after the little dears, has them to stay, helps out with their university costs, etc.
Also "adopting late teens does not count" is controversial and abusive; being an adoptive parent is a huge contribution.
I think the underlying thing here is that such values being expressed are still stuck in the 19C.
Someone: >Would Buttigieg need vetting, given he'll already have undergone the process for the cabinet post ?
I've noted the comments about vetting; the Dems are obviously thinking about cats.
The Dems want all this to go away quickly now. The way they just did away with Biden, who is now in a coma in a secure bunker in Montana, with a deepfake making his “phone calls”
Trouble is I’m not sure it will go away. Indeed now that Biden has retired for undisclosed and presumably sudden “health reasons” that they won’t explain, it could get worse, once they get over the Kamalagasm
It's a bit like sending Edward VIII to France.
The truth will be that he's super depressed about getting old/ill and losing the Presidency. We should invite him to Balmoral/Sandringham for holibobs.
One of the unsettling things about NOW is that voice cloning technology has got so good that stagey phone call to Kamala really could have been a fake. I am not saying it is, I am saying we have passed the point where we can tell
We can no longer determine what is true from what we see and hear with our own senses. It’s quite a moment
Yes - for a one off event. But it's far more difficult to deepfake a continuing narrative with any consistency.
But it's also, probably, why (eg) stadium events aren't going away. Hard to deepfake something tens of thousand of people witness.
Since Harris has enough pledged delegates for the nomination, the only way Obama could do it is by being chosen as Harris' running mate and Harris dying so Obama then assumes office.
So I'm not surprised they've given up hope...
I've got Newsom, Clinton, RFK and Obama to clear off the big lays in my book and free up cash.
I think Newsom heads out to 1000 once the convention is over, Clinton and Obama err *should* - RFK is a bit different even though he's probably 1000-1 in reality he likely won't trade at that price till the election is over.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Good god
Some snakes for hair and she'd be turning libtards and wokesters to stone.
Vance looks like Christopher Pike in The Cage. Only a bit more psychotic.
Oops, that's Matt Gaetz.
Easy mistake to make. Not like one of them has a beard or anything.
Mind you, they're both still madder than General Ripper.
And he still looks like Jeffrey Hunter as Christopher Pike, only more psychotic.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
"To lose one cat-lady vote, Mr. Carlson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"
I posted a stat on that.
Single cat ladies as % of the vote in US cities.
9.9% Portland, Oregon 9.3% Seattle, Washington 8.7% Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8.4% Kansas City, Missouri 8.3% Denver, Colorado 8.2% Albuquerque, New Mexico 7.7% Minneapolis, Minnesota 7.7% Harrisburg, Virginia 7.5% Tampa, Florida 7.5% Columbus, Ohio https://wkfr.com/columbus-single-cat-ladies/
In numbers it is a big survey, but I don't think they are in the BPC.
Vance didn't just insult single women who look after cats. He also insulted women who are childless. There are quite a few of the latter too.
And insulted lots of women with children. Many mothers take a protective/kindly view of childless women - “they missed out on our blessings”.
For a very smart guy (and Vance is that) it’s an incredibly dumb thing to say
Dont that lot believe in *not* helping childless women to have babies, even married women? All the more sensitive therefore. (Not sure what Mr Vance himself says, but if he runs with that lot ...)
If I was Vance I’d come out and claim they deepfaked it and he didn’t say it
Too late for that. It's not like he said, or it started to be memed, yesterday.
The quickest cure for a Tory revival amongst younger voters is an unpopular Labour government running a poor economy. For example the only time the Tories have won under 30s in the last 50 years were 1979, 1983 and 2010, 2 of which were elections where that applied and the other of which saw the SDP split the centre left vote
I remember, years ago, reading an analysis of polling data from the days when Ted Heath was Tory leader. Tory support among the young was negligible and the party seemed doomed in the longer-term.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Good god
Some snakes for hair and she'd be turning libtards and wokesters to stone.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
Vaguely on topic, I wouldn't be too concerned. Yes, 2028 might be worse than 2024 (marginally, in some areas) just as 2001 was worse than 1997 (marginally, in some areas). Inevitably, opposition will develop to the Government - there's a fair bit of it on here after less than three weeks, it seems.
The road "back" for conservative politics in the UK isn't easy to map. As others have said, if one of the foundations of conservative policy is strong fiscal management there has to be a mea culpa for what happened in the past administration - as an aside, Reeves seems determined to track down the millions apparently defrauded during Covid by the public - the biggest con artists of them all.
If you want to balance the books, live within your means, however you want to define it, there needs to be an honest debate with the electorate. I imagine some will be looking at what Pollievre is doing in Canada where he is arguing for all spending to be fiscally neutral - any new expenditure has to be balanced by a cut but that's the kind of granularity which is going to cause problems here.
However, freezing spending (which may be laudable as long as there are no sacred cows such as defence and education) only gets you so far. The income side of the balance sheet has to rise accordingly so how do you get more money in? The Lafferites argue cutting taxes brings in more money eventually through increased economic activity - others argue different forms of taxation need to be considered such as Land Value Taxation.
Either way, thirty or forty years of telling people they can have lower taxes and better services has warped the debate completely. The debate needs to be reset - perhaps a thoughtful conservative leader (if such a being exists) might be the start.
One area of obvious concern is Social Care - it was, I would argue, one of the biggest failures of the Conservative time in office from 2010 to fail to get to grips with it. It's not easy (if it were, it would have been sorted) but kicking the can down the road repeatedly was a complete abdication of governance. Labour might have a plan but we all know everyone is going to moan and whinge but at least we'd be talking about it rather than it dragging otherwise perfectly well run councils of all political stripes (and none) to the edge of insolvency.
Reflecting about slightly longer term policy and Tory Party recovery.
I think the Tories have kneecapped themselves further by rejecting many of their own achievements since 2010.
eg They made significant progress on both housebuilding (not enough but they *did* boost it significantly) and decarbonisation of power supply, wind farms etc.
But as part of Rishi's Save My Butt strategy he went full "give the Nimbys a BJ" and killed housing targets, plus refuted environmental progress in multiple ways.
That means that they are starting from an even worse point politically than would be the case otherwise, and that the Labour Govt will get far more credit than they deserve, including much of which should belong to the Conservatives.
