It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
"I’m a bit surprised about the ‘wall discussion’ here. Yes, the wall was really painfully unfortunate in this instance. But take a look at the departure end of about every other runway in Europe. You’ll find busy highways, fly overs, ditches, drop offs, cliffs, oceans with or without vessels, forests, houses, McDonalds, you name it, in similar proximity, if not closer than this wall.
This aircraft had a problem that 2800 meters of runway could not solve. Let’s focus on that."
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
No, The Simpsons is right. Things are much the same here. Professional men marry professional women for a combined income ten times the national average, and still need to spend more than half to live in a house that decades ago would have been occupied by a single-earner working class family.
It was @Leon who first pointed this out on PB years ago when he noted that in A Christmas Carol, the Cratchits who could not afford their own turkey lived in what is now a million pound house in Camden.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
A little background on the pro-life movement in the US: It has been, and is, largely a grass roots woman's movement. Years ago, I recall seeing a Gallup poll finding that those who voted on that single issue were mostly women, and that those who voted on the issue were more likely to be pro-life. It wasn't particularly a partisan issue, to begin with. For example, Jesse Jackson, was pro-life, no doubt in part because black babies were more likely to be killed than white babies.
While Roe was in effect, candidates could often gain votes, net, by opposing abortion, while knowing they could do little about it.
To compare these women to the Taliban seems a little strange.
(I assume all of you know that, in some groups, girls are more likely to be killed before birth than boys.)
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
Well Ross had a steady job. But yes.
Plus Chandler was a transponster.
And Joey presumably earned a fortune as a television actor. Wasn't the conceit that one of the flats belonged to either Rachel's or Phoebe's aunt or something and was thus rent-controlled?
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
Well Ross had a steady job. But yes.
Plus Chandler was a transponster.
A what? ..
Ah ok, googled. That's good Friends knowledge there.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
Well Ross had a steady job. But yes.
Plus Chandler was a transponster.
And Joey presumably earned a fortune as a television actor. Wasn't the conceit that one of the flats belonged to either Rachel's or Phoebe's aunt or something and was thus rent-controlled?
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
I also think that the aid agencies need to reflect on whether their support (in terms of providing very basic needs) for such a regime can be justified by the appalling suffering of its people. Of course we would have to accept that such an approach would greatly increase the number of refugees from this shambles of a country.
I am sure that Britain welcomes refugees fleeing such an awful place.
Doesn't it?
We broke it but let others beyond the Channel fix it has always been the British way.
We didn't break it.
We failed in our attempts to fix it, but Afghanistan was already broken long before 9/11.
Since 'we' have been dabbling in Afghan politics long before 9/11 I'd suggest we bear some responsibilty.
Not really.
Prior to 9/11 we hadn't been directly involved for a very long time.
If we were responsible, Afghanistan would be a much better place, but they don't want us involved even when we tried to fix things and failed to do so.
The Afghani population needs to take some accountability for its choices.
Yeah, the British Empire was all about making places better and fixing things. Tbf to the Afghans if Britain 'tried to fix things and failed to do so', probably wise to tell us to eff off.
Afghanistan was getting somewhere, socially, in the 70's. There was even a bus route from London to Calcutta/Kolkata which stopped in Kabul. Then there was the Revolution and the Soviet invasion, which the 'more enthusiastic' Muslims opposed, and were aided in their opposition by the West. Unfortunately those Muslims developed into the Taliban.
As someone born in the 70s, I have only ever known the arc from the Jordan to the Indus to be an unremitting medieval hellhole (Pakistan appears to be somewhat mixed but with a large area into which its inadvisable to go and an apparent constant danger of joining its western neighbours in Islamic totalitarianism). It's quite startling to learn how relatively recently this wasn't the case.
These places were beacons of light, learning and tolerance in the Middle Ages (pre-Genghis Khan) compared with now. Or indeed, compared with Europe then.
There is a fascinating book written by Robert Byron in the 1930s called the Road to Oxiana in which he is looking for the roots of Islamic Architecture. In it he mentions that in the early 13th century Herat, now a largely forgotten backwater in North Western Afghanistan, was reputedly the largest city in the world. When it was taken by the Mongols in 1222 they are said to have beheaded the entire population of 1.6 million.
What on earth was the Mongols problem?
They make Hitler look like a wet lettuce.
They took that view that if you did one Herat (which if I recall didn’t surrender at the first opportunity but waited until the red tent was pitched) then all other cities would surrender immediately so the overall loss of life would be lower.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
No, The Simpsons is right. Things are much the same here. Professional men marry professional women for a combined income ten times the national average, and still need to spend more than half to live in a house that decades ago would have been occupied by a single-earner working class family.
It was @Leon who first pointed this out on PB years ago when he noted that in A Christmas Carol, the Cratchits who could not afford their own turkey lived in what is now a million pound house in Camden.
Long years before that, there were plenty of jokes like the one about wanting to live in the slasher movie. Where ordinary people could afford apartments big enough to have a chase in.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
I also think that the aid agencies need to reflect on whether their support (in terms of providing very basic needs) for such a regime can be justified by the appalling suffering of its people. Of course we would have to accept that such an approach would greatly increase the number of refugees from this shambles of a country.
I am sure that Britain welcomes refugees fleeing such an awful place.
Doesn't it?
We broke it but let others beyond the Channel fix it has always been the British way.
We didn't break it.
We failed in our attempts to fix it, but Afghanistan was already broken long before 9/11.
Since 'we' have been dabbling in Afghan politics long before 9/11 I'd suggest we bear some responsibilty.
Not really.
Prior to 9/11 we hadn't been directly involved for a very long time.
If we were responsible, Afghanistan would be a much better place, but they don't want us involved even when we tried to fix things and failed to do so.
The Afghani population needs to take some accountability for its choices.
Yeah, the British Empire was all about making places better and fixing things. Tbf to the Afghans if Britain 'tried to fix things and failed to do so', probably wise to tell us to eff off.
Afghanistan was getting somewhere, socially, in the 70's. There was even a bus route from London to Calcutta/Kolkata which stopped in Kabul. Then there was the Revolution and the Soviet invasion, which the 'more enthusiastic' Muslims opposed, and were aided in their opposition by the West. Unfortunately those Muslims developed into the Taliban.
