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Are Trump and other top Republicans secret Democratic Party agents? – politicalbetting.com

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  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,273

    Scholz the clear winner from the post-debate polling?
    His ad campaign is quite cleverly presenting him as the heir to Merkel.

    image
    He's got the look of a balding Kenneth Brannagh in that poster. Probably not a bad move.
    Sans the Poirot moustache. A very good move....
    Lol yes. More Wallander than Poirot.
  • HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited August 2021

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    His father Pierre Trudeau only won 3 out of his 4 Canadian general election wins over the Progressive Conservatives because of Quebec and the bounce he got there from his fellow French Canadians.

    It could well be on current polling Justin Trudeau again only wins this Canadian election for the Liberals because of seats in Quebec while the Conservatives win most seats in the rest of Canada excluding Quebec.

    This election will likely see the biggest divide between results in British Canada, which will narrowly favour O'Toole and French Canada, which will still strongly favour Trudeau, since 1980
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,748
    kinabalu said:

    moonshine said:

    isam said:

    Michael Gove 'tried to avoid paying' £5 entry to Scots rave by saying 'I'm the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster'

    "We want to create events for everyone, even if we may disagree with most of what they stand for.“

    https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/michael-gove-tried-avoid-paying-24863233.amp

    Incredible scenes.
    All the signs of someone struggling in their private life.
    Who the hell was he with that thought it was a good idea to take him there!
    By himself on the cruise in the stews of Aberdeen.
    Been there myself, albeit not much above the age of 30.
    Leading in fact to a mouth tattoo. 🙂
    Indeed.
    The tattoo parlour was slap bang next to a strip bar called Crazy Dasies that had the occasional punk club night. Happy days..
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    edited August 2021
    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,273

    kinabalu said:

    moonshine said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    rcs1000 said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:
    What is he actually doing these days? He was only 55/6when he left the Commons - surely too young to retire?
    Well he is a member of the Lords and is chairman of the Royal Foundation, a charity under the auspices of the Cambridges and is VP of Friends of the British Library.

    Otherwise he lives in £2.5 m Cyfronydd Hall in Powys with Ffion
    Well, there are worse fates in life I suppose.

    He made one terrible mistake. He stood for the Tory leadership in 1997.

    Imagine him as Tory leader in 2005 with Osborne as Shadow Chancellor and Cameron as SFS.

    That would have been much better all around than what happened.
    Yes his mistake was not sticking to his agreement to back Howard for leader in 1997. Then Howard would have beaten Clarke but lost to Blair in 2001 and Hague would have been ideally placed to win the 2001 leadership election rather than IDS and he would have made the gains Howard did in 2005 after Iraq while still being young enough unlike Howard to stay leader.

    It could then have been Hague who won most seats in 2010 over Brown not Cameron. All because he could not wait to run for leader
    Had he not stood, Clarke (not Howard) would have won. But that couldn’t possibly have been worse than Hague’s leadership which just oozed inexperience from every pore. At least Clarke would have been a credible voice on the economy.

    Howard might have won a leadership contest in 2001, and then Hague could have taken over in 2005.

    And that would have been the right time. Hague vs Brown would surely have been a small overall majority for the Tories.
    Howard I think would have beaten Clarke as the Eurosceptic candidate in the final round in 1997 but yes I agree Hague v Brown would surely have seen Hague in No 10
    I don’t agree - because actually I think the Eurosceptic vote would, like Redwood himself, have broken for Clarke had Thatcher not intervened as a late revenge for Clarke’s role in her ousting, simply on the basis of a Clarke’s talent and appeal - but ultimately that would be a sterile discussion. We can’t know who would have won, however much we might read the tea leaves.

    All we can say is that Hague despite his many qualities that could have made him an excellent PM at the right time wasn’t ready. And I think - for once! - we’re all on PB on common ground here.
    The Conservatives should have elected Clarke in 1997. He would have led the Conservatives to defeat in 2001, but he'd also have done much better than Hague. New Conservative talent in 2001 (rather that 2005) might have made 2010 a very different election.
    If Clarke had been Tory leader after 97, would he have backed Blair for euro membership? If so, could be that he wouldn’t have survived the back bench fury to fight the 2001 election. And IDS would have fought an election lol
    Worth remembering that Clarke promised Portillo that the UK would only join the Euro following a referendum. I can't see him going back on that, so he might have been supportive, but he wasn't going to back it without a referendum.

    And Blair never cared that much, especially as it would have involved a row with Brown.
    It would have been politically impossible to join without one I think. And hindsight tells us it was an unwinnable referendum.
    I think it might have got a Yes if backed by Blair and Brown in their Cool Britannia prime. Trouble is that was before it was born.
    Thank goodness that never happened then or look where we'd be now.
    Still in the EU, I suspect, with influence, frictionless trade and freedom of movement. 😁

    Ah well, what might have been, eh?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
    Don't be so sexist. It's a Him...rrrible night if it's bad, and a herrr-ful night if it's good.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited August 2021
    Paging Leon...

    Lex Fridman talks to Wojciech Zaremba: OpenAI Codex, GPT-3, Robotics, and the Future of AI
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5OD8MjYnOM&t=179s

    And Aliens...
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,273
    dixiedean said:

    dixiedean said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    Cicero said:

    Carnyx said:

    ydoethur said:

    Trident nuclear weapons could end up in Wales within three years of Scottish independence

    https://nation.cymru/news/trident-nuclear-weapons-could-end-up-in-wales-within-three-years-of-scottish-independence/

    I do not understand the attraction of Milford Haven when Holyhead would love to have them, and even has a load of empty docking facilities that would take them.
    Nearer to the Western Approaches, AIUI.
    Basically only one way out from Plymouth into deep water so rUK SSBNs would be far easier to find and track than if they can lurk and choose a variety of different routes out once they hear that the coast is clear. Bear in mind that the US/UK OPLAN wants very little warning of launch against Russia, so target area of operations is North of GB not SW. Its why Faslane is a good place to base the strike force. The Ruskies need several Hunters to cover the routes out of the Clyde, and this increases the risks for them.
    But they are no longer Polaris but Trident boats, using the same missile the USN does, and the USN no longer bases forward at Holy Loch/Rota. So if the USN don't see the need .,..
    Why would they need to if the UK does?
    In which case it is not an independent deterrent?
    I don't follow. Being an independent means you can use it whenever you want, not that it can't be part of a coordinated plan with other states.
    Even so, if the USN are happy with it, then whether it is Plymouth or Faslane for basing the UK Trident can;t make any significant difference in practice range-wise.
    You don't know that for certain. They might only be happy with the current situation because of where it is located.
    No, I mean, the USN's own boats are based much further away. So the range issue can't be that sensitive.

    In any case, is the RN that subordinate to the US that it has to take orders as to where the boats are based?
    Perhaps because of the location of the UK forces. We are both speculating on this front, and you cannot say for certain that there are no strategic reasons to keep them where they are.
    But neither can you. And the USN seems perfectly happy to base their boats a long way away.