The quickest cure for a Tory revival amongst younger voters is an unpopular Labour government running a poor economy. For example the only time the Tories have won under 30s in the last 50 years were 1979, 1983 and 2010, 2 of which were elections where that applied and the other of which saw the SDP split the centre left vote
I remember, years ago, reading an analysis of polling data from the days when Ted Heath was Tory leader. Tory support among the young was negligible and the party seemed doomed in the longer-term.
Just saying.
The "Young Tories" were really struggling in the 90s with many groups closing or just running as a shoestring organisation.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Good god
Some snakes for hair and she'd be turning libtards and wokesters to stone.
Vance looks like Christopher Pike in The Cage. Only a bit more psychotic.
The Dems want all this to go away quickly now. The way they just did away with Biden, who is now in a coma in a secure bunker in Montana, with a deepfake making his “phone calls”
Trouble is I’m not sure it will go away. Indeed now that Biden has retired for undisclosed and presumably sudden “health reasons” that they won’t explain, it could get worse, once they get over the Kamalagasm
It's a bit like sending Edward VIII to France.
The truth will be that he's super depressed about getting old/ill and losing the Presidency. We should invite him to Balmoral/Sandringham for holibobs.
One of the unsettling things about NOW is that voice cloning technology has got so good that stagey phone call to Kamala really could have been a fake. I am not saying it is, I am saying we have passed the point where we can tell
We can no longer determine what is true from what we see and hear with our own senses. It’s quite a moment
Yes - for a one off event. But it's far more difficult to deepfake a continuing narrative with any consistency.
But it's also, probably, why (eg) stadium events aren't going away. Hard to deepfake something tens of thousand of people witness.
In the end, everything will be fake-able, but it will be a particular and enormous problem with anything that is witnessed via a screen or a signal, which is about 99.3% of politics, the 0.7% is those stadium events, meet and greets, canvassing, etc
I am honestly not sure how politics as we know it can survive this; indeed, it cannot. Democracy might be finished
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Good god
You do have to wonder what's going on. DJTJ could be getting served **** on the reg by solid 9+s (NYC Over 30s Division) yet he's with Zelda out of Terrahawks not Zelda out of Legend of Zelda.
The Dems want all this to go away quickly now. The way they just did away with Biden, who is now in a coma in a secure bunker in Montana, with a deepfake making his “phone calls”
Trouble is I’m not sure it will go away. Indeed now that Biden has retired for undisclosed and presumably sudden “health reasons” that they won’t explain, it could get worse, once they get over the Kamalagasm
It's a bit like sending Edward VIII to France.
The truth will be that he's super depressed about getting old/ill and losing the Presidency. We should invite him to Balmoral/Sandringham for holibobs.
One of the unsettling things about NOW is that voice cloning technology has got so good that stagey phone call to Kamala really could have been a fake. I am not saying it is, I am saying we have passed the point where we can tell
We can no longer determine what is true from what we see and hear with our own senses. It’s quite a moment
Yes - for a one off event. But it's far more difficult to deepfake a continuing narrative with any consistency.
But it's also, probably, why (eg) stadium events aren't going away. Hard to deepfake something tens of thousand of people witness.
In the end, everything will be fake-able, but it will be a particular and enormous problem with anything that is witnessed via a screen or a signal, which is about 99.3% of politics, the 0.7% is those stadium events, meet and greets, canvassing, etc
I am honestly not sure how politics as we know it can survive this; indeed, it cannot. Democracy might be finished
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
The quickest cure for a Tory revival amongst younger voters is an unpopular Labour government running a poor economy. For example the only time the Tories have won under 30s in the last 50 years were 1979, 1983 and 2010, 2 of which were elections where that applied and the other of which saw the SDP split the centre left vote
I remember, years ago, reading an analysis of polling data from the days when Ted Heath was Tory leader. Tory support among the young was negligible and the party seemed doomed in the longer-term.
Just saying.
The earliest I can quickly find is October 1974, MORI had the split amongst 18-24 year olds as C24L42;
The loss of Conservative support amongst the young started in about 2017, and if anything it's getting worse. It's not irreversible, but the party is on a down escalator and needs to start running upwards pretty fast pretty soon.
Relying on the elderly and economically active for most of their vote is unhealthy for the country and our politics, but wasn't necessarily strategically dumb, up until the point where - somewhere between Brexit, Johnson's behaviour, f*** business, the housing crisis, and governmental incompetence - middle aged people stopped becoming Tories as they got older, leaving them with a core vote mostly 70+.
If it takes two elections to get back into power, a third of their current voters will be dead by then, and likely over half of the members who are about to choose the leader to take on the task.
The challenge for the LibDems is to bed in as the party of the settled middle classes in the Home Counties, hoping that the Tories stick with their anti-business, anti-Europe, anti-BBC, anti-judges, anti-universities and anti-modernity nonsense for as long as possible.
Sorry for going off-topic (although slightly related to the last thread discussion), but isn't a major problem simply that equality doesn't work well for romantic matches, hence rising singleness?
What I mean by this is that women have equality in the workplace. That's a good thing. Women also tend to want to marry up. The economic circumstances of a man matters way more to a woman than the economic circumstances of a woman do to a man.
But that's a problem because equality means roughly the same earning potential so lines drawn according to economic circumstance will average out to being horizontal between men and women. Hence, middle and lower income chaps find things very difficult, because the desire line of marrying up just cuts out a ton of men.
This tallies with what's been remarked upon here before, that overall frisky time is the same as ever, but guys at the top are having tons whereas men at the bottom are getting none. But on a societal level that's no way to reach a standard of stable families and most people being happily married with kids.
Anyway, that's some sleepy waffling psychological rambling, but it might have something to it.
The Taiwan article I posted in the last thread suggests a different paradigm.
https://alethios.substack.com/p/unexplored-unsaid ...Curiously, TSMC stands apart here. Their Taiwanese workforce accounts for a staggering 1.8% of births in Taiwan (and growing quickly, up from 1.4% in 2019), despite being just 0.3% of the population. After adjusting for demographic differences, I estimate10 that TSMC employees have 2.8x more children than the national average, giving a TFR of around 2.45 children per woman. This is especially noteworthy since every statistical indicator predicts lower-than-average fertility. Employees are overwhelmingly urban, highly educated, irreligious, work long hours, and have a 2:1 skew in gender ratio - all of which would predict lower fertility than the Taiwanese average...
What's TSMC?
Probably one of the most important companies youve never heard of.
They make all the most sophisticated semiconductors that run the world around you.
