I see that Rishi’s budget has unraveled already. A mix of wildly optimistic economic assumptions and spending figures that imply, for a majority of government departments, Austerity redux, and even then he only gets the deficit back to where it was.
Despite all his emphasis on being honest with people about the challenge ahead, he’s been dishonest, hiding the cuts that are implicit in his forward spending plans and ducking all the big decisions that should have been taken about the future financing of public services.
Sorry, which parallel Universe are you in at the moment? Is it the one where Rishi's speech was written by @contrarian and involved 30% cuts across the board along with a cut in IT to stimulate demand (amongst the most wealthy)? Because that's not the one where most of us are right now.
Yes, that's pretty damning and I'd forgotten two aspects - first, the increased pressure on local authorities and second, the collapse of the pre-existing operating model for public transport provision.
While I'm sure some office work will resume, it won't be at the pre-Covid levels and while that will be countered to some extent by increased leisure travel, the latter won't bring in the money the commuters used to. That either means more Government support, big hikes in fares (bad news for the Conservative marginals) and a re-think of engineering and maintenance which becomes more problematic at weekends and Bank Holidays when more people are travelling.
Rishi’s wildly optimistic forecasts appear to assume:
- a very rapid return to the pre-pandemic economy: - an immediate spending spree by those who have saved during lockdown; - no medium term behaviour changes after a year in lockdown; - no damage whatsoever from Brexit; - no rampant inflation; - no fall off in tax take despite rising unemployment and so many small businesses on the edge of bankruptcy; - higher corporation tax will increase the tax take from business pro-rata; - no post-pandemic pressure to spend more on health, education and social care; - spending in many government departments and by local councils can return to austerity levels of cuts.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
Interesting header. I usually enjoy your posts and more often than not agree with them. Tonight you've let your slip show. You are clearly a Leaver and the only Leaver's cliche you haven't used is 'Metropolitan Elite'
It's funny someone who's left the country calling someone else a leaver. C'est vrai?
What an omnishambles....3m AZN jabs sitting not being used in Germany.
Looks like they managed to get an interview with Karl Marx at the end.
Talking of Marxists....juat scrolling through Jezza twitter, no sign or suggestion he has been for his jab. Maybe he has been listening to his brother.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
Musing on tonight's extraordinary poll - which may of course be an outlier but if it isn't how might it be reflected I wonder in terms of Scotland and perhaps more interestingly, in Wales? If it isn't replicated to some degree in both, then the situation in England would be extraordinary. I suspect a small uptick for the blues in Scotland and maybe something a little larger in Wales. Either way the locals are looking somewhat less good for Labour now unless things change quite quickly.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
I see that Rishi’s budget has unraveled already. A mix of wildly optimistic economic assumptions and spending figures that imply, for a majority of government departments, Austerity redux, and even then he only gets the deficit back to where it was.
Despite all his emphasis on being honest with people about the challenge ahead, he’s been dishonest, hiding the cuts that are implicit in his forward spending plans and ducking all the big decisions that should have been taken about the future financing of public services.
Sorry, which parallel Universe are you in at the moment? Is it the one where Rishi's speech was written by @contrarian and involved 30% cuts across the board along with a cut in IT to stimulate demand (amongst the most wealthy)? Because that's not the one where most of us are right now.
Yes, that's pretty damning and I'd forgotten two aspects - first, the increased pressure on local authorities and second, the collapse of the pre-existing operating model for public transport provision.
While I'm sure some office work will resume, it won't be at the pre-Covid levels and while that will be countered to some extent by increased leisure travel, the latter won't bring in the money the commuters used to. That either means more Government support, big hikes in fares (bad news for the Conservative marginals) and a re-think of engineering and maintenance which becomes more problematic at weekends and Bank Holidays when more people are travelling.