As someone born in the 70s, I have only ever known the arc from the Jordan to the Indus to be an unremitting medieval hellhole (Pakistan appears to be somewhat mixed but with a large area into which its inadvisable to go and an apparent constant danger of joining its western neighbours in Islamic totalitarianism). It's quite startling to learn how relatively recently this wasn't the case.
These places were beacons of light, learning and tolerance in the Middle Ages (pre-Genghis Khan) compared with now. Or indeed, compared with Europe then.
There is a fascinating book written by Robert Byron in the 1930s called the Road to Oxiana in which he is looking for the roots of Islamic Architecture. In it he mentions that in the early 13th century Herat, now a largely forgotten backwater in North Western Afghanistan, was reputedly the largest city in the world. When it was taken by the Mongols in 1222 they are said to have beheaded the entire population of 1.6 million.
What on earth was the Mongols problem?
They make Hitler look like a wet lettuce.
They took that view that if you did one Herat (which if I recall didn’t surrender at the first opportunity but waited until the red tent was pitched) then all other cities would surrender immediately so the overall loss of life would be lower.
It’s an argument…
Greatest good for the greatest number. There's some heavyweight philosophical backing for that.
"I’m a bit surprised about the ‘wall discussion’ here. Yes, the wall was really painfully unfortunate in this instance. But take a look at the departure end of about every other runway in Europe. You’ll find busy highways, fly overs, ditches, drop offs, cliffs, oceans with or without vessels, forests, houses, McDonalds, you name it, in similar proximity, if not closer than this wall.
This aircraft had a problem that 2800 meters of runway could not solve. Let’s focus on that."
Looking from the video, and very far from being an expert, he did seem to have trouble actually getting onto the ground, floating above it for some distance. Was there some form of wing-in-ground-effect going on, because he could not set all flaps appropriately, and he was lower to the ground due to no landing gear?
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Paul Mason thinks that in order to thwart the far right, Starmer needs to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP, clamp down on immigration, and get tough on crime.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Paul Mason thinks that in order to thwart the far right, Starmer needs to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP, clamp down on immigration, and get tough on crime.
Yes, Mason's gone bad. I've never trusted him. One of those blokes with an eye on the mirror the whole time. Thinks he's a diamond in the rough.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
If Jesus didn't say anything about gay marriage, and you agreed that he said nothing about it, why does the Church of England forbid it.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
Well Ross had a steady job. But yes.
Plus Chandler was a transponster.
And Joey presumably earned a fortune as a television actor. Wasn't the conceit that one of the flats belonged to either Rachel's or Phoebe's aunt or something and was thus rent-controlled?
Yep.
I don't think I ever watched more than a couple of episodes of Friends, as it seemed both not very funny, and not very interesting.
Though allegedly it has played a bigger role in teaching English to America's recent tech immigrants than almost anything else.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Probably true - though if the Trumpster makes a sufficient horlicks of his second go, it will complicate matters. And it's likely not going to be the contest anyway.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
I think the number of women in the U.S, outside of the most ultra-conservative communities, must be pretty small.
From what I can see, the "Trad Wife" phenomenon is more of a mixture of religious fundamentalists with minimal education, a few largely coastal former careerwomen who now have the money to stay at home, and a slightly larger minority who simply don't like being told that they shouldn't pursue a more traditional female gender role, separate from the employment issue. I wonder if thar group are actually looking more for "Trad women" than trad wives, but the polarised, and online marketplace of ideas has nothing in between the gaps.
Chagos - £800 million a year for something we already own
Thats more than the Farmers are getting screwed for
Starmer really is a prat.
To be fair, the govt is denying they agreed to that figure - though they won't say what they did agree, which should be published now.
Mauritius should be told to do one, including scrapping the previously initialed agreement. If that wasn't good enough for them, it's dead. I'm no great fan of the deal but finance-free I could live with it. But they have no real claim on the islands; let those who live there (or have been displaced, where traceable) choose their sovereignty, as is consistent with international law. As for the base, a long-lease at market rates or it doesn't go anywhere.
How do we determine the market rate for a site for a military base -- sealed bid auction and invite the Chinese and the Russians to take part?
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
Well Ross had a steady job. But yes.
Plus Chandler was a transponster.
And Joey presumably earned a fortune as a television actor. Wasn't the conceit that one of the flats belonged to either Rachel's or Phoebe's aunt or something and was thus rent-controlled?
Yep.
I don't think I ever watched more than a couple of episodes of Friends, as it seemed both not very funny, and not very interesting.
Though allegedly it has played a bigger role in teaching English to America's recent tech immigrants than almost anything else.
So you didn't watch it but think it's not very funny or interesting.
Just to be clear about this: Does Cyclefree believe that the Loser should not have surrendered to the Taliban, and that Biden should not have botched the withdrawal of the US forces, which were providing protection for some Afghan women?
(Incidentally, Laura Bush tried hard to help Afghan women, with some success.)
Biden made clear he would not put anymore US soldiers lives in danger to protect Afghan womens rights and given Bin Laden was dead didn't think the US should be in Afghanistan anymore so pulled out of Kabul
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
Well Ross had a steady job. But yes.
Plus Chandler was a transponster.
And Joey presumably earned a fortune as a television actor. Wasn't the conceit that one of the flats belonged to either Rachel's or Phoebe's aunt or something and was thus rent-controlled?
Yep.
I don't think I ever watched more than a couple of episodes of Friends, as it seemed both not very funny, and not very interesting.
Though allegedly it has played a bigger role in teaching English to America's recent tech immigrants than almost anything else.
So you didn't watch it but think it's not very funny or interesting.
Dolt.
A couple of episodes was quite enough. Tasteless imbecile.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
They weren't doing as you said people should do (ie follow the preachings of Jesus). They were just making it up in the name of the religion that you now follow.
Hence you are following a religion, not the preachings of Jesus.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
Maybe, but 2024 saw the lowest vote share for the main 2 parties in a long time and polling since has seen the Lab+Con vote share drop below 50% some times. The signs are we are moving further away from 2-party politics.