TSMC is an interesting company I only learnt recently it was created, owned and controlled by the Taiwanese state govt
RoC not exactly playing fair in the free market like US/UK do !!
US and eu are now spending billions trying to bring back some semiconductors for military security
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
The Dems want all this to go away quickly now. The way they just did away with Biden, who is now in a coma in a secure bunker in Montana, with a deepfake making his “phone calls”
Trouble is I’m not sure it will go away. Indeed now that Biden has retired for undisclosed and presumably sudden “health reasons” that they won’t explain, it could get worse, once they get over the Kamalagasm
Give over, its over.
There's only one party now with a doddery, demented old fool on the ticket - and its not the donkey.
The Dems want all this to go away quickly now. The way they just did away with Biden, who is now in a coma in a secure bunker in Montana, with a deepfake making his “phone calls”
Trouble is I’m not sure it will go away. Indeed now that Biden has retired for undisclosed and presumably sudden “health reasons” that they won’t explain, it could get worse, once they get over the Kamalagasm
Give over, its over.
There's only one party now with a doddery, demented old fool on the ticket - and it's not the donkey.
Well, the party in question is led by a donkey.
Taking a leaf out of Agatha Christie, the slogan every time the donkey in question forgets where he is should be 'Elephants Do Forget.'
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Good god
You do have to wonder what's going on. DJTJ could be getting served **** on the reg by solid 9+s (NYC Over 30s Division) yet he's with Zelda out of Terrahawks not Zelda out of Legend of Zelda.
The twitter psychologists (I know) say Kimberly bears more than a passing resemblance to Melania, which is pretty fckd up in a wonderfully Trumpian way.
Martin Lewis has repeated a point I've banged on about for ages (Though him being him more people might listen)
Martin Lewis 3m · An important clarification - pls share. There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit). Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
The quickest cure for a Tory revival amongst younger voters is an unpopular Labour government running a poor economy. For example the only time the Tories have won under 30s in the last 50 years were 1979, 1983 and 2010, 2 of which were elections where that applied and the other of which saw the SDP split the centre left vote
I remember, years ago, reading an analysis of polling data from the days when Ted Heath was Tory leader. Tory support among the young was negligible and the party seemed doomed in the longer-term.
Just saying.
The "Young Tories" were really struggling in the 90s with many groups closing or just running as a shoestring organisation.
And one of the reasons that the current crop of Top Tories is relatively unattractive is that they are drawn from the Young Tories of that era. And that was when the party was still getting about a quarter of the youth vote.
Flip knows what the party will look like thirty years from now.
This weekend we're having a little break near the coast in North Norfolk. The Google Maps driving route takes me through the Labour monopolies of South and East London, into the Tory holdouts of Essex and South Suffolk, through a band of Labour around Ipswich, through Green Waveney Valley and ending up in Lib Dem North Norfolk. With a couple of small detours I could easily take in Reform's Clacton and Great Yarmouth. If I could be bothered to pay the congestion charge I could exit London via Corbyn's Islington North.
The most politically diverse driving route in the country over a manageable distance? I could cover Labour, Lib Dem, Tory and Green on a drive down to Brighton or Bristol, and Lab-Con-LD-Indy-Reform on the way up to Boston and Skeggy. But Lab-Con-Lib-Ref-Indy-Green must win the prize.
Sorry for going off-topic (although slightly related to the last thread discussion), but isn't a major problem simply that equality doesn't work well for romantic matches, hence rising singleness?
What I mean by this is that women have equality in the workplace. That's a good thing. Women also tend to want to marry up. The economic circumstances of a man matters way more to a woman than the economic circumstances of a woman do to a man.
But that's a problem because equality means roughly the same earning potential so lines drawn according to economic circumstance will average out to being horizontal between men and women. Hence, middle and lower income chaps find things very difficult, because the desire line of marrying up just cuts out a ton of men.
This tallies with what's been remarked upon here before, that overall frisky time is the same as ever, but guys at the top are having tons whereas men at the bottom are getting none. But on a societal level that's no way to reach a standard of stable families and most people being happily married with kids.
Anyway, that's some sleepy waffling psychological rambling, but it might have something to it.
The Taiwan article I posted in the last thread suggests a different paradigm.
https://alethios.substack.com/p/unexplored-unsaid ...Curiously, TSMC stands apart here. Their Taiwanese workforce accounts for a staggering 1.8% of births in Taiwan (and growing quickly, up from 1.4% in 2019), despite being just 0.3% of the population. After adjusting for demographic differences, I estimate10 that TSMC employees have 2.8x more children than the national average, giving a TFR of around 2.45 children per woman. This is especially noteworthy since every statistical indicator predicts lower-than-average fertility. Employees are overwhelmingly urban, highly educated, irreligious, work long hours, and have a 2:1 skew in gender ratio - all of which would predict lower fertility than the Taiwanese average...
What's TSMC?
Probably one of the most important companies youve never heard of.
They make all the most sophisticated semiconductors that run the world around you.
TSMC is an interesting company I only learnt recently it was created, owned and controlled by the Taiwanese state govt
RoC not exactly playing fair in the free market like US/UK do !!
US and eu are now spending billions trying to bring back some semiconductors for military security
The ROC is an interesting political phenomenon. At first glance it appears to be free market, bordering on the anarcho-libertarian. Spend some months or years there and you realise that the State, and in particular, the 2 big political parties, have a finger in every possible pie.
Merging council pensions schemes could unlock a pot of cash to invest in infrastructure/give to middlemen and administrators.
It’s going to happen, isn’t it. Pensions seen by both parties as pots of cash to use. The govt are so good at spending money and investing. Nothing could go wrong.
“A single LGPS with a sophisticated, long-term investment strategy might put up to £40bn into vital infrastructure,” said Tracy Blackwell, chief executive of the PIC. “That could make a big difference to the UK’s economic prospects.”
Consolidating LGPS schemes into a single fund would give Britain “a real sovereign wealth fund” that could be “run and managed to the same professional standards as world-leading schemes like Canada’s,” Blackwell added.
The phrase 'world leading' should ring alarm bells:
The largest shareholder as of July 2023 is the Canadian pension fund Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (Omers) — about 32 per cent.
Why on Earth would a state pension fund invest in 32% of a FTSE100 company, rather than investing in global stock markets in general with a small side of picked stocks?
Well they’re likely to lose several billion, which is not good if you’re a municipal employee in Ontario.