    One ohter factor is of course the huge decline in UK antisubmarine capability (discussed earlier today) and the UK submarine force, so much less scope or none for delousing the entry channels anyway.

    Anyway. we'll have to leace it at that: goodnight, all.
    Good drama on a nuclear submarine, Vigil, tonight and tomorrow evening on BBC1
    Great touch from the Line of Duty people. Heavily trail Martin Compston (Steve Arnott) as one of the stars.
    Then have him dead after 15 mins.
    Can't decide whether I liked it or not. Claustrophobic and atmospheric, but desperately slow. Will give it tomorrow to get above a saunter.
    Spoiler alert?? (I'm recording it.)
    Yeah. Considered that. He is dead before the story really starts.
    OK, fair enough.

    We watched Contagion again last week, for giggles - that's a great film for stars kicking the bucket early.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    stodge said:

    The argument around the economic impact of a reduced labour market is complex and has many nuances.

    To this observer, the most obvious impact is rising labour costs should be leading companies to invest in improving business processes through technology whether though improved business systems or even the use of robots. It's not a question of whether a robot can serve you coffee (probably could) but whether the current way the process of ordering, preparation and delivery can be made more efficient and improved.

    The skilled worker will be at an advantage if the skills are transferrable - they can almost command a wage, either you pay me more or I'm off to a company that will.

    The alternative approach is to look to outsource - in a sense, home or remote working is a form of outsourcing especially if organisations take the opportunity to reduce or re-configure their space away from the traditional banks of desks to something more useful. Obviously, the thorny old issue of sending it all to a business park in Bangalore will raise its head but are the savings that obvious?

    We've already heard @rcs1000 claiming there'll be a new push for outsourcing - I doubt it. Companies and organisations who mange their property portfolios adroitly will realise some significant benefits.

    As for unskilled workers, they too will be better off at least initially subject to them performing a function which can't be easily automated. The suspicion is future immigration policy will be focussed on bridging perceived or actual skills gaps or temporary requirements for unskilled workers.

    The other aspect of home or remote working is the re-invigoration of commuter towns and dormitories during the day as places for home workers to go for lunch or entertainment. That may be to the detriment of the City centre but the small town or village and especially those with a few artisan or "unique" shops is going to prosper.

    Outsourcing is perhaps the wrong word.

    The point is that you no longer need to be in the office to do work. And that has been demonstrated in many, many businesses over the last 18 months.

    And if you no longer need to be in London, why do you actually have to be in the UK?

    Saying "oh it didn't work 20 years ago" misses the point. Two decades ago people didn't have 200mb/second internet at home, there was no Slack or Zoom. If you were at home you *might* have access to the file server via a VPN. But that was the preserve of Senior Management supported by a massive IT department.

    We would never have considered remote employees a decade ago. Now we're contemplating not ever again getting a London office.

    That's a pretty major shift.
    Yes but I think there are some issues not factored in with remote working, some of which @TheScreamingEagles has occasionally mentioned. One is security; one-and-a-half is confidentiality. Then there is tax: if your employees each work in a different country, are you deducting (or not) income tax or the local equivalents correctly? And H&S legislation as it might affect their home offices? Then there is extra-territorial legislation like the Bribery Act or the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or whatever is the Latvian equivalent – and by "or" I mean "and" because all might apply to the same transaction.

    I expect you are right that WFH and foreign WFH will continue to grow but for some employers, there will be tears before bedtime.
    Those are all solvable problems, though. And if the price is right (and the price is right), then they will be solved.
    Security and confidentiality are far easier to fix than international tax..
    International tax is a pot of piss.

    A firm in Estonia will pop up. Your firm will have the relationship with the Estonian firm, and they will bill you. The Estonian firm will pay the Estonian remote employee.
    Supposedly such PEO already exist - it's remarkable how many of them have turned to tax fraud within in the UK to make extra money (hint offering transparency in that market is where I make some of my money).

    It may look easy but trust me it actually isn't
    Sure. But it's achievable. Just as firms sprung up to deal with IR35. And sure, some of them behave really badly, and all. But ultimately, someone in Estonia working in Estonia producing work in Estonia and exporting the fruits of their labours to the UK is not subject to UK employment law. Unless we're going all extraterritorial.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,848

    kinabalu said:

    moonshine said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    rcs1000 said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:
    What is he actually doing these days? He was only 55/6when he left the Commons - surely too young to retire?
    Well he is a member of the Lords and is chairman of the Royal Foundation, a charity under the auspices of the Cambridges and is VP of Friends of the British Library.

    Otherwise he lives in £2.5 m Cyfronydd Hall in Powys with Ffion
    Well, there are worse fates in life I suppose.

    He made one terrible mistake. He stood for the Tory leadership in 1997.

    Imagine him as Tory leader in 2005 with Osborne as Shadow Chancellor and Cameron as SFS.

    That would have been much better all around than what happened.
    Yes his mistake was not sticking to his agreement to back Howard for leader in 1997. Then Howard would have beaten Clarke but lost to Blair in 2001 and Hague would have been ideally placed to win the 2001 leadership election rather than IDS and he would have made the gains Howard did in 2005 after Iraq while still being young enough unlike Howard to stay leader.

    It could then have been Hague who won most seats in 2010 over Brown not Cameron. All because he could not wait to run for leader
    Had he not stood, Clarke (not Howard) would have won. But that couldn’t possibly have been worse than Hague’s leadership which just oozed inexperience from every pore. At least Clarke would have been a credible voice on the economy.

    Howard might have won a leadership contest in 2001, and then Hague could have taken over in 2005.

    And that would have been the right time. Hague vs Brown would surely have been a small overall majority for the Tories.
    Howard I think would have beaten Clarke as the Eurosceptic candidate in the final round in 1997 but yes I agree Hague v Brown would surely have seen Hague in No 10
    I don’t agree - because actually I think the Eurosceptic vote would, like Redwood himself, have broken for Clarke had Thatcher not intervened as a late revenge for Clarke’s role in her ousting, simply on the basis of a Clarke’s talent and appeal - but ultimately that would be a sterile discussion. We can’t know who would have won, however much we might read the tea leaves.

    All we can say is that Hague despite his many qualities that could have made him an excellent PM at the right time wasn’t ready. And I think - for once! - we’re all on PB on common ground here.
    The Conservatives should have elected Clarke in 1997. He would have led the Conservatives to defeat in 2001, but he'd also have done much better than Hague. New Conservative talent in 2001 (rather that 2005) might have made 2010 a very different election.
    If Clarke had been Tory leader after 97, would he have backed Blair for euro membership? If so, could be that he wouldn’t have survived the back bench fury to fight the 2001 election. And IDS would have fought an election lol
    Worth remembering that Clarke promised Portillo that the UK would only join the Euro following a referendum. I can't see him going back on that, so he might have been supportive, but he wasn't going to back it without a referendum.