"I’m a bit surprised about the ‘wall discussion’ here. Yes, the wall was really painfully unfortunate in this instance. But take a look at the departure end of about every other runway in Europe. You’ll find busy highways, fly overs, ditches, drop offs, cliffs, oceans with or without vessels, forests, houses, McDonalds, you name it, in similar proximity, if not closer than this wall.
This aircraft had a problem that 2800 meters of runway could not solve. Let’s focus on that."
Looking from the video, and very far from being an expert, he did seem to have trouble actually getting onto the ground, floating above it for some distance. Was there some form of wing-in-ground-effect going on, because he could not set all flaps appropriately, and he was lower to the ground due to no landing gear?
(This WAG is almost certainly hilariously wrong.)
I'd surmise that he could have gone too high to try and go over the flock of birds.
I'm not sure about why his undercarriage was not down, however.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
Well Ross had a steady job. But yes.
Plus Chandler was a transponster.
And Joey presumably earned a fortune as a television actor. Wasn't the conceit that one of the flats belonged to either Rachel's or Phoebe's aunt or something and was thus rent-controlled?
Yep.
I don't think I ever watched more than a couple of episodes of Friends, as it seemed both not very funny, and not very interesting.
Though allegedly it has played a bigger role in teaching English to America's recent tech immigrants than almost anything else.
So you didn't watch it but think it's not very funny or interesting.
Dolt.
A couple of episodes was quite enough. Tasteless imbecile.
Did you get beyond it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, or shall I compare thee to a summer's day.
Not that Dickens is my favourite but what would you know.
I thought we didn't allow illiterate morons on PB these days.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
They weren't doing as you said people should do (ie follow the preachings of Jesus). They were just making it up in the name of the religion that you now follow.
Hence you are following a religion, not the preachings of Jesus.
Quite disappointed in you tbh.
The Christian Church follows the Old Testament Jewish Bible not just the New Testament, which includes the teachings of Paul as well as Christ.
A few denominations do allow same sex marriages in church eg the Methodists, Unitarians, Church of Scotland and Quakers and uS and Scottish Anglicans and some Lutherans but they are in steep decline membership wise.
The fastest growing denominations in the world are Pentecostals and Orthodox neither of which allow any services for same sex couples at all
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
Bondegezou - Here's some data for you: "The vast majority of women who had abortions in 2021 were unmarried (87%), while married women accounted for 13%, according to the CDC, which had data on this from 37 states.
In the District of Columbia, New York City (but not the rest of New York) and the 31 states that reported racial and ethnic data on abortion to the CDC, 42% of all women who had abortions in 2021 were non-Hispanic Black, while 30% were non-Hispanic White, 22% were Hispanic and 6% were of other races." source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/25/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-us/
And this reminder: Hitler, Mao, and . . . . the late Hugh Hefner were all strongly in favor of abortion.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
And "Friends" told us that barely employed single people could live glamorously in NYC. But perhaps tv has always had an element of fantasy.
Well Ross had a steady job. But yes.
Plus Chandler was a transponster.
And Joey presumably earned a fortune as a television actor. Wasn't the conceit that one of the flats belonged to either Rachel's or Phoebe's aunt or something and was thus rent-controlled?
Yep.
I don't think I ever watched more than a couple of episodes of Friends, as it seemed both not very funny, and not very interesting.
Though allegedly it has played a bigger role in teaching English to America's recent tech immigrants than almost anything else.
So you didn't watch it but think it's not very funny or interesting.
Dolt.
A couple of episodes was quite enough. Tasteless imbecile.
Did you get beyond it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, or shall I compare thee to a summer's day.
Not that Dickens is my favourite but what would you know.
I thought we didn't allow illiterate morons on PB these days.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
O/T and apologies if I missed previous discussion of this but... watching the harrowing footage of the Jeju Air crash, who on earth decided to build a concrete block wall around Muan airport?
An aviation expert said the pilot made a text book landing in the circumstances and but for the wall it was fair to assume everyone would have survived. He also commented the runway was shorter than many
As with all disasters lessons will be learnt but sadly at the loss of innocent lives
Hmm. Questions about 'text book'.
The aircraft landed a long way down the runway and at considerable speed. Quite why the landing gear wasn't down is a huge open question, as its inoperability wouldn't normally result from a bird strike. It apparently landed the wrong way on the runway i.e. with the wind, which may have been necessary and may account for (some of) the excess speed but the plane didn't appear to be in *that* much trouble that it couldn't go round - and if it had gone round, it wouldn't have had a concrete wall at the end of the runway and should have been able to land at a much slower speed. Also, the flaps weren't down, increasing stall speed.
Now some or all of those might have technical explanations. Maybe there was a catastrophic loss of hydraulics. But it's an appallingly bad set of coincidences if there are no human factors involved.
It’s a very weird accident. Thankfully the investigators have found the flight recorders, which are probably with the NTSB and heading to a facility for reading them out.
There’s a video that purports to be the accident aircraft suffering a bird strike in one of the engines, but even on one you’ll still have flaps and gear. If you’ve got no hydraulics at all, the gear will drop under gravity, which is surely something you’d attempt. No flaps raises the landing speed considerably though, and requires a much trickier landing technique to avoid ending up with a lot of runway behind you and the plane still flying.
Hopefully we’ll know a lot more in the coming days, but the investigators will be keeping an open mind as they always do.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
I’ve had some strange and hilarious conversations with people about housing in Peru. There, outside the posh bits of Lima, the housing problem is having enough money to build a house on the land you own. Or add another story to the house you live in.
It’s at the concrete (and concrete blocks) level - the actual cost of real builders is beyond most, so they self build, with help from a cousin who worked for a guy.
People from “developed countries” can’t get their heads around there being no shortage of places to build houses.
Hell, some people are still falling for “buy a chateaux in rural France. Because it must be worth more than they are asking”. Even the ones that are half completed boutique hotel projects.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
I think you are deluded. Most of this lot here, if pushed into a corner, would vote for low tax- small state good over evil. And there are many Labour 'til I die types who might not be able to bring themselves to vote Tory, but a National Socialist? Of course they could.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
O/T and apologies if I missed previous discussion of this but... watching the harrowing footage of the Jeju Air crash, who on earth decided to build a concrete block wall around Muan airport?