You can be sure that there are people in the Canadian government, UK foreign office and City all telling Reeves that a full bailout must be made or Britain wont be seen as a safe place to invest anymore.
I think she has more sense than that. It will be a test.
Just seems bonkers that a municipal pension fund would so apparently undiversified as this Canadian one is.
The response to the threat is that the pension fund should have been more thorough in checking out the finances of Thames Water when they bought it fully loaded in debt...
One of the problems with very large pension funds, and a combined Local Authority Pension fund would fall into that category, is that it becomes very difficult to make a meaningful difference to their fund. If you invest £5m in X and X doubles in value that gain is a rounding error in the fund as a whole. There is less incentive to look for such opportunities and a stronger tendency to follow the indices.
Smaller pension funds are more nimble and can pay more attention to their individual investments. The "efficiency" of having the funds administered as one can easily be lost elsewhere. Really not sure that is a good idea.
Looking for opportunities (by which you mean stock-picking) means you have to pay managers to do this. Secondly, stock-picking is contrary to the efficient markets hypothesis, which I think is true (market prices reflect existing known information (except in the case if insider-dealing)). Index tracker funds cost pennies to invest in and so without the drag of management costs (and higher transactional costs through increased trading) usually outperform the mean.
*mostly true. Otherwise why politically bet? EMH applies just as much to prediction markets... They also make its deficiencies clearer.
I agree that stock picking is 99% of the time a mug's game. But - very occasionally - you can see obvious mispricings. Sometimes glaringly obvious ones, e.g. shorting CRWD on Friday was imo free money.
I wouldn't short it this afternoon mind. Too many "bargain hunters", could go anywhere.
I think Wokery, turbocharged by social media, is driving misogyny amongst boys and misandry amongst girls. Just look at that stupid poll on young women preferring to be with a bear than a man in a forest upthread.
Identity politics must end.
Its not remotely stupid that women feel safer with a bear than a strange man. Maybe you should stop moaning about identity politics and actually listen women and their concerns instead.
I heard this from my wife long before I heard it on this site, and she said bear too. The context given was that it was a stranger not a man you know in case that makes a difference to you.
A bear is likely to leave you alone. Far fewer women are attacked by bears than men. Instead of moaning about identity politics, how about we deal with the predators that make so many women feel unsafe - and those predators are not bears!
Even though a random bear is probably many thousands of times more likely to attack them than a random man?
Martin Lewis has repeated a point I've banged on about for ages (Though him being him more people might listen)
Martin Lewis 3m · An important clarification - pls share. There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit). Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
Well yes, unless you earn over £100K like I did when my son was a qualifying child in which event you don't get it or have to pay it back.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
Getting pensioners to pay their own way, so that any income earned in retirement is taxed at the same rate as income earned while working, would go some of the way to addressing the problem.
We act like pensioners are impoverished, and some are, but many are not.
Someone living rent and mortgage free on a gold-plated pension of £95k per annum currently pays a lower marginal tax rate than a young graduate starting their life, renting and wanting to save a deposit and start their family on £30k. That is absurd.
Sorry for going off-topic (although slightly related to the last thread discussion), but isn't a major problem simply that equality doesn't work well for romantic matches, hence rising singleness?
What I mean by this is that women have equality in the workplace. That's a good thing. Women also tend to want to marry up. The economic circumstances of a man matters way more to a woman than the economic circumstances of a woman do to a man.
But that's a problem because equality means roughly the same earning potential so lines drawn according to economic circumstance will average out to being horizontal between men and women. Hence, middle and lower income chaps find things very difficult, because the desire line of marrying up just cuts out a ton of men.
This tallies with what's been remarked upon here before, that overall frisky time is the same as ever, but guys at the top are having tons whereas men at the bottom are getting none. But on a societal level that's no way to reach a standard of stable families and most people being happily married with kids.
Anyway, that's some sleepy waffling psychological rambling, but it might have something to it.
The Taiwan article I posted in the last thread suggests a different paradigm.
https://alethios.substack.com/p/unexplored-unsaid ...Curiously, TSMC stands apart here. Their Taiwanese workforce accounts for a staggering 1.8% of births in Taiwan (and growing quickly, up from 1.4% in 2019), despite being just 0.3% of the population. After adjusting for demographic differences, I estimate10 that TSMC employees have 2.8x more children than the national average, giving a TFR of around 2.45 children per woman. This is especially noteworthy since every statistical indicator predicts lower-than-average fertility. Employees are overwhelmingly urban, highly educated, irreligious, work long hours, and have a 2:1 skew in gender ratio - all of which would predict lower fertility than the Taiwanese average...
What's TSMC?
Probably one of the most important companies youve never heard of.
They make all the most sophisticated semiconductors that run the world around you.
TSMC is an interesting company I only learnt recently it was created, owned and controlled by the Taiwanese state govt
RoC not exactly playing fair in the free market like US/UK do !!
US and eu are now spending billions trying to bring back some semiconductors for military security
I think you have a somewhat inaccurate understanding of "the free market".
The US semiconductor industry was built with much the same kind of government funding. Only in its case, via the military, and the Apollo program. TSMC was also quarter owned, at the outset, by Phillips - who provided start up finance, and the required technology licenses, in exchange for about a quarter of the company. (US companies turned them down.)
And TSMC probably wouldn't have existed in its current dominant form had Texas Instruments made Morris Chang their CEO back in the 1980s.
I think Wokery, turbocharged by social media, is driving misogyny amongst boys and misandry amongst girls. Just look at that stupid poll on young women preferring to be with a bear than a man in a forest upthread.
Identity politics must end.
Its not remotely stupid that women feel safer with a bear than a strange man. Maybe you should stop moaning about identity politics and actually listen women and their concerns instead.
I heard this from my wife long before I heard it on this site, and she said bear too. The context given was that it was a stranger not a man you know in case that makes a difference to you.
A bear is likely to leave you alone. Far fewer women are attacked by bears than men. Instead of moaning about identity politics, how about we deal with the predators that make so many women feel unsafe - and those predators are not bears!
Even though a random bear is probably many thousands of times more likely to attack them than a random man?
Is it?
Most bears, like most men, leave people alone.
Another factor is that if a woman is attacked by a bear people are sympathetic and supportive. Nobody says the woman consented to the attack, or was asking for it, or made it up. Or in America gets threatened for filing a false report to the Police for reporting an attack that did happen. None of that happens with bears.