Rishi’s wildly optimistic forecasts appear to assume:
- a very rapid return to the pre-pandemic economy: - an immediate spending spree by those who have saved during lockdown; - no medium term behaviour changes after a year in lockdown; - no damage whatsoever from Brexit; - no rampant inflation; - no fall off in tax take despite rising unemployment and so many small businesses on the edge of bankruptcy; - higher corporation tax will increase the tax take from business pro-rata; - no post-pandemic pressure to spend more on health, education and social care; - spending in many government departments and by local councils can return to austerity levels of cuts.
Company tax is paid 8 months after the end of the company tax year, so we should see the impact of lockdown on revenue by mid- summer. My own company will not be paying any next year.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
I see that Rishi’s budget has unraveled already. A mix of wildly optimistic economic assumptions and spending figures that imply, for a majority of government departments, Austerity redux, and even then he only gets the deficit back to where it was.
Despite all his emphasis on being honest with people about the challenge ahead, he’s been dishonest, hiding the cuts that are implicit in his forward spending plans and ducking all the big decisions that should have been taken about the future financing of public services.
Sorry, which parallel Universe are you in at the moment? Is it the one where Rishi's speech was written by @contrarian and involved 30% cuts across the board along with a cut in IT to stimulate demand (amongst the most wealthy)? Because that's not the one where most of us are right now.
Yes, that's pretty damning and I'd forgotten two aspects - first, the increased pressure on local authorities and second, the collapse of the pre-existing operating model for public transport provision.
While I'm sure some office work will resume, it won't be at the pre-Covid levels and while that will be countered to some extent by increased leisure travel, the latter won't bring in the money the commuters used to. That either means more Government support, big hikes in fares (bad news for the Conservative marginals) and a re-think of engineering and maintenance which becomes more problematic at weekends and Bank Holidays when more people are travelling.
Rishi’s wildly optimistic forecasts appear to assume:
- a very rapid return to the pre-pandemic economy: - an immediate spending spree by those who have saved during lockdown; - no medium term behaviour changes after a year in lockdown; - no damage whatsoever from Brexit; - no rampant inflation; - no fall off in tax take despite rising unemployment and so many small businesses on the edge of bankruptcy; - higher corporation tax will increase the tax take from business pro-rata; - no post-pandemic pressure to spend more on health, education and social care; - spending in many government departments and by local councils can return to austerity levels of cuts.
Well, it might happen like that. And if it does, then revolting people as they are, the current government deserve to stay on for as long as they want.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some German citizens in (old) East Prussia took Polish citizenship in the last quarter century.
I think the Volksdeutsch were all expelled in 45-6 from East of the Oder and replaced with Poles from what is now Belarus and Ukraine.
You probably know more than me
While old reading the article I posted here is a quoteAs of 2013, the largest group of modern Polonia can be found in the United Kingdom (550,000),[17] followed by that in Germany (425,608),[5][17]
which implies that till 2013 which is just after the fom moratorium lapsed we were the leading destination
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
Oh no now you have done it AS.....Leon will now be hyperventilating over DeepMind tech....I had wished I had left him to get over excited by GANs.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
All true, but it highlights the issues with human intelligence.
If you replaced "GPT-3" with (to pluck a random name out of the air) "Dominic Cummings", it would still work pretty well as a critique.
This can't be a resignation - you wouldn't trail it in advance. Perhaps it is something along the lines of seperate parties in Wales and Scotland. This would give more heft to new leader in Scotland and deflect from constant NHS issues in Wales
I'd expect it would get the SNP vote out big time. If the cause looks like being damaged by personalities, wouldn't the reaction be to support the cause even more fervently?