    And Blair never cared that much, especially as it would have involved a row with Brown.
    It would have been politically impossible to join without one I think. And hindsight tells us it was an unwinnable referendum.
    I think it might have got a Yes if backed by Blair and Brown in their Cool Britannia prime. Trouble is that was before it was born.
    Thank goodness that never happened then or look where we'd be now.
    We'd be in the EU and using the Euro. Speculation beyond that will be informed mainly by prejudice.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    kinabalu said:

    moonshine said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    rcs1000 said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:
    What is he actually doing these days? He was only 55/6when he left the Commons - surely too young to retire?
    Well he is a member of the Lords and is chairman of the Royal Foundation, a charity under the auspices of the Cambridges and is VP of Friends of the British Library.

    Otherwise he lives in £2.5 m Cyfronydd Hall in Powys with Ffion
    Well, there are worse fates in life I suppose.

    He made one terrible mistake. He stood for the Tory leadership in 1997.

    Imagine him as Tory leader in 2005 with Osborne as Shadow Chancellor and Cameron as SFS.

    That would have been much better all around than what happened.
    Yes his mistake was not sticking to his agreement to back Howard for leader in 1997. Then Howard would have beaten Clarke but lost to Blair in 2001 and Hague would have been ideally placed to win the 2001 leadership election rather than IDS and he would have made the gains Howard did in 2005 after Iraq while still being young enough unlike Howard to stay leader.

    It could then have been Hague who won most seats in 2010 over Brown not Cameron. All because he could not wait to run for leader
    Had he not stood, Clarke (not Howard) would have won. But that couldn’t possibly have been worse than Hague’s leadership which just oozed inexperience from every pore. At least Clarke would have been a credible voice on the economy.

    Howard might have won a leadership contest in 2001, and then Hague could have taken over in 2005.

    And that would have been the right time. Hague vs Brown would surely have been a small overall majority for the Tories.
    Howard I think would have beaten Clarke as the Eurosceptic candidate in the final round in 1997 but yes I agree Hague v Brown would surely have seen Hague in No 10
    I don’t agree - because actually I think the Eurosceptic vote would, like Redwood himself, have broken for Clarke had Thatcher not intervened as a late revenge for Clarke’s role in her ousting, simply on the basis of a Clarke’s talent and appeal - but ultimately that would be a sterile discussion. We can’t know who would have won, however much we might read the tea leaves.

    All we can say is that Hague despite his many qualities that could have made him an excellent PM at the right time wasn’t ready. And I think - for once! - we’re all on PB on common ground here.
    The Conservatives should have elected Clarke in 1997. He would have led the Conservatives to defeat in 2001, but he'd also have done much better than Hague. New Conservative talent in 2001 (rather that 2005) might have made 2010 a very different election.
    If Clarke had been Tory leader after 97, would he have backed Blair for euro membership? If so, could be that he wouldn’t have survived the back bench fury to fight the 2001 election. And IDS would have fought an election lol
    Worth remembering that Clarke promised Portillo that the UK would only join the Euro following a referendum. I can't see him going back on that, so he might have been supportive, but he wasn't going to back it without a referendum.

    And Blair never cared that much, especially as it would have involved a row with Brown.
    It would have been politically impossible to join without one I think. And hindsight tells us it was an unwinnable referendum.
    I think it might have got a Yes if backed by Blair and Brown in their Cool Britannia prime. Trouble is that was before it was born.
    Thank goodness that never happened then or look where we'd be now.
    Still in the EU, I suspect, with influence, frictionless trade and freedom of movement. 😁

    Ah well, what might have been, eh?
    And with our economic policy determined in Berlin and Frankfurt
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,848
    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    TOPPING said:

    But jesus fucking christ. We are facing a grave threat which has the potential to kill many of us.

    And PB almost to a man (person) embraced then and is embracing now illiberal measures unprecedented in our own times. Yes it is an unprecedented pandemic but the way people on here are completely suspending their normal critical faculties is a sight to behold.

    No one knows what long term effects the vaccine has but more important, you are all cheering mandatory vaccination. The government forcing people to inject something into their bodies.

    Quite extraordinary.

    Who is cheering that? Who has proposed it? How would it even work? There has never been compulsory vaccination of adults in this country, and I don't see it happening.
    That's great and leaving aside the Covid Pass which allows people to participate in normal life, so why are you giving @contrarian such a hard time.
    Because he's unvaccinated and sharing antivaxx memes, misrepresentations and outright falsehoods.

    He deserves a hard time for that does he not?
    He has chosen not to let the government tell him what to put inside his body.

    And questioned lockdown.

    We absolutely need such voices.
    You can question things without lying and bullshitting.

    We don't need such voices.
    I haven't checked out his lies. What was the most egregious of them?
    He does so regularly, sharing antivaxx memes and lies.

    In the past 24 hours he's claimed that the young are better off catching Covid than being vaccinated (not true) and that the risk to the young from Covid is less than being struck by lightning (completely wrong).

    He's no better than Susan Michie.
    Is it not the case that the risks to the young from Covid are sufficiently small such that there is a live debate about the relative merits of that vs getting the vaccine.

    How is what @contrarian says so different from the JCVI position.
    Contrarian says things that are palpably untrue and repeats them again and again after being called out. The JCVI don't.

    Contrarian is just an antivaxx extreme equivalent of Michie. I do not see much praise on this website for her, every argument you use in favour of contrarian could be repeated for Michie. Both are questioning, uncompromising zealots who don't engage with reality.

    When did you last praise Michie? Or anyone else from that extreme?
    It is the scientific process. You need Michie and you need @contrarian.

    Vigorous debate.

    As I said, his position on vaxxing children is the same as that of the JCVI.
    But he's just an idiot. We have seen footage from Italy and NYC and South America and India showing what out of control covid does. He's like someone at the tail end of the blitz insisting there's still no real evidence that getting people off the streets and into air raid shelters helps stop them being blown up. I was arguing vigorously this time last year that we were probably years away from even one workable vaccine, might not even get that, etc. The scientific method is about being shown to be wrong and admitting it.
    You are a funny old sausage.

    You have a guy who has questioned the government at every turn. I know you are a huge fan of Boris et al but the reaction to him ( @contrarian ) has been unmitigated opprobrium.

    Society needs contrarians. Everyone agrees, right? But of course the defining characteristic of a contrarian is that no one believes what they say and, further, ridicules them with a near-religious certainty.

    You believe that @contrarian is foolish, absurd and heretical. Fair enough.
    We need contrarians but not contrarian. He's not a moron though. He's a troll who's having a good time on here. Like you.
    I know the discussion is relatively complex but that was embarrassing by any measure.
    Except not because I'm right. Contrarian posts in jest mostly about Covid. He'll be chuckling as much at your ardent defence of him as 'plucky voice in the wilderness' as at those who write reams to rebut his complete and utter tosh. I know these things. It's my gift and my curse.
    Yes you are right. I have understood for quite some time how important it is for you to believe that so here it is from me, and I know if it doesn't come from me it's not that important for you: You are right. Great analysis.
    You're taking both yourself and contrarian's arrant nonsense far too seriously. It's an odd spectacle.
    Jeez trying to agree with you here. Please take yes for an answer.
    Are you from a military family?
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,459
    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I would only add that anybody who thinks IQ measures are a valid measure of intelligence can't, by definition, be very intelligent.
  • AslanAslan Posts: 1,673
    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    Nigerian immigrants massively outperform white Brits in the British education system.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    Here is the latest Canada psephological analysis. @Quincel's tip of 3 to 1 Conservatives most seats is looking better and better.
    https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/338canada-the-conservatives-surge-the-liberals-slide/
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,273
    edited August 2021
    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    You really don't understand IQ do you?