Without going full @Leon, she looks *very* hot in that picture. Just my sort. She's fairly good-looking now as well; especially given the competition. I'd even say she's more attractive now than Melania Trump.
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Good god
You do have to wonder what's going on. DJTJ could be getting served **** on the reg by solid 9+s (NYC Over 30s Division) yet he's with Zelda out of Terrahawks not Zelda out of Legend of Zelda.
The twitter psychologists (I know) say Kimberly bears more than a passing resemblance to Melania, which is pretty fckd up in a wonderfully Trumpian way.
Putting on my Kink Doctor hat (REMEMBER THE NECKLACE) I diagnose some fetlifery here
Look at this photo of DJTrump Junior before he adopted the "manly beard"
That's a boyish sub face, with hints of bisexuality
If you can't go full gay (you're the son of Trump!), then getting pegged by a domme wife is the next best thing. And she looks incredibly domme. In fact in this photo she looks like a paid and professional domme, advertising for business
Martin Lewis has repeated a point I've banged on about for ages (Though him being him more people might listen)
Martin Lewis 3m · An important clarification - pls share. There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit). Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
Well yes, unless you earn over £100K like I did when my son was a qualifying child in which event you don't get it or have to pay it back.
It's not even £100k, it's £80k.
The way marginal taxes work in this country, particularly as a parent, between £50k and £125k is crazy. As is the universal credit taper at the other end.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I looked about 28 into my early 50s. And then suddenly I didn’t
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
I'd wager you still look younger than the 46 year old above.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
I think Wokery, turbocharged by social media, is driving misogyny amongst boys and misandry amongst girls. Just look at that stupid poll on young women preferring to be with a bear than a man in a forest upthread.
Identity politics must end.
Its not remotely stupid that women feel safer with a bear than a strange man. Maybe you should stop moaning about identity politics and actually listen women and their concerns instead.
I heard this from my wife long before I heard it on this site, and she said bear too. The context given was that it was a stranger not a man you know in case that makes a difference to you.
A bear is likely to leave you alone. Far fewer women are attacked by bears than men. Instead of moaning about identity politics, how about we deal with the predators that make so many women feel unsafe - and those predators are not bears!
Even though a random bear is probably many thousands of times more likely to attack them than a random man?
Depends on the bear I assume. Black bear, very very unlikely to attack. Grizzly, worth exercising some caution, Polar bear you're dead meat but they're unlikely to be found in woods. Panda or Koala, you're probably fine.
Man...depends on the woods and time of day doesn't it? Afternoon on a footpath in a National Trust estate: safer than bears. Late night in the scrubby woodland on the edge of town, the sort of place you wonder why there's a man there in the first place? Think I'd prefer a bear, and I'm not even a woman.
I think Wokery, turbocharged by social media, is driving misogyny amongst boys and misandry amongst girls. Just look at that stupid poll on young women preferring to be with a bear than a man in a forest upthread.
Identity politics must end.
Its not remotely stupid that women feel safer with a bear than a strange man. Maybe you should stop moaning about identity politics and actually listen women and their concerns instead.
I heard this from my wife long before I heard it on this site, and she said bear too. The context given was that it was a stranger not a man you know in case that makes a difference to you.
A bear is likely to leave you alone. Far fewer women are attacked by bears than men. Instead of moaning about identity politics, how about we deal with the predators that make so many women feel unsafe - and those predators are not bears!
Even though a random bear is probably many thousands of times more likely to attack them than a random man?
Is it?
Most bears, like most men, leave people alone.
Another factor is that if a woman is attacked by a bear people are sympathetic and supportive. Nobody says the woman consented to the attack, or was asking for it, or made it up. Or in America gets threatened for filing a false report to the Police for reporting an attack that did happen. None of that happens with bears.
The question is very poorly phrased. A bear a few yards away is probably not going to leave you alone if it's being forced to stay with you. A bear in the same forest of course will.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, said in 2021 that Vice President Kamala Harris is one of the “childless cat ladies” who is “miserable” with her life and has no direct stake in America because she is not a mom, the HuffPost reports.
The Repulican lady interviewed on R4 this evening was derisive about that - said she was a single cat lady too.
That kind of comment is likely to go down badly . If Vance thinks trashing women who either choose not to have kids or can’t have them is a vote winner then he really is deluded .
Wasn't it female voters who won it for Biden last time? I know he increased the Democrat share among white men, which was likely important too, but I seem to recall the gender gap was pretty large still.
IIRC, the number of women now reaching the age of 45 without kids is about 25%. More pertinently, the number of these who have chosen not to have kids is about 3%. That we have contrived to arrange society thus is one of history's biggest failures.
A rather horrible cooperation between the Conservative Party (stop paying poor people to have children!) and boomers (give me money, not my children!) led to an outcome neither side wanted. In fairness to them, the extended childhood ushered in by New Labour (everybody must go to University!) didn't help either.
I don't necessarily deny this (though I don't think we should be paying anyone to have children, we should be creating the economic and societal conditions where it is not prohibitively expensive to do so) - but this isn't just a British phenomenon; it appears to be common to the whole of the developed world (and also Russia). It's a problem, but it's a very interesting problem.
That's fair, @Cookie. It is true that the Conservatives did not fix the problem (and arguably made it worse), but it is also true that they did not cause it. I'm going to split my answer into two parts. This is part 1: an AI summary of Zeihan's explanation.
Part 1: Zeihan on Demography: the basics In this episode Peter Zeihan explains the importance of population structures in shaping economies and countries' success.
The traditional pyramid demographic model has a large young population at the bottom and few retirees at the top, leading to inflationary economic activity. However, due to decreased child mortality and increased lifespans, many countries now have a chimney-shaped demographic structure with a balanced distribution of age groups, resulting in controlled inflation and a balanced economy.
He also highlights the emerging trend of an inverted pyramid demographic model, where there are more people in older age groups than younger ones. This leads to a decline in consumption and a surplus of capital, requiring countries to focus on exports. This shift has been observed in Europe and Asia since 2000, impacting global trade relations.
He then categorizes countries based on their demographic structures, from pyramid-shaped (Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa) to chimney-shaped (India, United States) to inverted pyramid-shaped (Germany, Italy). He warns that countries with an aging population and declining birth rates will have problems in the coming decade, as the workforce moves into retirement with insufficient younger generations to support consumption and production.