An aviation expert said the pilot made a text book landing in the circumstances and but for the wall it was fair to assume everyone would have survived. He also commented the runway was shorter than many
As with all disasters lessons will be learnt but sadly at the loss of innocent lives
Hmm. Questions about 'text book'.
The aircraft landed a long way down the runway and at considerable speed. Quite why the landing gear wasn't down is a huge open question, as its inoperability wouldn't normally result from a bird strike. It apparently landed the wrong way on the runway i.e. with the wind, which may have been necessary and may account for (some of) the excess speed but the plane didn't appear to be in *that* much trouble that it couldn't go round - and if it had gone round, it wouldn't have had a concrete wall at the end of the runway and should have been able to land at a much slower speed. Also, the flaps weren't down, increasing stall speed.
Now some or all of those might have technical explanations. Maybe there was a catastrophic loss of hydraulics. But it's an appallingly bad set of coincidences if there are no human factors involved.
It’s a very weird accident. Thankfully the investigators have found the flight recorders, which are probably with the NTSB and heading to a facility for reading them out.
There’s a video that purports to be the accident aircraft suffering a bird strike in one of the engines, but even on one you’ll still have flaps and gear. If you’ve got no hydraulics at all, the gear will drop under gravity, which is surely something you’d attempt. No flaps raises the landing speed considerably though, and requires a much trickier landing technique to avoid ending up with a lot of runway behind you and the plane still flying.
Hopefully we’ll know a lot more in the coming days, but the investigators will be keeping an open mind as they always do.
ISTR there was a case a few years back where something happened on approach, and the pilots simply got overloaded with tasks at exactly the wrong moment, and forgot to put the gear down? All the warnings for the landing gear being up were ignored because both pilots were working the other issue.
So... a bird strike, one or both engines gone, to busy looking at checklists and trying to get it down to remember to put the landing gear down?
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
Its quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the Old Testament.
And a lot of the New with the New too.
There's a reason people like HYUFD prefer to quote from Paul or the Old Testament rather than the Gospels.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
I think you are deluded. Most of this lot here, if pushed into a corner, would vote for low tax- small state good over evil. And there are many Labour 'til I die types who might not be able to bring themselves to vote Tory, but a National Socialist? Of course they could.
Hmm, could be yes. I did get the US wrong. But I stick to my guns on this. I think Starmer beats Farage to the Georgian Townhouse if it's all boiled down to that choice. Farage is closing in on hubris if not already there.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
The New Testament was about Old Testament God having a mid life crisis.
Has an affair with a married woman, kid, the kid’s got this strained relationship with dad. Kid goes off to prove himself to dad and get his love, ends badly.
God smoke a lot of weed on a Thai beach and discovers himself. Relaunches as a charity/ad agency/self help guru.
I fully support boycotts against gender apartheid as much as any other apartheid. Afghanistan as much as South Africa. Ultimately it can prove effective as it did in South Africa. Israel should certainly be sanctioned, It has defied international law and has been pracicing aparteid for decades
That whole region is a mess. But I'm always amused that it the leftists concentrate on Israel - perhaps the best country to be anything other than Muslim, or male, in the immediate region.
I fully support boycotts against gender apartheid as much as any other apartheid. Afghanistan as much as South Africa. Ultimately it can prove effective as it did in South Africa. Israel should certainly be sanctioned, It has defied international law and has been pracicing aparteid for decades
That whole region is a mess. But I'm always amused that it the leftists concentrate on Israel - perhaps the best country to be anything other than Muslim, or male, in the immediate region.
Written on every Israeli bomb dropped
“We’re not as bad as some Muslins “
Gives them some comfort I suppose
I was responding to the following part of the comment: " It has defied international law and has been pracicing aparteid for decades"
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
O/T and apologies if I missed previous discussion of this but... watching the harrowing footage of the Jeju Air crash, who on earth decided to build a concrete block wall around Muan airport?
An aviation expert said the pilot made a text book landing in the circumstances and but for the wall it was fair to assume everyone would have survived. He also commented the runway was shorter than many
As with all disasters lessons will be learnt but sadly at the loss of innocent lives
Hmm. Questions about 'text book'.
The aircraft landed a long way down the runway and at considerable speed. Quite why the landing gear wasn't down is a huge open question, as its inoperability wouldn't normally result from a bird strike. It apparently landed the wrong way on the runway i.e. with the wind, which may have been necessary and may account for (some of) the excess speed but the plane didn't appear to be in *that* much trouble that it couldn't go round - and if it had gone round, it wouldn't have had a concrete wall at the end of the runway and should have been able to land at a much slower speed. Also, the flaps weren't down, increasing stall speed.
Now some or all of those might have technical explanations. Maybe there was a catastrophic loss of hydraulics. But it's an appallingly bad set of coincidences if there are no human factors involved.
It’s a very weird accident. Thankfully the investigators have found the flight recorders, which are probably with the NTSB and heading to a facility for reading them out.
There’s a video that purports to be the accident aircraft suffering a bird strike in one of the engines, but even on one you’ll still have flaps and gear. If you’ve got no hydraulics at all, the gear will drop under gravity, which is surely something you’d attempt. No flaps raises the landing speed considerably though, and requires a much trickier landing technique to avoid ending up with a lot of runway behind you and the plane still flying.
Hopefully we’ll know a lot more in the coming days, but the investigators will be keeping an open mind as they always do.
ISTR there was a case a few years back where something happened on approach, and the pilots simply got overloaded with tasks at exactly the wrong moment, and forgot to put the gear down? All the warnings for the landing gear being up were ignored because both pilots were working the other issue.
So... a bird strike, one or both engines gone, to busy looking at checklists and trying to get it down to remember to put the landing gear down?
There’s very little that hasn’t been messed up by otherwise competent pilots under high workload, at some point in aviation history.