    Literacy ≠ intelligence.

    For literacy you need a level of intelligence, yes, but more importantly, education.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,848

    kinabalu said:

    moonshine said:

    isam said:

    Michael Gove 'tried to avoid paying' £5 entry to Scots rave by saying 'I'm the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster'

    "We want to create events for everyone, even if we may disagree with most of what they stand for.“

    https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/michael-gove-tried-avoid-paying-24863233.amp

    Incredible scenes.
    All the signs of someone struggling in their private life.
    Who the hell was he with that thought it was a good idea to take him there!
    By himself on the cruise in the stews of Aberdeen.
    Been there myself, albeit not much above the age of 30.
    Leading in fact to a mouth tattoo. 🙂
    Indeed.
    The tattoo parlour was slap bang next to a strip bar called Crazy Dasies that had the occasional punk club night. Happy days..
    Case of Tattoo You then lurch next door to try and meet a gin soaked Barroom Queen. Type thing.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited August 2021
    Aslan said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    Nigerian immigrants massively outperform white Brits in the British education system.
    They outperform white working class Brits and only because most Nigerian immigrants to the UK come from the Nigerian upper middle class anyway

  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    dixiedean said:

    Here is the latest Canada psephological analysis. @Quincel's tip of 3 to 1 Conservatives most seats is looking better and better.
    https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/338canada-the-conservatives-surge-the-liberals-slide/

    Liberals still ahead 140 seats to 139 for the Conservatives, just
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    You really don't understand IQ do you?

    Literacy ≠ intelligence.

    For literacy you need a level of intelligence, yes, but more importantly, education.
    Without any literacy you obviously could not do any of the verbal reasoning of IQ tests at all
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,848
    HYUFD said:

    Aslan said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    Nigerian immigrants massively outperform white Brits in the British education system.
    White working class Brits and only because most Nigerian immigrants to the UK come from the Nigerian upper middle class anyway
    Sounding a bit peeved there, H.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited August 2021
    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    Aslan said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    Nigerian immigrants massively outperform white Brits in the British education system.
    White working class Brits and only because most Nigerian immigrants to the UK come from the Nigerian upper middle class anyway
    Sounding a bit peeved there, H.
    No, most Nigerians who come to the UK are religious, hardworking and socially conservative.

    However the average Nigerian does not have the skills to get to emigrate to the UK as a result of our points based immigration system
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,273
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    You really don't understand IQ do you?

    Literacy ≠ intelligence.

    For literacy you need a level of intelligence, yes, but more importantly, education.
    Without any literacy you obviously could not do any of the verbal reasoning of IQ tests at all
    True but that only serves to illustrate what an imperfect measure of intelligence IQ tests are.

    I had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that you were using IQ as a proxy for intelligence.
  • dixiedean said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    Cicero said:

    Carnyx said:

    ydoethur said:

    Trident nuclear weapons could end up in Wales within three years of Scottish independence

    https://nation.cymru/news/trident-nuclear-weapons-could-end-up-in-wales-within-three-years-of-scottish-independence/

    I do not understand the attraction of Milford Haven when Holyhead would love to have them, and even has a load of empty docking facilities that would take them.
    Nearer to the Western Approaches, AIUI.
    Basically only one way out from Plymouth into deep water so rUK SSBNs would be far easier to find and track than if they can lurk and choose a variety of different routes out once they hear that the coast is clear. Bear in mind that the US/UK OPLAN wants very little warning of launch against Russia, so target area of operations is North of GB not SW. Its why Faslane is a good place to base the strike force. The Ruskies need several Hunters to cover the routes out of the Clyde, and this increases the risks for them.
    But they are no longer Polaris but Trident boats, using the same missile the USN does, and the USN no longer bases forward at Holy Loch/Rota. So if the USN don't see the need .,..
    Why would they need to if the UK does?
    In which case it is not an independent deterrent?
    I don't follow. Being an independent means you can use it whenever you want, not that it can't be part of a coordinated plan with other states.
    Even so, if the USN are happy with it, then whether it is Plymouth or Faslane for basing the UK Trident can;t make any significant difference in practice range-wise.
    You don't know that for certain. They might only be happy with the current situation because of where it is located.
    No, I mean, the USN's own boats are based much further away. So the range issue can't be that sensitive.

    In any case, is the RN that subordinate to the US that it has to take orders as to where the boats are based?
    Perhaps because of the location of the UK forces. We are both speculating on this front, and you cannot say for certain that there are no strategic reasons to keep them where they are.
    But neither can you. And the USN seems perfectly happy to base their boats a long way away.

    One ohter factor is of course the huge decline in UK antisubmarine capability (discussed earlier today) and the UK submarine force, so much less scope or none for delousing the entry channels anyway.

    Anyway. we'll have to leace it at that: goodnight, all.
    Good drama on a nuclear submarine, Vigil, tonight and tomorrow evening on BBC1
    Great touch from the Line of Duty people. Heavily trail Martin Compston (Steve Arnott) as one of the stars.
    Then have him dead after 15 mins.
    Can't decide whether I liked it or not. Claustrophobic and atmospheric, but desperately slow. Will give it tomorrow to get above a saunter.
    But - Spoiler Alert! - he recorded a "video to be played in case of my unforeseen death" so will "appear" in more of the series.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    I don't think there are big genetic differences in IQs between countries or "races" - if there were, all the great mathematicians* would come from a very narrow set of genetic backgrounds. The reality is that Fields Medal recipients span White European, White Hispanic, Indian and Asian backgrounds pretty well.

    Significant gaps between countries are probably therefore the consequence of nutrition in the womb, and in the early years of life. As nutritional levels are increasing, one would expect gaps to close.

    I imagine that in in 1960, South Korean or Chinese IQs lagged those in the UK and the US markedly (and due to poor nutrition), and are now above.

    * Pure mathematics being a field which does not require expensive laboratory equipment.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,848

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I would only add that anybody who thinks IQ measures are a valid measure of intelligence can't, by definition, be very intelligent.
    My IQ fluctuates like crazy depending on what I'm talking about. Eg anything military or about the Liberal Democrats I'm a dunce, but on stuff like 70s pop culture or the need for an egalitarian schools system I'm right up in the upper echelons. Thankfully PB covers the full range so you can skew your input to high IQ areas. I think most posters do this. Not all though. Occasionally you'll get someone grinding away on something which they really shouldn't be.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    I don't think there are big genetic differences in IQs between countries or "races" - if there were, all the great mathematicians* would come from a very narrow set of genetic backgrounds. The reality is that Fields Medal recipients span White European, White Hispanic, Indian and Asian backgrounds pretty well.

    Significant gaps between countries are probably therefore the consequence of nutrition in the womb, and in the early years of life. As nutritional levels are increasing, one would expect gaps to close.