To address this issue, countries can either increase their birth rates or implement large-scale immigration policies to bolster their populations. However, once a country's demographic structure has inverted, it's difficult to reverse the trend.
He ends by saying that to fix all this you should have started thirty years ago, and in the next episode he discusses Canada as a country that did exactly that through immigration policies.
This is part 2: me picking out the salient points
Part 2: Viewcode's tenpennyworth
Urbanisation. People moved from the country to the cities. In the country you can have a farm and children are a boon because they can work. In the cities children are expensive furniture that break things
Birth control. If you can control your reproductive cycle you can put off having children until it's convenient. But it never is...
Juvenilization of adults. By continually pushing the age of agency up, people are now not starting families until their mid twenties or even thirties or forties. That's too late. This has been exacerbated in the UK by pensionerism as older people treat their grandchildren as children.
Longer life spans. Old people use up resources and must be looked after, which reduces the amount of time and resources you have to make and look after babies.
Hat tip to you, @viewcode , for introducing something I hadn't particularly thought of: your fourth point. The other three are choices, and I recognise the truth of them, but if we truly wanted children we could overcome them. The fourth is an external factor, and is true whether you are taking care of old people at an individual level or at a state level: the more we spend on the old, the less we will have to spend on the young. Therefore more old people almost necessarily leads to fewer young people. We are necessarily being destroyed by the demographic miracle of a century ago.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg - this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations. I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
I think that's a slightly extreme example. Most 46 year olds didn't look quite as old as this heavy-drinking (and probably smoking) football fan in 1975.
I think Wokery, turbocharged by social media, is driving misogyny amongst boys and misandry amongst girls. Just look at that stupid poll on young women preferring to be with a bear than a man in a forest upthread.
Identity politics must end.
Its not remotely stupid that women feel safer with a bear than a strange man. Maybe you should stop moaning about identity politics and actually listen women and their concerns instead.
I heard this from my wife long before I heard it on this site, and she said bear too. The context given was that it was a stranger not a man you know in case that makes a difference to you.
A bear is likely to leave you alone. Far fewer women are attacked by bears than men. Instead of moaning about identity politics, how about we deal with the predators that make so many women feel unsafe - and those predators are not bears!
Even though a random bear is probably many thousands of times more likely to attack them than a random man?
Is it?
Most bears, like most men, leave people alone.
Another factor is that if a woman is attacked by a bear people are sympathetic and supportive. Nobody says the woman consented to the attack, or was asking for it, or made it up. Or in America gets threatened for filing a false report to the Police for reporting an attack that did happen. None of that happens with bears.
The question is very poorly phrased. A bear a few yards away is probably not going to leave you alone if it's being forced to stay with you. A bear in the same forest of course will.
The original question is would you rather be in the same forest . . .
I remember this "A lot of Tory voters will be dead by the next election" line after the 1997 election. History repeats itself. In reality the party will attract new voters under Kemi Badenoch's leadership, assuming she's the winner of the contest.
I think Wokery, turbocharged by social media, is driving misogyny amongst boys and misandry amongst girls. Just look at that stupid poll on young women preferring to be with a bear than a man in a forest upthread.
Identity politics must end.
Its not remotely stupid that women feel safer with a bear than a strange man. Maybe you should stop moaning about identity politics and actually listen women and their concerns instead.
I heard this from my wife long before I heard it on this site, and she said bear too. The context given was that it was a stranger not a man you know in case that makes a difference to you.
A bear is likely to leave you alone. Far fewer women are attacked by bears than men. Instead of moaning about identity politics, how about we deal with the predators that make so many women feel unsafe - and those predators are not bears!
Even though a random bear is probably many thousands of times more likely to attack them than a random man?
Is it?
Most bears, like most men, leave people alone.
Another factor is that if a woman is attacked by a bear people are sympathetic and supportive. Nobody says the woman consented to the attack, or was asking for it, or made it up. Or in America gets threatened for filing a false report to the Police for reporting an attack that did happen. None of that happens with bears.
The question is very poorly phrased. A bear a few yards away is probably not going to leave you alone if it's being forced to stay with you. A bear in the same forest of course will.
The original question is would you rather be in the same forest . . .
And you have to remember that a bear is going to be seeking to avoid humans while a man may be actively seeking them...
Martin Lewis has repeated a point I've banged on about for ages (Though him being him more people might listen)
Martin Lewis 3m · An important clarification - pls share. There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit). Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
Well yes, unless you earn over £100K like I did when my son was a qualifying child in which event you don't get it or have to pay it back.
It's not even £100k, it's £80k.
The way marginal taxes work in this country, particularly as a parent, between £50k and £125k is crazy. As is the universal credit taper at the other end.
Ironically there is much they can do with the universal credit taper because any changes to the taper will drag even more people into universal credit.
I think Wokery, turbocharged by social media, is driving misogyny amongst boys and misandry amongst girls. Just look at that stupid poll on young women preferring to be with a bear than a man in a forest upthread.
Identity politics must end.
Its not remotely stupid that women feel safer with a bear than a strange man. Maybe you should stop moaning about identity politics and actually listen women and their concerns instead.
I heard this from my wife long before I heard it on this site, and she said bear too. The context given was that it was a stranger not a man you know in case that makes a difference to you.
A bear is likely to leave you alone. Far fewer women are attacked by bears than men. Instead of moaning about identity politics, how about we deal with the predators that make so many women feel unsafe - and those predators are not bears!
Even though a random bear is probably many thousands of times more likely to attack them than a random man?
Is it?
Most bears, like most men, leave people alone.
Another factor is that if a woman is attacked by a bear people are sympathetic and supportive. Nobody says the woman consented to the attack, or was asking for it, or made it up. Or in America gets threatened for filing a false report to the Police for reporting an attack that did happen. None of that happens with bears.
The question is very poorly phrased. A bear a few yards away is probably not going to leave you alone if it's being forced to stay with you. A bear in the same forest of course will.
The original question is would you rather be in the same forest . . .
In that case, frankly, it makes no difference as you'll never meet either one before you die from dehydration
But it explains a lot of the "controversy", assuming you're right. People hearing different questions from the same words.
Comments
I wonder if it was actually done against his will - like seizing the car keys out of your grandpa’s angry
hands. And he’s still fuming. Which is why he’s not been seen
Over the top? Maybe, but there have been a couple of "flasher" type incidents in the past few years and Loughborough town has its share of assaults. Some of it is me worrying about her. She doesn't like being on her own in the part of the network near Loughborough as it's a really sketchy area and couple of runners have been mugged for their phones and watches there.