The gear warning - a very loud “TOO LOW GEAR” annunciated several times, often alongside “TERRAIN TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP” at an equally-high volume, have been known to be totally tuned out by pilots who have no memory of the warnings when interviewed after an incident, and are shocked to hear them clearly on the cockpit voice recorder. There’s a lot of medical research into how people inadvertently tune out an awful lot of stimulus in high-pressure situations. Pilots are also trained to “aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order”, although a crew of two are supposed to manage the workload between them, with one doing nothing except the aviating and the other running the checklists and talking to ATC. There’s plenty of times that the crew has failed to work effectively during an incident as well.
One might also expect the tower to mention the lack of landing gear to the pilots, and expect an acknowledgment in return, if they wen’t expecting it to be landing wheels-up. The accident was said to be from the second approach, so again we need more details of the exact sequence of events.
Some interesting reviews of Carter's life appearing in the press.
"A progressive evangelical who advanced the causes of womens' and minorities' rights before the Christian Right rolled back the gains."
It's easy to forget how different some things were in the supposedly uniformly awful 1970's, when there wasn't just a post-1960's Chrustian Left in the United States, but social liberalism in parts of the urban Middle East. The world needs more of that cross-cultural spirit.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
I think you are deluded. Most of this lot here, if pushed into a corner, would vote for low tax- small state good over evil. And there are many Labour 'til I die types who might not be able to bring themselves to vote Tory, but a National Socialist? Of course they could.
Hmm, could be yes. I did get the US wrong. But I stick to my guns on this. I think Starmer beats Farage to the Georgian Townhouse if it's all boiled down to that choice. Farage is closing in on hubris if not already there.
Your email confused me as neither seemed likely to become First Minister - Bute House being very much a Georgian Townhouse (and owned by the NTS who open the Georgian House next door to the public). Downing St, or at least the facade on the street, is of Charles II date ...
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
I think you are deluded. Most of this lot here, if pushed into a corner, would vote for low tax- small state good over evil. And there are many Labour 'til I die types who might not be able to bring themselves to vote Tory, but a National Socialist? Of course they could.
Hmm, could be yes. I did get the US wrong. But I stick to my guns on this. I think Starmer beats Farage to the Georgian Townhouse if it's all boiled down to that choice. Farage is closing in on hubris if not already there.
The problem, which Starmer is prodding at, a bit, is the inability to change things.
Hence his wet fish slap at The Blob.
It is perfectly possible to come up with policies that match the social and political needs of his party and could produce results.
The problem is actually implementing them.
So along comes the likes of Reform - “We will build the trains on time.”
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
I also think that the aid agencies need to reflect on whether their support (in terms of providing very basic needs) for such a regime can be justified by the appalling suffering of its people. Of course we would have to accept that such an approach would greatly increase the number of refugees from this shambles of a country.
I am sure that Britain welcomes refugees fleeing such an awful place.
Doesn't it?
We broke it but let others beyond the Channel fix it has always been the British way.
We didn't break it.
We failed in our attempts to fix it, but Afghanistan was already broken long before 9/11.
Since 'we' have been dabbling in Afghan politics long before 9/11 I'd suggest we bear some responsibilty.
Not really.
Prior to 9/11 we hadn't been directly involved for a very long time.
If we were responsible, Afghanistan would be a much better place, but they don't want us involved even when we tried to fix things and failed to do so.
The Afghani population needs to take some accountability for its choices.
Yeah, the British Empire was all about making places better and fixing things. Tbf to the Afghans if Britain 'tried to fix things and failed to do so', probably wise to tell us to eff off.
Afghanistan was getting somewhere, socially, in the 70's. There was even a bus route from London to Calcutta/Kolkata which stopped in Kabul. Then there was the Revolution and the Soviet invasion, which the 'more enthusiastic' Muslims opposed, and were aided in their opposition by the West. Unfortunately those Muslims developed into the Taliban.
As someone born in the 70s, I have only ever known the arc from the Jordan to the Indus to be an unremitting medieval hellhole (Pakistan appears to be somewhat mixed but with a large area into which its inadvisable to go and an apparent constant danger of joining its western neighbours in Islamic totalitarianism). It's quite startling to learn how relatively recently this wasn't the case.
These places were beacons of light, learning and tolerance in the Middle Ages (pre-Genghis Khan) compared with now. Or indeed, compared with Europe then.
There is a fascinating book written by Robert Byron in the 1930s called the Road to Oxiana in which he is looking for the roots of Islamic Architecture. In it he mentions that in the early 13th century Herat, now a largely forgotten backwater in North Western Afghanistan, was reputedly the largest city in the world. When it was taken by the Mongols in 1222 they are said to have beheaded the entire population of 1.6 million.
What on earth was the Mongols problem?
They make Hitler look like a wet lettuce.
They took that view that if you did one Herat (which if I recall didn’t surrender at the first opportunity but waited until the red tent was pitched) then all other cities would surrender immediately so the overall loss of life would be lower.
It’s an argument…
Greatest good for the greatest number. There's some heavyweight philosophical backing for that.
Aquinas would have trouble with proportionality.
(It’s been a long time since I studied the ethics of war so I’m a little rusty)
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
O/T and apologies if I missed previous discussion of this but... watching the harrowing footage of the Jeju Air crash, who on earth decided to build a concrete block wall around Muan airport?
An aviation expert said the pilot made a text book landing in the circumstances and but for the wall it was fair to assume everyone would have survived. He also commented the runway was shorter than many
As with all disasters lessons will be learnt but sadly at the loss of innocent lives
Hmm. Questions about 'text book'.
The aircraft landed a long way down the runway and at considerable speed. Quite why the landing gear wasn't down is a huge open question, as its inoperability wouldn't normally result from a bird strike. It apparently landed the wrong way on the runway i.e. with the wind, which may have been necessary and may account for (some of) the excess speed but the plane didn't appear to be in *that* much trouble that it couldn't go round - and if it had gone round, it wouldn't have had a concrete wall at the end of the runway and should have been able to land at a much slower speed. Also, the flaps weren't down, increasing stall speed.
Now some or all of those might have technical explanations. Maybe there was a catastrophic loss of hydraulics. But it's an appallingly bad set of coincidences if there are no human factors involved.