    I imagine that in in 1960, South Korean or Chinese IQs lagged those in the UK and the US markedly (and due to poor nutrition), and are now above.

    * Pure mathematics being a field which does not require expensive laboratory equipment.
    I doubt Chinese IQ has ever been lower than the west, nutrition or not, the only reason it lagged economically in the 1960s and so many were malnourished was it had a Maoist Marxist government.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,733
    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    I don't think there are big genetic differences in IQs between countries or "races" - if there were, all the great mathematicians* would come from a very narrow set of genetic backgrounds. The reality is that Fields Medal recipients span White European, White Hispanic, Indian and Asian backgrounds pretty well.

    Significant gaps between countries are probably therefore the consequence of nutrition in the womb, and in the early years of life. As nutritional levels are increasing, one would expect gaps to close.

    I imagine that in in 1960, South Korean or Chinese IQs lagged those in the UK and the US markedly (and due to poor nutrition), and are now above.

    * Pure mathematics being a field which does not require expensive laboratory equipment.
    I doubt Chinese IQ has ever been lower than the west, nutrition or not, the only reason it lagged economically in the 1960s and so many were malnourished was it had a Maoist Marxist government.
    Well, certainly Maoism was the reason for the malnourishment:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    kinabalu said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I would only add that anybody who thinks IQ measures are a valid measure of intelligence can't, by definition, be very intelligent.
    My IQ fluctuates like crazy depending on what I'm talking about. Eg anything military or about the Liberal Democrats I'm a dunce, but on stuff like 70s pop culture or the need for an egalitarian schools system I'm right up in the upper echelons. Thankfully PB covers the full range so you can skew your input to high IQ areas. I think most posters do this. Not all though. Occasionally you'll get someone grinding away on something which they really shouldn't be.
    That is knowledge not IQ.

    IQ solely measures verbal, numerical and logical reasoning ability
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,848
    HYUFD said:

    kinabalu said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I would only add that anybody who thinks IQ measures are a valid measure of intelligence can't, by definition, be very intelligent.
    My IQ fluctuates like crazy depending on what I'm talking about. Eg anything military or about the Liberal Democrats I'm a dunce, but on stuff like 70s pop culture or the need for an egalitarian schools system I'm right up in the upper echelons. Thankfully PB covers the full range so you can skew your input to high IQ areas. I think most posters do this. Not all though. Occasionally you'll get someone grinding away on something which they really shouldn't be.
    That is knowledge not IQ.

    IQ solely measures verbal, numerical and logical reasoning ability
    Also spatial. The stuff involving shapes. My weakest area if you're interested, which you shouldn't be because it makes no odds to you either way.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    HYUFD said:

    kinabalu said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I would only add that anybody who thinks IQ measures are a valid measure of intelligence can't, by definition, be very intelligent.
    My IQ fluctuates like crazy depending on what I'm talking about. Eg anything military or about the Liberal Democrats I'm a dunce, but on stuff like 70s pop culture or the need for an egalitarian schools system I'm right up in the upper echelons. Thankfully PB covers the full range so you can skew your input to high IQ areas. I think most posters do this. Not all though. Occasionally you'll get someone grinding away on something which they really shouldn't be.
    That is knowledge not IQ.

    IQ solely measures verbal, numerical and logical reasoning ability
    Memory and IQ are related, and memory is similar to knowledge.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    I don't think there are big genetic differences in IQs between countries or "races" - if there were, all the great mathematicians* would come from a very narrow set of genetic backgrounds. The reality is that Fields Medal recipients span White European, White Hispanic, Indian and Asian backgrounds pretty well.

    Significant gaps between countries are probably therefore the consequence of nutrition in the womb, and in the early years of life. As nutritional levels are increasing, one would expect gaps to close.

    I imagine that in in 1960, South Korean or Chinese IQs lagged those in the UK and the US markedly (and due to poor nutrition), and are now above.

    * Pure mathematics being a field which does not require expensive laboratory equipment.
    I doubt Chinese IQ has ever been lower than the west, nutrition or not, the only reason it lagged economically in the 1960s and so many were malnourished was it had a Maoist Marxist government.
    Nutrition is a major driver of IQ scores, so it would be staggering if average Chinese IQ in the 60s was not well below the West.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,263
    edited August 2021
    rcs1000 said:



    I don't think there are big genetic differences in IQs between countries or "races" - if there were, all the great mathematicians* would come from a very narrow set of genetic backgrounds. The reality is that Fields Medal recipients span White European, White Hispanic, Indian and Asian backgrounds pretty well.

    Significant gaps between countries are probably therefore the consequence of nutrition in the womb, and in the early years of life. As nutritional levels are increasing, one would expect gaps to close.

    I imagine that in in 1960, South Korean or Chinese IQs lagged those in the UK and the US markedly (and due to poor nutrition), and are now above.

    * Pure mathematics being a field which does not require expensive laboratory equipment.

    Pretty much agree, but I've always thought IQ tests primarily measure a certain kind of systematic thinking which comes naturally to mathematicians and linguists, but is not the only kind of intelligence even in the narrow sense. I joined Mensa with an IQ of 170 when I was young (hoping to meet gorgeous blonde geniuses - oh well!), but while I've got a good mathematical mind and an eye for language, physics and chemistry completely baffle me, and you'd think all-round intelligence would cope with them too.

    On outsourcing, completely agree. We're retaining our base in Surrey, but our campaign staff recruited in lockdown are in Portugal, Italy, Scotland and the USA - we simply went for the best applicants and shrugged off where they actually are (though serendipitously the Scots will be handy for COP in Glasgow). You might think that charity campaigners really do need to be based where they're campaigning, but not so - nearly all campaigning is now online. I've never met some of the people in my team, but they're excellent, and of course we talk on Teams every day - which IMO is awfully like meeting across a table once you get used to it.

    The consequence of that, in turn, is that we can't sensibly require semi-local staff to come in to the office on a frequent basis - they'd wonder why they have to commute when if they lived in Bulgaria they wouldn't need to come in at all. So it'll just be a convenient place for local people to congregate if we think it handy.

  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    "Afghanistan always defeats the West
    A grasp of history might have prevented this disastrous war
    BY WILLIAM DALRYMPLE"

    https://unherd.com/2021/08/afghanistan-always-defeats-the-west/
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,263
    edited August 2021

    Scholz the clear winner from the post-debate polling?
    His ad campaign is quite cleverly presenting him as the heir to Merkel.

    image
    He's got the look of a balding Kenneth Brannagh in that poster. Probably not a bad move.
    Yes, and the wording gives a pleasant jolt since it says he knows how to be a female Chancellor. You're supposed to say "Eh?" but then he promises a gender-balanced Cabinet and better chances for women nationally. The "underwhelming but solid" impression on the New Statesman commentator may mislead - Germans like solid, quiet people, it's why they like Merkel and by the look of that poll Scholz too.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583
    rcs1000 said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:
    What is he actually doing these days? He was only 55/6when he left the Commons - surely too young to retire?
    Well he is a member of the Lords and is chairman of the Royal Foundation, a charity under the auspices of the Cambridges and is VP of Friends of the British Library.