At least we're not in the US. The question "What do y'all use to carry your Glock whilst out on a run?" must get asked at least once a week by newbie female runners in the groups and forums I'm in!
Perhaps the reason you haven’t seen Biden is that he is still self isolating with Covid.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2024/jul/22/joe-biden-calls-kamala-harris-event-video
https://x.com/twlldun/status/1815670441698042320?s=61
But if they are true, and Biden either dies or stands down as President, that means Harris becomes president with less than four months until election day. Given that's essentially f-all time to do anything policy-wise, how would that affect her position? Would it make a Harris win in November more or less likely?
(I assume she'd have to choose a vice president very quickly, who would almost certainly become her running mate?)
(And with this comment, I shall withdraw in shame.)
He was all fired up to see the minister, vote for the idea….
I have seen similar with too many “leaders” - they seem extremely vulnerable to a plausible pitch from the last guy they spoke to. Whereas I think in terms of “OK, nice idea. What are the draw backs? Downsides? Why isn’t this happening already?”
Edit: BritVolt was a recent, perfect example of this. They were obviously heading for failure.
I don't have a statistically significant sample of ladies.
I suppose we could give cats the vote. As long as they are over 16.
Harris would be only the second US President born after the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Obama being the only one to date).
If Beshear doesn’t seem to be in the frame I’d think Shapiro would be the one to watch.
She's no Kimberly Guilfoyle.
The truth will be that he's super depressed about getting old/ill and losing the Presidency. We should invite him to Balmoral/Sandringham for holibobs.
Same as the Tories did by confining the Nil Rate Band of IHT to Ideologically Sound Nuclear Family Parents, and only later admitting their error.
We can no longer determine what is true from what we see and hear with our own senses. It’s quite a moment
Vance has bought into the Rad Trad Catholic thing, and if it has brought him peace, then peace be with him.
But if he runs for office on that basis, a lot of people are going to shuffle away nervously. Including quite a lot of Catholics.
Out to 100-1 for the presidency now.
Thekey date seems to be 1997
If the first election you could vote in was 1997 then you are far less likely to vote Conservative
if you look at the data this has shift been true for many years but is has only become clearer over time as generations move on
No idea how the Tories can solve it
A GA/NV/AZ/NC strategy seems a viable play for Harris (in contrast with Biden), so PA isn't as critical. Kelly or Coper wouldn't be daft picks.
Would Buttigieg need vetting, given he'll already have undergone the process for the cabinet post ?
Judging from his media activity over the last 24 hours or so, Beshear really wants it.
So I'm not surprised they've given up hope...
One is that it would be a lie, wouldn't it? And whilst that wouldn't bother Trump, I think it would bother Vance. (How he reconciles his integrity with serving the liar-in-chief I will leave to him and his confessor.)
The other is that pitying childless women to death is consistent with his prescription for society's ills. All that has changed is the platform from which he is saying it.
I think the underlying thing here is that such values being expressed are still stuck in the 19C.
Someone: >Would Buttigieg need vetting, given he'll already have undergone the process for the cabinet post ?
I've noted the comments about vetting; the Dems are obviously thinking about cats.
But it's also, probably, why (eg) stadium events aren't going away.
Hard to deepfake something tens of thousand of people witness.
I think Newsom heads out to 1000 once the convention is over, Clinton and Obama err *should* - RFK is a bit different even though he's probably 1000-1 in reality he likely won't trade at that price till the election is over.
Easy mistake to make. Not like one of them has a beard or anything.
Mind you, they're both still madder than General Ripper.
And he still looks like Jeffrey Hunter as Christopher Pike, only more psychotic.
It's not like he said, or it started to be memed, yesterday.
Just saying.
Vaguely on topic, I wouldn't be too concerned. Yes, 2028 might be worse than 2024 (marginally, in some areas) just as 2001 was worse than 1997 (marginally, in some areas). Inevitably, opposition will develop to the Government - there's a fair bit of it on here after less than three weeks, it seems.
The road "back" for conservative politics in the UK isn't easy to map. As others have said, if one of the foundations of conservative policy is strong fiscal management there has to be a mea culpa for what happened in the past administration - as an aside, Reeves seems determined to track down the millions apparently defrauded during Covid by the public - the biggest con artists of them all.
If you want to balance the books, live within your means, however you want to define it, there needs to be an honest debate with the electorate. I imagine some will be looking at what Pollievre is doing in Canada where he is arguing for all spending to be fiscally neutral - any new expenditure has to be balanced by a cut but that's the kind of granularity which is going to cause problems here.
However, freezing spending (which may be laudable as long as there are no sacred cows such as defence and education) only gets you so far. The income side of the balance sheet has to rise accordingly so how do you get more money in? The Lafferites argue cutting taxes brings in more money eventually through increased economic activity - others argue different forms of taxation need to be considered such as Land Value Taxation.
Either way, thirty or forty years of telling people they can have lower taxes and better services has warped the debate completely. The debate needs to be reset - perhaps a thoughtful conservative leader (if such a being exists) might be the start.
One area of obvious concern is Social Care - it was, I would argue, one of the biggest failures of the Conservative time in office from 2010 to fail to get to grips with it. It's not easy (if it were, it would have been sorted) but kicking the can down the road repeatedly was a complete abdication of governance. Labour might have a plan but we all know everyone is going to moan and whinge but at least we'd be talking about it rather than it dragging otherwise perfectly well run councils of all political stripes (and none) to the edge of insolvency.
I think the Tories have kneecapped themselves further by rejecting many of their own achievements since 2010.
eg They made significant progress on both housebuilding (not enough but they *did* boost it significantly) and decarbonisation of power supply, wind farms etc.
But as part of Rishi's Save My Butt strategy he went full "give the Nimbys a BJ" and killed housing targets, plus refuted environmental progress in multiple ways.
That means that they are starting from an even worse point politically than would be the case otherwise, and that the Labour Govt will get far more credit than they deserve, including much of which should belong to the Conservatives.
I am honestly not sure how politics as we know it can survive this; indeed, it cannot. Democracy might be finished
I mean you know the rules.
This factor is why declining birth rates are common everywhere, regardless of local cultural or economic factors. (Perhaps - more research needed - the steepness of the decline is a factor of the steepness of the growth 50-100 years ago? I bet it is. I bet you could find a convincing correlation.)