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
This can't be a resignation - you wouldn't trail it in advance. Perhaps it is something along the lines of seperate parties in Wales and Scotland. This would give more heft to new leader in Scotland and deflect from constant NHS issues in Wales
Well, if he became the leader of something explicitly called the English Labour Party then it would be a start. It would certainly upset all the right people.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
This can't be a resignation - you wouldn't trail it in advance. Perhaps it is something along the lines of seperate parties in Wales and Scotland. This would give more heft to new leader in Scotland and deflect from constant NHS issues in Wales
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
This can't be a resignation - you wouldn't trail it in advance. Perhaps it is something along the lines of seperate parties in Wales and Scotland. This would give more heft to new leader in Scotland and deflect from constant NHS issues in Wales
It's not even a real tweet is it?
No it's literal fake news. Some here are so eager to play points they literally comment on fake news by a randommer on Twitter.
I think I will take some time away again, we're falling fast if we think that's the source of reasonable debate.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
His constituency home is near Richmond. A few miles from Darlington. Now he plans to work there part of the week.
Quite incredible how blatant this stuff is getting now.
Yes quite blatantly its not all going to be Londoncentric.
Exactly as promised. People living in the North might be able to work up North rather than commuting to London to get stuff done - I imagine that must really get your goat.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
I don't fancy having to sit a Voight-Kampff during every job interview I go to.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Of course it was fake, Keir Starmer doesn't have interesting things to say.
If the Conservatives are implementing Labour style policies (as they promised to do I guess to level up) why would Labour voters care? Surely its good for policies you think are right to be enacted?
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
You prefer factual posts here you go
Starmer is going down faster than a dockside hooker
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Because he is Neil Kinnock fighting Militant setting things up for them to be Tony Blair (or setting their favourite Labour politician up to be Tony Blair) in the delusional minds of some.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
Normalcy bias
Didn’t eadric bang on about normalcy bias last year?
I used to think that my area of work - Health and Social Care - would be the last to fall to AI, after the Lawyers, so it would never really be allowed to get there. But looking at GPT-3 I no longer think that's the case. In fact, there are already apps we can download that chat with us and tell us to smile, and they seem to be good enough for psychiatrists to be recommending them. In ten years time, who knows? Psychiatry itself could be up for grabs, and it doesn't look that difficult to be honest. There's not to much variation in the actions of antipsychotics, for example - almost all of them spins on antihistamines. Just kick down the list of effectiveness till you get a result.
As for "is it real intelligence, is it genuine knowledge," all silly. We are what we do, not what's going on inside us. What's going on inside is is secret, unknown to everyone else, and can't be used to assess or even meaningfully be discussed.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Is the YG Poll fake too
You have backed a loser pal
Who are you backing BJO?
Who are you enabling? The Tories.
I will be voting Lab in local elections
In spite of SKS.
After that who knows
I hope there will be a successful leadership challenge or 2019 will look like a fantastic result
2017 will be the last time LAB gets 40% for a long time or maybe ever
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
There's the danger it's one of the nutters, isn't there? I wonder if he only ran to stop RLB, but would rather it had been a woman, which is why Dodds is in Shadow. I can see there being enough resistance to him going in the parliamentary party, who voted 73% no confidence in Jezza, that shifting him is too dangerous.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
sighs I used czechs merely as an example of eastern europe. I very much doubt there are more eastern europeans in germany than the uk as you decided to ban them for seven years after accession
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were pretty close now, they will certainly have had far more net migration from Eastern Europe in the last decade than the uk did.
Of course, germany would have a falling population without immigration, given low birthrates, so they have different challenges to us.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some German citizens in (old) East Prussia took Polish citizenship in the last quarter century.
I think the Volksdeutsch were all expelled in 45-6 from East of the Oder and replaced with Poles from what is now Belarus and Ukraine.
You probably know more than me
While old reading the article I posted here is a quoteAs of 2013, the largest group of modern Polonia can be found in the United Kingdom (550,000),[17] followed by that in Germany (425,608),[5][17]
which implies that till 2013 which is just after the fom moratorium lapsed we were the leading destination
My understanding - and I could be wrong - is that the number of Poles in the UK has barely budged from about 2008.