    Otherwise he lives in £2.5 m Cyfronydd Hall in Powys with Ffion
    Well, there are worse fates in life I suppose.

    He made one terrible mistake. He stood for the Tory leadership in 1997.

    Imagine him as Tory leader in 2005 with Osborne as Shadow Chancellor and Cameron as SFS.

    That would have been much better all around than what happened.
    So in your parallel universe of PM Hague, Johnson remains an itinerant game show host, Corbyn is still utterly hopeless, but incognito, and the EU Referendum never happens because Hague is less arrogant than Dave.

    I like it, but can I remind you of Hague's "save the pound" campaign. He was not averse to foolishness, or do you put that episode down to youthful exuberance?
    Actually, freed of the burdens of the Premiership, Boris Johnson would have been able to develop the vaccine by the end of April 2020, and Covid would have been largely averted.
    However, without being a Benny Hill tribute act PM, would the great man have ever had the opportunity to don the labcoat in Oxford and invent the vaccines at all.

    Maybe the present reality is for the best then...Brexit notwithstanding.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    Andy_JS said:

    "Afghanistan always defeats the West
    A grasp of history might have prevented this disastrous war
    BY WILLIAM DALRYMPLE"

    https://unherd.com/2021/08/afghanistan-always-defeats-the-west/

    We didn't invade to colonise Afghanistan, we invaded to remove the Al Qaeda training camps from where 9/11 was planned and to kill Bin Laden
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited August 2021
    Aslan said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    "Afghanistan always defeats the West
    A grasp of history might have prevented this disastrous war
    BY WILLIAM DALRYMPLE"

    https://unherd.com/2021/08/afghanistan-always-defeats-the-west/

    We didn't invade to colonise Afghanistan, we invaded to remove the Al Qaeda training camps from where 9/11 was planned and to kill Bin Laden
    You want to occupy the place forever. That is colonialism.
    To keep jihadi militants out yes and entrench the elected government. Now terrorists as seen last week will be back there plotting against the west.

    Colonialism would have been to put in place unelected puppet rulers and the invasion would have been long before 9/11 when the Taliban took over in 1995
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    Cicero said:

    Carnyx said:

    ydoethur said:

    Trident nuclear weapons could end up in Wales within three years of Scottish independence

    https://nation.cymru/news/trident-nuclear-weapons-could-end-up-in-wales-within-three-years-of-scottish-independence/

    I do not understand the attraction of Milford Haven when Holyhead would love to have them, and even has a load of empty docking facilities that would take them.
    Nearer to the Western Approaches, AIUI.
    Basically only one way out from Plymouth into deep water so rUK SSBNs would be far easier to find and track than if they can lurk and choose a variety of different routes out once they hear that the coast is clear. Bear in mind that the US/UK OPLAN wants very little warning of launch against Russia, so target area of operations is North of GB not SW. Its why Faslane is a good place to base the strike force. The Ruskies need several Hunters to cover the routes out of the Clyde, and this increases the risks for them.
    But they are no longer Polaris but Trident boats, using the same missile the USN does, and the USN no longer bases forward at Holy Loch/Rota. So if the USN don't see the need .,..
    Why would they need to if the UK does?
    In which case it is not an independent deterrent?
    I don't follow. Being an independent means you can use it whenever you want, not that it can't be part of a coordinated plan with other states.
    Even so, if the USN are happy with it, then whether it is Plymouth or Faslane for basing the UK Trident can;t make any significant difference in practice range-wise.
    You don't know that for certain. They might only be happy with the current situation because of where it is located.
    No, I mean, the USN's own boats are based much further away. So the range issue can't be that sensitive.

    In any case, is the RN that subordinate to the US that it has to take orders as to where the boats are based?
    The UK can't load or test the missiles with the US (or degauss the hulls) so yes.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,786

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
    It looks like Trudeau is facing she-feat.

    image
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
    It looks like Trudeau is facing she-feat.

    image
    Ten point deficit? Ouch.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    edited August 2021

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
    It looks like Trudeau is facing she-feat.

    image
    It looks like voters are annoyed at being asked to go back to the polls less than two years since the previous election while a pandemic is still ongoing. Just before he called the election Trudeau had healthy leads with most pollsters.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I highly doubt even 10% of Indians and Nigerians have IQs higher than the average Brit, certainly outside the wealthiest parts of the biggest cities.

    Japanese or Chinese I could well believe over half the population have IQs higher than the average Brit but not Nigerians or Indians, in many of the rural parts some of them are not even literate
    You really don't understand IQ do you?

    Literacy ≠ intelligence.

    For literacy you need a level of intelligence, yes, but more importantly, education.
    I think it’s as much that he doesn’t understand statistics. For 10% of one normally distributed population to exceed the mean of another, against a measure where you’d expect the ranges of the populations not to be too far apart, is a really low bar.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146

    rcs1000 said:



    I don't think there are big genetic differences in IQs between countries or "races" - if there were, all the great mathematicians* would come from a very narrow set of genetic backgrounds. The reality is that Fields Medal recipients span White European, White Hispanic, Indian and Asian backgrounds pretty well.

    Significant gaps between countries are probably therefore the consequence of nutrition in the womb, and in the early years of life. As nutritional levels are increasing, one would expect gaps to close.

    I imagine that in in 1960, South Korean or Chinese IQs lagged those in the UK and the US markedly (and due to poor nutrition), and are now above.

    * Pure mathematics being a field which does not require expensive laboratory equipment.

    Pretty much agree, but I've always thought IQ tests primarily measure a certain kind of systematic thinking which comes naturally to mathematicians and linguists, but is not the only kind of intelligence even in the narrow sense. I joined Mensa with an IQ of 170 when I was young (hoping to meet gorgeous blonde geniuses - oh well!), but while I've got a good mathematical mind and an eye for language, physics and chemistry completely baffle me, and you'd think all-round intelligence would cope with them too.

    On outsourcing, completely agree. We're retaining our base in Surrey, but our campaign staff recruited in lockdown are in Portugal, Italy, Scotland and the USA - we simply went for the best applicants and shrugged off where they actually are (though serendipitously the Scots will be handy for COP in Glasgow). You might think that charity campaigners really do need to be based where they're campaigning, but not so - nearly all campaigning is now online. I've never met some of the people in my team, but they're excellent, and of course we talk on Teams every day - which IMO is awfully like meeting across a table once you get used to it.

    The consequence of that, in turn, is that we can't sensibly require semi-local staff to come in to the office on a frequent basis - they'd wonder why they have to commute when if they lived in Bulgaria they wouldn't need to come in at all. So it'll just be a convenient place for local people to congregate if we think it handy.