It’s a very weird accident. Thankfully the investigators have found the flight recorders, which are probably with the NTSB and heading to a facility for reading them out.
There’s a video that purports to be the accident aircraft suffering a bird strike in one of the engines, but even on one you’ll still have flaps and gear. If you’ve got no hydraulics at all, the gear will drop under gravity, which is surely something you’d attempt. No flaps raises the landing speed considerably though, and requires a much trickier landing technique to avoid ending up with a lot of runway behind you and the plane still flying.
Hopefully we’ll know a lot more in the coming days, but the investigators will be keeping an open mind as they always do.
ISTR there was a case a few years back where something happened on approach, and the pilots simply got overloaded with tasks at exactly the wrong moment, and forgot to put the gear down? All the warnings for the landing gear being up were ignored because both pilots were working the other issue.
So... a bird strike, one or both engines gone, to busy looking at checklists and trying to get it down to remember to put the landing gear down?
There’s very little that hasn’t been messed up by otherwise competent pilots under high workload, at some point in aviation history.
The gear warning - a very loud “TOO LOW GEAR” annunciated several times, often alongside “TERRAIN TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP” at an equally-high volume, have been known to be totally tuned out by pilots who have no memory of the warnings when interviewed after an incident, and are shocked to hear them clearly on the cockpit voice recorder. There’s a lot of medical research into how people inadvertently tune out an awful lot of stimulus in high-pressure situations. Pilots are also trained to “aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order”, although a crew of two are supposed to manage the workload between them, with one doing nothing except the aviating and the other running the checklists and talking to ATC. There’s plenty of times that the crew has failed to work effectively during an incident as well.
One might also expect the tower to mention the lack of landing gear to the pilots, and expect an acknowledgment in return, if they wen’t expecting it to be landing wheels-up. The accident was said to be from the second approach, so again we need more details of the exact sequence of events.
They've not reverted to that strange two (or possibly more) class Korean language which was held responsible for a Korean air accident some twenty (?) or so years ago, have they?
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
I think you are deluded. Most of this lot here, if pushed into a corner, would vote for low tax- small state good over evil. And there are many Labour 'til I die types who might not be able to bring themselves to vote Tory, but a National Socialist? Of course they could.
Hmm, could be yes. I did get the US wrong. But I stick to my guns on this. I think Starmer beats Farage to the Georgian Townhouse if it's all boiled down to that choice. Farage is closing in on hubris if not already there.
That townhouse could be in Islington rather than SW1.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
Its quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the Old Testament.
And a lot of the New with the New too.
There's a reason people like HYUFD prefer to quote from Paul or the Old Testament rather than the Gospels.
Not me specifically, if I put St Paul above all I would have left the C of E for the Roman Catholic or Orthodox church as soon as it introduced women priests and women bishops.
I would also be leaving the C of E for a Baptist or Pentecostal church if I put St Paul and the Old Testament first now it has approved PLF for same sex couples
A good header from @Cyclefree , though along with others I'm not sure how practical (or even how beneficial for women in Afghanistan) such
I'd like to hear what Rory the Tory (ex-Tory?) has to say, or more especially Mrs Rory, since she runs a charity that I believe still works there.
Perhaps anti-ODA peeps who have pivoted nativist / isolationist would prefer us not to be involved at all, as in "nothing to do with us, leave well alone".
My feeling is that the strongest things we can do are provide refuge where appropriate, encourage more tolerant Islamic cultures to develop (ie not Islamist), and pay attention to the motes in our own eye - part of which is characters like of Andrew Tate and Donald Trump, and part of which is the tendencies they embrace wherever they are in *our* culture.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
I knew I was taking the risk of triggering your monomaniacal drum beating.
To quote Jean Valjean: you are wrong, and always have been wrong.
Yes housing is a scarce asset and addressing that is part of the solution. But to ignore the negative externalities, as you do, would result in a misallocation of resources.
O/T and apologies if I missed previous discussion of this but... watching the harrowing footage of the Jeju Air crash, who on earth decided to build a concrete block wall around Muan airport?
An aviation expert said the pilot made a text book landing in the circumstances and but for the wall it was fair to assume everyone would have survived. He also commented the runway was shorter than many
As with all disasters lessons will be learnt but sadly at the loss of innocent lives
Hmm. Questions about 'text book'.
The aircraft landed a long way down the runway and at considerable speed. Quite why the landing gear wasn't down is a huge open question, as its inoperability wouldn't normally result from a bird strike. It apparently landed the wrong way on the runway i.e. with the wind, which may have been necessary and may account for (some of) the excess speed but the plane didn't appear to be in *that* much trouble that it couldn't go round - and if it had gone round, it wouldn't have had a concrete wall at the end of the runway and should have been able to land at a much slower speed. Also, the flaps weren't down, increasing stall speed.
Now some or all of those might have technical explanations. Maybe there was a catastrophic loss of hydraulics. But it's an appallingly bad set of coincidences if there are no human factors involved.
It’s a very weird accident. Thankfully the investigators have found the flight recorders, which are probably with the NTSB and heading to a facility for reading them out.
There’s a video that purports to be the accident aircraft suffering a bird strike in one of the engines, but even on one you’ll still have flaps and gear. If you’ve got no hydraulics at all, the gear will drop under gravity, which is surely something you’d attempt. No flaps raises the landing speed considerably though, and requires a much trickier landing technique to avoid ending up with a lot of runway behind you and the plane still flying.
Hopefully we’ll know a lot more in the coming days, but the investigators will be keeping an open mind as they always do.
ISTR there was a case a few years back where something happened on approach, and the pilots simply got overloaded with tasks at exactly the wrong moment, and forgot to put the gear down? All the warnings for the landing gear being up were ignored because both pilots were working the other issue.
So... a bird strike, one or both engines gone, to busy looking at checklists and trying to get it down to remember to put the landing gear down?
There’s very little that hasn’t been messed up by otherwise competent pilots under high workload, at some point in aviation history.