Lots of things have happened since: the UK was more affected by the Global Financial Crisis than Germany, plus unemployment and the cost of living are lower there. Finally, of course, there is Brexit.
I used to think that my area of work - Health and Social Care - would be the last to fall to AI, after the Lawyers, so it would never really be allowed to get there. But looking at GPT-3 I no longer think that's the case. In fact, there are already apps we can download that chat with us and tell us to smile, and they seem to be good enough for psychiatrists to be recommending them. In ten years time, who knows? Psychiatry itself could be up for grabs, and it doesn't look that difficult to be honest. There's not to much variation in the actions of antipsychotics, for example - almost all of them spins on antihistamines. Just kick down the list of effectiveness till you get a result.
As for "is it real intelligence, is it genuine knowledge," all silly. We are what we do, not what's going on inside us. What's going on inside is is secret, unknown to everyone else, and can't be used to assess or even meaningfully be discussed.
Quite so, quite so. This is the point. The computers will easily pass the Turing Test and so will appear human (except much smarter). We won't be able to open them up and *see* if they are *really* thinking, just as you can't open my skull and see if I am not some chatbot from the future, deepfaking multiple identities
Indeed one of my main worries about AI is that the computers will appear omniscient and all-powerful, as well as quasi-human - in other words they will appear like Gods - and our natural human instinct, buried deep inside all of us, will be to worship them. We will install them in churches and bow down in obeisance
His constituency home is near Richmond. A few miles from Darlington. Now he plans to work there part of the week.
Quite incredible how blatant this stuff is getting now.
Yes quite blatantly its not all going to be Londoncentric.
Exactly as promised. People living in the North might be able to work up North rather than commuting to London to get stuff done - I imagine that must really get your goat.
No, it's not that. I'm far from against these ideas. I spent half my childhood in the North and went to Northern university.
But I am suspicious of the exact location choice of this norther treasury. Was the CoE involved in the decision? As Darlington was on the list he should have excused himself from the final selection imho.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
That is where Starmer fails most. He has completely failed to outline any vision. His flags and change of tune fool no one on either right or left.
He needs to either enunciate something other than clichés, or get off the pot.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
Normalcy bias
Didn’t eadric bang on about normalcy bias last year?
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
That is where Starmer fails most. He has completely failed to outline any vision. His flags and change of tune fool no one on either right or left.
He needs to either enunciate something other than clichés, or get off the pot.
Sadly, he has zero charisma. Some level of charisma is key these days.
His constituency home is near Richmond. A few miles from Darlington. Now he plans to work there part of the week.
Quite incredible how blatant this stuff is getting now.
Yes quite blatantly its not all going to be Londoncentric.
Exactly as promised. People living in the North might be able to work up North rather than commuting to London to get stuff done - I imagine that must really get your goat.
No, it's not that. I'm far from against these ideas. I spent half my childhood in the North and went to Northern university.
But I am suspicious of the exact location choice of this norther treasury. Was the CoE involved in the decision? As Darlington was on the list he should have excused himself from the final selection imho.
Why? We have constituency MPs for a reason. 🤷♂️
A location has been chosen now make it work. Better than cramming everything into London, this should have been done last century not now. The fact he's even been able to choose Darlington because nobody else had ever bothered to choose anything sooner speaks it all.
For all the hate going SKS's way today, it is worth remembering that the government is (rightly) getting an awful lot of credit for its handling of CV19 vaccine purchases.
This is a war, we know we're going to win, and it was the government who led us to victory.
If Labour was led by the lovechild of Evita, Jesus Christ, and Clement Attlee they would still be lagging the Conservatives right now.
Comments
- a very rapid return to the pre-pandemic economy:
- an immediate spending spree by those who have saved during lockdown;
- no medium term behaviour changes after a year in lockdown;
- no damage whatsoever from Brexit;
- no rampant inflation;
- no fall off in tax take despite rising unemployment and so many small businesses on the edge of bankruptcy;
- higher corporation tax will increase the tax take from business pro-rata;
- no post-pandemic pressure to spend more on health, education and social care;
- spending in many government departments and by local councils can return to austerity levels of cuts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_the_United_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrations_from_Poland_since_EU_accession
I presume only between 10-12 and 2-4pm though....