    Glad you found good Scottish staff. DavidL was telling us the other day that Scots were unemployable.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    Dura_Ace said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    RobD said:

    Carnyx said:

    Cicero said:

    Carnyx said:

    ydoethur said:

    Trident nuclear weapons could end up in Wales within three years of Scottish independence

    https://nation.cymru/news/trident-nuclear-weapons-could-end-up-in-wales-within-three-years-of-scottish-independence/

    I do not understand the attraction of Milford Haven when Holyhead would love to have them, and even has a load of empty docking facilities that would take them.
    Nearer to the Western Approaches, AIUI.
    Basically only one way out from Plymouth into deep water so rUK SSBNs would be far easier to find and track than if they can lurk and choose a variety of different routes out once they hear that the coast is clear. Bear in mind that the US/UK OPLAN wants very little warning of launch against Russia, so target area of operations is North of GB not SW. Its why Faslane is a good place to base the strike force. The Ruskies need several Hunters to cover the routes out of the Clyde, and this increases the risks for them.
    But they are no longer Polaris but Trident boats, using the same missile the USN does, and the USN no longer bases forward at Holy Loch/Rota. So if the USN don't see the need .,..
    Why would they need to if the UK does?
    In which case it is not an independent deterrent?
    I don't follow. Being an independent means you can use it whenever you want, not that it can't be part of a coordinated plan with other states.
    Even so, if the USN are happy with it, then whether it is Plymouth or Faslane for basing the UK Trident can;t make any significant difference in practice range-wise.
    You don't know that for certain. They might only be happy with the current situation because of where it is located.
    No, I mean, the USN's own boats are based much further away. So the range issue can't be that sensitive.

    In any case, is the RN that subordinate to the US that it has to take orders as to where the boats are based?
    The UK can't load or test the missiles with the US (or degauss the hulls) so yes.
    I’m trying to make sense of your sentence. Should it be “without the US”?

    Why can the UK not degauss the submarine hulls without US permission? Electronics in the US Trident missiles?
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    "Afghanistan always defeats the West
    A grasp of history might have prevented this disastrous war
    BY WILLIAM DALRYMPLE"

    https://unherd.com/2021/08/afghanistan-always-defeats-the-west/

    We didn't invade to colonise Afghanistan, we invaded to remove the Al Qaeda training camps from where 9/11 was planned and to kill Bin Laden
    So why didn’t we leave when that was accomplished? Why stay 10 years longer?
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,957

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
    It looks like Trudeau is facing she-feat.

    image
    Should have had a quiet word with Theresa May before calling an early election...

    "What could possibly go wrong?"
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
    It looks like Trudeau is facing she-feat.

    image
    Ouch.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    edited August 2021



    I’m trying to make sense of your sentence. Should it be “without the US”?

    Why can the UK not degauss the submarine hulls without US permission? Electronics in the US Trident missiles?

    Yes, it should read 'without'.

    The RN can't degauss/deperm their boats because they lack a suitable facility and the inclination to spend the vast amounts of money necessary to build one.

    They can't test Trident launches because they lack an instrumented range ship and the inclination to spend the vast amounts of money necessary to build one.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Good morning, everyone.

    I see Trudeau is the French for 'Theresa May'.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    F1: the rules may snaffle the points:
    https://twitter.com/EliGP/status/1432034388385144834
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
    It looks like Trudeau is facing she-feat.

    image
    While I shan't shed a tear if Trudeau is for the tas de ferraille, I'm a little sceptical of that poll.

    Looking at Left as Libs + Greens + NDP, and comparing to Right as Conservatives + Peoples Party, that's a *really* low share for Left vs Right compared to all the recent opinion polls.

    I can't think of a single other poll where the three left wing parties are below 50% - indeed, they've mostly been on 52-53%. Most of the poll movement we've seen so far has really been Lib to NDP.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146

    HYUFD said:

    Canada poll tracker tonight has the Conservatives ahead in the popular vote on average by 32.9% to 31.8% for the Liberals with the NDP on 20%.

    Yet the Liberals are projected to still win most seats, 143 to 129 for the Conservatives. However that will be entirely down to Quebec with the Liberals projected to win 34-44 seats there to just 9-13 for the Conservatives

    https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

    It would be the first time Quebec has made the difference in a Canadian election since Justin Trudeau's father Pierre's Liberals narrowly beat Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in 1980

    Trudeau currently muttering about it all going to she...ite...
    It looks like it could be a her...rrible night for the Liberals.
    It looks like Trudeau is facing she-feat.

    image
    Unionists take note. Let the Scots hold their referendum! 😉
  • Did Trump or other republican leaders ever tell people to avoid the vaccine? I don't remember him doing so.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,715
    edited August 2021

    Did Trump or other republican leaders ever tell people to avoid the vaccine? I don't remember him doing so.

    Good morning everyone; not quite typical Bank Holiday weather; it's not raining! Heavy, miserable looking, cloud though.

    And Mr D, no I don't remember him doing so; he suggested all sorts of rubbish before the vaccine became available, but IIRC he, and/or members of his family, were vaccinated.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,733
    edited August 2021

    Did Trump or other republican leaders ever tell people to avoid the vaccine? I don't remember him doing so.

    I don’t think until a few days ago he had ever said one thing or another about Covid vaccines. However, he was a supporter of the wider anti-vax movement, and was particularly loud in ramping Wakefield’s bullshit, as a dog whistle to his base. So he does bear a certain level of responsibility for wider vaccine scepticism.

    Equally, of course, it’s not entirely or even largely his fault that the movement developed, and he is now urging people to be jabbed and being criticised for it by his base.

    So I don’t think it’s a fruitful line of attack when there are so many other failures he entirely owns to go after him for.

    Edit - see this article from two years ago for more details:

    https://www.insider.com/how-donald-trump-became-an-anti-vaccinationist-2019-9
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,762
    The American death rate per million is roughly the same as ours and their current death rate is below ours, adjusted for population. Vaccines have worked in the US as they have worked here. Both countries have sectors where vaccine uptake is below the average but statistically that must always be so and it is worth bearing in mind that the fatality rate of this virus remains relatively low at somewhere between 1-2%.

    Overall, I regard the thread header as having a go at people that TSE doesn't like very much but I am not sure it has a particularly sound basis.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    Andy_JS said:

    "Afghanistan always defeats the West
    A grasp of history might have prevented this disastrous war
    BY WILLIAM DALRYMPLE"

    https://unherd.com/2021/08/afghanistan-always-defeats-the-west/

    He is late to the party with that point, and like saying "don't march on Moscow" it lacks enough data points to be valid.
  • F1: the rules may snaffle the points:
    https://twitter.com/EliGP/status/1432034388385144834

    No, thats why you need to do at least 2 laps, so that when you count back a lap there is actually a lap on the board.

    An absolute farce though. Not because of their rightful concern for the drivers. Not for what turned out to be a pretty funny few hours. Because they decided "lets pretend its a race". Because they ran the music and graphics and did a podium and awarded the fastest lap.

    There were no racing laps. It was not a race. Fine if the view was "sod it, tour them behind the safety car, award half points, lets go home". But stop pretending it was a race so that the drowned sods don't get a refund.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Mr. Pioneers, did Mazepin end up with the fastest lap then?

    And yeah, 'twas a farce.
  • NEW THREAD

  • Did Trump or other republican leaders ever tell people to avoid the vaccine? I don't remember him doing so.