The gear warning - a very loud “TOO LOW GEAR” annunciated several times, often alongside “TERRAIN TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP” at an equally-high volume, have been known to be totally tuned out by pilots who have no memory of the warnings when interviewed after an incident, and are shocked to hear them clearly on the cockpit voice recorder. There’s a lot of medical research into how people inadvertently tune out an awful lot of stimulus in high-pressure situations. Pilots are also trained to “aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order”, although a crew of two are supposed to manage the workload between them, with one doing nothing except the aviating and the other running the checklists and talking to ATC. There’s plenty of times that the crew has failed to work effectively during an incident as well.
One might also expect the tower to mention the lack of landing gear to the pilots, and expect an acknowledgment in return, if they wen’t expecting it to be landing wheels-up. The accident was said to be from the second approach, so again we need more details of the exact sequence of events.
They've not reverted to that strange two (or possibly more) class Korean language which was held responsible for a Korean air accident some twenty (?) or so years ago, have they?
Yes, the cultural lessons that Western airlines mostly learned after the Teneriffe disaster in 1977, were very much still an issue in Korea into the 1990s. They did get there eventually though, although similar issues still exist in China.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
Chagos - £800 million a year for something we already own
Thats more than the Farmers are getting screwed for
Starmer really is a prat.
I do not know the details, but Starmer and Lammy need to come clean on this and explain the agreement and cost
All the details are in The Times today and it's as excruciatingly boring as one would imagine. Ultimately Starmer is going to do whatever Trump tells him and the only person Trump will listen to on the subject is Modi.
The only interesting bit was that the law firm that The Ludicrous Cox works for is advising the Mauritian government.
And he doesn't need to travel to Mauritius. They can hear him from here.
Seems fairly clear that Mauritius has gone into “ask for everything mode”
Well that's the art of the deal apparently. As if.
It's a weird sort of stand off because the situation on DG with the US Naval Support Facility isn't going to change no matter what is agreed or not agreed.
The Mauritians want money and the British want the matter settled and their reputation to be slightly less besmirched in international law and in actuality. As several African nations have pointed out, it's a bit much for the UK to be mounting the tall steed over the SMO when they relatively recently forcibly occupied part of Africa and shot all of the inhabitants' dogs.
Fuck the African nations. Most of them are taking the Chinese Renminbi and to the extent they actually care it's because they view DG as the first move for Reparations™. They couldn't give the tiniest shit about the SMO and wouldn't lift a finger to do anything about it even if we surrendered that plus Gibraltar and the sovereign base areas on Cyprus. We need to get beyond this naive belief that the UN and the ICJ play with a straight bat, whereas in reality they're far more like FIFA.
We're in a geopolitical streetfight. David Herdson is quite right: Mauritius should be told to do one, who have zero real claim anyway.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
This seems rather more likely a reason for the concern:
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
I knew I was taking the risk of triggering your monomaniacal drum beating.
To quote Jean Valjean: you are wrong, and always have been wrong.
Yes housing is a scarce asset and addressing that is part of the solution. But to ignore the negative externalities, as you do, would result in a misallocation of resources.
What "negative externalities"?
Most of them typically quoted are to do with people and not houses.
Its our current planning system that leads to a "misallocation of resources" - if you have a planned economy then if your planning is wrong you have a misallocation of resources, whereas if you have a free market then the invisible hand means that people change their actions in response to market conditions dynamically and that leads to a better reallocation of resources.
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with resources being "misallocated" anyway, and if they are, a free market should fix that.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Re Farage v Starmer, at this point, I’d expect Starmer to win. In fact, I’d expect a1924 - type result. A big win for Labour, with Reform establishing dominance on the Right, and winning heavily in South Yorkshire, Wearside, South Lancashire, South Wales, East Anglia, and West Midlands.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
Worth noting in passing a distinct lack of global centre-right leaders too. Who? Macron, maybe? But he's unpopular, heading towards the end of his term and not the easiest to pin down ideologically anyway (he served in Hollande's government).
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
Worth noting in passing a distinct lack of global centre-right leaders too. Who? Macron, maybe? But he's unpopular, heading towards the end of his term and not the easiest to pin down ideologically anyway (he served in Hollande's government).
Meloni, though she leans more right of centre than centre right and Ishiba. By this time next year you will also likely have Merz and Polievre as centre right leaders of big western nations and of course the leaders of NZ, Ireland, Portugal, Finland and Sweden are centre right leaders of smaller western nations.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
Comments
9:02 am. Flight 7C2216 makes contact with runway at about 1,200m (1,312 yard) point of the 2,800m (3,062 yard) runway.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/dec/30/south-korea-plane-crash-news-jeju-air-flight-2216-airlines-muan-airport-live-updates
It was @Leon who first pointed this out on PB years ago when he noted that in A Christmas Carol, the Cratchits who could not afford their own turkey lived in what is now a million pound house in Camden.
Ah ok, googled. That's good Friends knowledge there.
It’s an argument…
(This WAG is almost certainly hilariously wrong.)
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
1. Housing is a desirable asset
2. Housing is a scarce asset
3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford
4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that
5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing
6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had
7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
https://www.cityam.com/hiring-frenzy-at-london-law-firms-as-apex-predator-disrupts-market/
All right for some.
Though allegedly it has played a bigger role in teaching English to America's recent tech immigrants than almost anything else.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
And it's likely not going to be the contest anyway.
just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
From what I can see, the "Trad Wife" phenomenon is more of a mixture of religious fundamentalists with minimal education, a few largely coastal former careerwomen who now have the money to stay at home, and a slightly larger minority who simply don't like being told that they shouldn't pursue a more traditional female gender role, separate from the employment issue. I wonder if thar group are actually looking more for "Trad women" than trad wives, but the polarised, and online marketplace of ideas has nothing in between the gaps.
The number of women in the U.S not seeking a career, that should say. Apologies for the mobile cut-offs as usual.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
Dolt.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
Tasteless imbecile.
Hence you are following a religion, not the preachings of Jesus.
Quite disappointed in you tbh.
It can be ineffably smug, though.
I'm not sure about why his undercarriage was not down, however.
Not that Dickens is my favourite but what would you know.
I thought we didn't allow illiterate morons on PB these days.