Britain Elects
@BritainElects
· 3h
Westminster voting intention:
CON: 45% (+4)
LAB: 32% (-4)
GRN: 7% (-)
LDEM: 6% (+1)
REFUK: 3% (-)
via @YouGov, 03 - 04 Mar
Chgs. w/ 26 Feb
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some German citizens in (old) East Prussia took Polish citizenship in the last quarter century.
Weirdos.
https://twitter.com/itxaropena/status/1367572614479310851/photo/1
But what if it doesn't?
NHS Nurses doing weekend shifts at triple NHS pay
I think his flag shagging has shall we say not been a complete success
which implies that till 2013 which is just after the fom moratorium lapsed we were the leading destination
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1367587367918264326?s=19
His constituency home is near Richmond. A few miles from Darlington. Now he plans to work there part of the week.
Quite incredible how blatant this stuff is getting now.
If you replaced "GPT-3" with (to pluck a random name out of the air) "Dominic Cummings", it would still work pretty well as a critique.
Good evening, everybody.
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
https://twitter.com/ne_al_/status/1367432497789882373?s=19
Not even a token woman. Tut tut.
And no I am not content to be given Justice as some sort of after the fact sop, thank you very much. I aim much higher.
However, I have carefully noted your names .....
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1367592719309303809/photo/1
Not something you normally see in same sentence!
I think I will take some time away again, we're falling fast if we think that's the source of reasonable debate.
Bye for now
You have backed a loser pal
Exactly as promised. People living in the North might be able to work up North rather than commuting to London to get stuff done - I imagine that must really get your goat.
A transparently faked Starmer 'tweet' leads to PB.com meltdown.
It was funny though.
If the Conservatives are implementing Labour style policies (as they promised to do I guess to level up) why would Labour voters care? Surely its good for policies you think are right to be enacted?
As my piece said, your morality is not their morality.
Starmer is going down faster than a dockside hooker
https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1367532944341016578
Who are you backing BJO?
Who are you enabling? The Tories.
https://twitter.com/YungLambton/status/1364281210931929102
As for "is it real intelligence, is it genuine knowledge," all silly. We are what we do, not what's going on inside us. What's going on inside is is secret, unknown to everyone else, and can't be used to assess or even meaningfully be discussed.
https://twitter.com/jneill/status/1367465559424655362?s=21
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
In spite of SKS.
After that who knows
I hope there will be a successful leadership challenge or 2019 will look like a fantastic result
2017 will be the last time LAB gets 40% for a long time or maybe ever
Bit like Starmer himself.
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
Oh yes wrong colour hair
Lots of things have happened since: the UK was more affected by the Global Financial Crisis than Germany, plus unemployment and the cost of living are lower there. Finally, of course, there is Brexit.
Indeed one of my main worries about AI is that the computers will appear omniscient and all-powerful, as well as quasi-human - in other words they will appear like Gods - and our natural human instinct, buried deep inside all of us, will be to worship them. We will install them in churches and bow down in obeisance
But I am suspicious of the exact location choice of this norther treasury. Was the CoE involved in the decision? As Darlington was on the list he should have excused himself from the final selection imho.
Its not Anfield without the fans though.
He needs to either enunciate something other than clichés, or get off the pot.
A location has been chosen now make it work. Better than cramming everything into London, this should have been done last century not now. The fact he's even been able to choose Darlington because nobody else had ever bothered to choose anything sooner speaks it all.
This is a war, we know we're going to win, and it was the government who led us to victory.
If Labour was led by the lovechild of Evita, Jesus Christ, and Clement Attlee they would still be lagging the Conservatives right now.