How do we overcome this? I would suggest the only way to do it is by reclassifying 'old' upwards by however much we've increased the life expectancy by. Life expectancy now 85 rather than 75? Great, retire at 75 rather than 65. Retiring at 75 and dying at 85 is surely a better deal than retiring at 65 and dying at 75. And as a society we get much, much richer as a result. The counter to this is that people will not be fit to work in their 70s, but I don't fully buy that: the average 70 year old today is at least as hale and hearty as the average 60 year old two generations back. Those approaching 50 today (*cough*) are as healthy and fit as those a decade younger used to be. We were discussing yesterday - in the context of Kamala Harris and Kier Starmer - how much younger looking people are now. And I posted this, from 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUqq4Q8gsg
- this is what a 46 year old looked like in 1975:
It'll be politically difficult to do. There'll be an angry pensioner along to tell you how hard they worked for their 25-year long retirement. But as someone for whom retirement is no longer an unimaginably remote landmark on the horizon, I'm the generation who stands to lose out the most - yet it strikes me as the only equitable and affordable solution. The only alternatives are can-kicking ponzi schemes: either extracting people from the third world indefinitely or piling more and more costs onto future generations.
I won't be as lucky as my parents generation who in many cases will spend longer retired than they did working and who can spend healthy decades jetting around the world. But I will still undoubtedly be luckier than every single generation that preceded them.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-october-1974
The YouGov estimate for this month's election was C8L41;
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49978-how-britain-voted-in-the-2024-general-election
The loss of Conservative support amongst the young started in about 2017, and if anything it's getting worse. It's not irreversible, but the party is on a down escalator and needs to start running upwards pretty fast pretty soon.
If it takes two elections to get back into power, a third of their current voters will be dead by then, and likely over half of the members who are about to choose the leader to take on the task.
The challenge for the LibDems is to bed in as the party of the settled middle classes in the Home Counties, hoping that the Tories stick with their anti-business, anti-Europe, anti-BBC, anti-judges, anti-universities and anti-modernity nonsense for as long as possible.
RoC not exactly playing fair in the free market like US/UK do !!
US and eu are now spending billions trying to bring back some semiconductors for military security
*quietly sobs in l’Aveyron*
There's only one party now with a doddery, demented old fool on the ticket - and its not the donkey.
Taking a leaf out of Agatha Christie, the slogan every time the donkey in question forgets where he is should be 'Elephants Do Forget.'
Martin Lewis
3m ·
An important clarification - pls share.
There is NO two child cap on Child Benefit
I've had questions, as many media outlets write confusing statements or use 'child benefit' as shorthand. The two-child cap is not about Child Benefit, it is about benefits (eg Universal Credit or tax credit).
Child Benefit is separate and is increased for every child.
Flip knows what the party will look like thirty years from now.
This weekend we're having a little break near the coast in North Norfolk. The Google Maps driving route takes me through the Labour monopolies of South and East London, into the Tory holdouts of Essex and South Suffolk, through a band of Labour around Ipswich, through Green Waveney Valley and ending up in Lib Dem North Norfolk. With a couple of small detours I could easily take in Reform's Clacton and Great Yarmouth. If I could be bothered to pay the congestion charge I could exit London via Corbyn's Islington North.
The most politically diverse driving route in the country over a manageable distance? I could cover Labour, Lib Dem, Tory and Green on a drive down to Brighton or Bristol, and Lab-Con-LD-Indy-Reform on the way up to Boston and Skeggy. But Lab-Con-Lib-Ref-Indy-Green must win the prize.
Spend some months or years there and you realise that the State, and in particular, the 2 big political parties, have a finger in every possible pie.
I agree that stock picking is 99% of the time a mug's game. But - very occasionally - you can see obvious mispricings. Sometimes glaringly obvious ones, e.g. shorting CRWD on Friday was imo free money.
I wouldn't short it this afternoon mind. Too many "bargain hunters", could go anywhere.
We act like pensioners are impoverished, and some are, but many are not.
Someone living rent and mortgage free on a gold-plated pension of £95k per annum currently pays a lower marginal tax rate than a young graduate starting their life, renting and wanting to save a deposit and start their family on £30k. That is absurd.
The US semiconductor industry was built with much the same kind of government funding. Only in its case, via the military, and the Apollo program.
TSMC was also quarter owned, at the outset, by Phillips - who provided start up finance, and the required technology licenses, in exchange for about a quarter of the company. (US companies turned them down.)
And TSMC probably wouldn't have existed in its current dominant form had Texas Instruments made Morris Chang their CEO back in the 1980s.
Most bears, like most men, leave people alone.
Another factor is that if a woman is attacked by a bear people are sympathetic and supportive. Nobody says the woman consented to the attack, or was asking for it, or made it up. Or in America gets threatened for filing a false report to the Police for reporting an attack that did happen. None of that happens with bears.
Look at this photo of DJTrump Junior before he adopted the "manly beard"
That's a boyish sub face, with hints of bisexuality
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump-Jr
If you can't go full gay (you're the son of Trump!), then getting pegged by a domme wife is the next best thing. And she looks incredibly domme. In fact in this photo she looks like a paid and professional domme, advertising for business
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=912953780191689&id=100044312265402&set=a.292079542279119
I won't go any further as I don't want to cross the line into vulgar prurience
The way marginal taxes work in this country, particularly as a parent, between £50k and £125k is crazy. As is the universal credit taper at the other end.
This is all an on-average, of course. My Dad always looked a good 10 years younger than he was, and still does. I have very little hair now, and that ages me. I suspect I'm going to get a bit jowly in the next few years. But almost all of my 50-ish friends seem capable of remarkable feats - half marathons, lengthy bike rides, football, etc - which you just wouldn't have expected from that demographic 50 years ago. And yes, self-selecting middle-class suburbanite, but that was also true of the 50-year-olds I knew when I was growing up.
The decline in smoking possibly has a lot to do with it.
Man...depends on the woods and time of day doesn't it? Afternoon on a footpath in a National Trust estate: safer than bears. Late night in the scrubby woodland on the edge of town, the sort of place you wonder why there's a man there in the first place? Think I'd prefer a bear, and I'm not even a woman.
But it explains a lot of the "controversy", assuming you're right. People hearing different questions from the same words.
That's the problem, in the past people grew up, settled down, got a mortgage and aged into Tories.
Now that mechanism has been kicked away.