A few denominations do allow same sex marriages in church eg the Methodists, Unitarians, Church of Scotland and Quakers and uS and Scottish Anglicans and some Lutherans but they are in steep decline membership wise.
The fastest growing denominations in the world are Pentecostals and Orthodox neither of which allow any services for same sex couples at all
Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians).
Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
In the District of Columbia, New York City (but not the rest of New York) and the 31 states that reported racial and ethnic data on abortion to the CDC, 42% of all women who had abortions in 2021 were non-Hispanic Black, while 30% were non-Hispanic White, 22% were Hispanic and 6% were of other races."
source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/25/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-us/
And this reminder: Hitler, Mao, and . . . . the late Hugh Hefner were all strongly in favor of abortion.
There’s a video that purports to be the accident aircraft suffering a bird strike in one of the engines, but even on one you’ll still have flaps and gear. If you’ve got no hydraulics at all, the gear will drop under gravity, which is surely something you’d attempt. No flaps raises the landing speed considerably though, and requires a much trickier landing technique to avoid ending up with a lot of runway behind you and the plane still flying.
Hopefully we’ll know a lot more in the coming days, but the investigators will be keeping an open mind as they always do.
It’s at the concrete (and concrete blocks) level - the actual cost of real builders is beyond most, so they self build, with help from a cousin who worked for a guy.
People from “developed countries” can’t get their heads around there being no shortage of places to build houses.
Hell, some people are still falling for “buy a chateaux in rural France. Because it must be worth more than they are asking”. Even the ones that are half completed boutique hotel projects.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
So... a bird strike, one or both engines gone, to busy looking at checklists and trying to get it down to remember to put the landing gear down?
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
I've found the mobile surprisingly good for watching films, though.
And a lot of the New with the New too.
There's a reason people like HYUFD prefer to quote from Paul or the Old Testament rather than the Gospels.
Has an affair with a married woman, kid, the kid’s got this strained relationship with dad. Kid goes off to prove himself to dad and get his love, ends badly.
God smoke a lot of weed on a Thai beach and discovers himself. Relaunches as a charity/ad agency/self help guru.
“We’re not as bad as some Muslins “
Gives them some comfort I suppose
https://genius.com/The-beautiful-south-101-man-lyrics
The gear warning - a very loud “TOO LOW GEAR” annunciated several times, often alongside “TERRAIN TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP” at an equally-high volume, have been known to be totally tuned out by pilots who have no memory of the warnings when interviewed after an incident, and are shocked to hear them clearly on the cockpit voice recorder. There’s a lot of medical research into how people inadvertently tune out an awful lot of stimulus in high-pressure situations. Pilots are also trained to “aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order”, although a crew of two are supposed to manage the workload between them, with one doing nothing except the aviating and the other running the checklists and talking to ATC. There’s plenty of times that the crew has failed to work effectively during an incident as well.
One might also expect the tower to mention the lack of landing gear to the pilots, and expect an acknowledgment in return, if they wen’t expecting it to be landing wheels-up. The accident was said to be from the second approach, so again we need more details of the exact sequence of events.
"A progressive evangelical who advanced the causes of womens' and minorities' rights before the Christian Right rolled back the gains."
It's easy to forget how different some things were in the supposedly uniformly awful 1970's, when there wasn't just a post-1960's Chrustian Left in the United States, but social liberalism in parts of the urban Middle East. The world needs more of that cross-cultural spirit.
Either a mobile or Freudian slip, there.
Hence his wet fish slap at The Blob.
It is perfectly possible to come up with policies that match the social and political needs of his party and could produce results.
The problem is actually implementing them.
So along comes the likes of Reform - “We will build the trains on time.”
(It’s been a long time since I studied the ethics of war so I’m a little rusty)
I would also be leaving the C of E for a Baptist or Pentecostal church if I put St Paul and the Old Testament first now it has approved PLF for same sex couples
A good header from @Cyclefree , though along with others I'm not sure how practical (or even how beneficial for women in Afghanistan) such
I'd like to hear what Rory the Tory (ex-Tory?) has to say, or more especially Mrs Rory, since she runs a charity that I believe still works there.
Perhaps anti-ODA peeps who have pivoted nativist / isolationist would prefer us not to be involved at all, as in "nothing to do with us, leave well alone".
My feeling is that the strongest things we can do are provide refuge where appropriate, encourage more tolerant Islamic cultures to develop (ie not Islamist), and pay attention to the motes in our own eye - part of which is characters like of Andrew Tate and Donald Trump, and part of which is the tendencies they embrace wherever they are in *our* culture.
To quote Jean Valjean: you are wrong, and always have been wrong.
Yes housing is a scarce asset and addressing that is part of the solution. But to ignore the negative externalities, as you do, would result in a misallocation of resources.
https://leonogas.medium.com/thinking-beyond-cultural-legacy-the-case-of-korean-air-ac049b190b6d
Yes, the cultural lessons that Western airlines mostly learned after the Teneriffe disaster in 1977, were very much still an issue in Korea into the 1990s. They did get there eventually though, although similar issues still exist in China.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
We're in a geopolitical streetfight. David Herdson is quite right: Mauritius should be told to do one, who have zero real claim anyway.
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
https://www.transparency.org.uk/house-of-cards-UK-housing-policy-influence-Conservative-party-donations-lobbying-press-release
Most of them typically quoted are to do with people and not houses.
Its our current planning system that leads to a "misallocation of resources" - if you have a planned economy then if your planning is wrong you have a misallocation of resources, whereas if you have a free market then the invisible hand means that people change their actions in response to market conditions dynamically and that leads to a better reallocation of resources.
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with resources being "misallocated" anyway, and if they are, a free market should fix that.
https://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/MATT+24.html#:~:text=I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not,all these things have happened.&text=Heaven and earth will pass,words will never pass away.
Four years from now, it might be different.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
Macron is more liberal than centre right
Kemi Badenoch is judged to be to the right of Tories, and Lib Dems’ Ed Davey further left than Starmer
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/dec/30/keir-starmer-is-one-of-labours-most-rightwing-mps-study-finds
Barely British left, let alone global left. (Sorry, alliteration police!)
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.