    Good morning everyone; not quite typical Bank Holiday weather; it's not raining! Heavy, miserable looking, cloud though.

    And Mr D, no I don't remember him doing so; he suggested all sorts of rubbish before the vaccine became available, but IIRC he, and/or members of his family, were vaccinated.
    It has been a thoroughly miserable August has it not? I know that it isn't just me up here in the real north east, because I have been reading your own Essex weather updates every day (thanks!).

    Heavily overcast here, 12 degrees, light winds from the north. And the same again tomorrow by the look of it.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,733

    Did Trump or other republican leaders ever tell people to avoid the vaccine? I don't remember him doing so.

    Good morning everyone; not quite typical Bank Holiday weather; it's not raining! Heavy, miserable looking, cloud though.

    And Mr D, no I don't remember him doing so; he suggested all sorts of rubbish before the vaccine became available, but IIRC he, and/or members of his family, were vaccinated.
    It has been a thoroughly miserable August has it not? I know that it isn't just me up here in the real north east, because I have been reading your own Essex weather updates every day (thanks!).

    Heavily overcast here, 12 degrees, light winds from the north. And the same again tomorrow by the look of it.
    Not really. Last week was glorious sunshine at least where I was.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458
    Andy_JS said:

    HYUFD said:

    kinabalu said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    pigeon said:

    An alternative take on Brexit-induced worker shortages:

    Employers have only a limited range of options if they find themselves short of staff and it is not possible to call up reinforcements from overseas. They can invest more in labour-saving equipment; they can invest more in training to raise skill levels; or they can pay more in order to attract staff. It is not immediately obvious why any of these should be either impossible or undesirable.

    Naturally, companies cannot solve immediate labour shortage issues by ramping up training or buying new kit. Both take time to organise and to have any real impact. That only really leaves the option of paying higher wages, which explains why Tesco is offering a £1,000 sign-on bonus for new lorry drivers.

    ...

    Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brexit divided the nation in the way it did. If you were in a relatively well-paid job and not at risk of being replaced or undercut by a worker from overseas, you were likely to vote remain. The Polish plumber was cheaper, the Lithuanian nanny was better educated, so what was not to like?

    If, on the other hand, you were part of Britain’s casualised workforce, needing two or more part-time jobs to get by, you were much more likely to vote leave, on the grounds that tougher controls on migration would lead to a tighter labour market, which in turn would push up wages.

    For those who have nothing to fear from open borders, labour shortages are evidence Brexit is flawed. For those not so fortunate, it is doing what it was supposed to do.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/29/so-whats-so-wrong-with-labour-shortages-driving-up-low-wages

    Good piece.

    The question is what happens next?

    In a globalised world, is it easier to take the jobs overseas, or to train up the people here?
    Offshoring is unnecessary on labour shortage grounds in better paid sectors, where companies will be able to bring workers in from abroad if they need to: the main point of regaining control of the borders is to cut off the limitless flow of coffee shop baristas and chancers looking for casual labour on building sites or in hand car washes, not to exclude computer programmers. OTOH it's mostly an empty threat to low-paid work. You can't offshore supermarket shelf stacking or wiping the arses of the demented.
    So,

    I'm going to disagree incredibly vehemently with you.

    Off-shoring: first they came for the textiles staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the call center staff, and I said nothing.
    Then they came for the transcription staff, and I said nothing.

    You know what's coming next - accelerated by Covid and working from home - a whole ton of professional industries.

    Take my business (Just). Pre-covid, we had a dozen staff in the UK, of which 4 or 5 were immigrants. We now have maybe 16 people working for the UK entity. But there's no London office any more.

    Our designer has relocated back to Portugal, because she can earn near London wages, but live in her own apartment rather than a house share. One developer returned to Oz. Two new developers are working from Poland. And our head of software engineering can't decide whether to stay in an apartment in London with his wife and small child, or head back to Latvia.

    That's a massive shift. If we don't need people to work from London any more, then we can have all the advantages of a pan European labour pool but without the expensive London real estate. Great for us, great for people who need to pay rent in London, but not actually great for the pay rates of developers in London. They are now competing with people who have much lower costs of living.

    The same is happening with things like accounting. Why have a bookkeeper based in London? Invoices are all electronic these days, and I can probably get somebody for 70 or 80% less in India or Malaysia.

    What next? What about conveyancing and other bread-and-butter legal services. If a man with an English law degree can do it in Bangalore, why not? Law firms increasingly become brass plates, with all the work done by those overseas.

    At Morgan Stanley, they're hiring MBAs from the best business schools in India, and putting them together as analyst support. So, instead of a senior US analyst having two American MBAs at $500,000 apiece working for them, they have three Indians at $100,000.

    It starts in support roles, and then those offshore people will move to the main roles. One of those Indian MBAs will write such good research, that it won't make sense replacing the American with another expensive Stanford MBA - not when the man from Bangalore only wants a quarter of his salary.

    Covid is accelerating a trend that high end work - thought work, professional work - can be delivered by people with funny names in places with much lower costs.

    Off shoring is coming for all of us.
    In which case we're all doomed anyway*, so what difference the immigration regime will make I don't know. It would still be cheaper for your remote worker in Portugal to keep on working remotely from Portugal even if we were still in the EU and therefore had a completely open border with Portugal.

    *Well, most of us are doomed. Amongst the saved are those in niche high-end manufacturing that's too difficult to uproot/not worth the upheaval of moving somewhere with lower labour costs. (Buffs nails.)
    We're not doomed.

    It's just that those of us born in the UK or the US or Australia or wherever, well we got the Charlie Bucket golden ticket. We got to be better educated than people in the rest of the world, and we got to be paid more for our level of education and intelligence than we would get paid elsewhere in the world.

    Of course we attracted immigrants! If you can earn more washing cars in Acton than as an accountant in Albania, then it's pretty logical to try and get to London.

    But the world is changing. Technology means that education is going to be available to more people than ever before; and it means that someone can probably do your job for less, and without having to move country.

    This doesn't mean we're doomed. It merely means that we'll receive the same reward for a piece of work as someone in Karachi, not a massive multiple based on the lottery of place of birth.

    That'll be a hard pill for those in the West to swallow. But it'll be an incredibly opportunity for those in poorer parts of the world.
    I asked back in 2009:

    How do we compete against other countries which are as intelligent and educated as us but who are willing to work harder for lower cost and with fewer restrictions ?
    Apart from in the Far East and at a push urban India I don't think there are any countries in the non western world who have or will have a population of higher average intelligence than ours.

    There are 80 million Nigerians and 500 million Indians with IQs greater than that of the average Brit.

    What with every person in a country having a different level of intelligence, and all.

    IMPORTANT POINT:
    Knowing the average for a group is not the same as knowing the results for an individual within a group.

    So, it may be that PBers (on average) have an IQ of 130. That doesn't mean we don't have some posters who have IQs of 75. On a good day.
    I would only add that anybody who thinks IQ measures are a valid measure of intelligence can't, by definition, be very intelligent.
    My IQ fluctuates like crazy depending on what I'm talking about. Eg anything military or about the Liberal Democrats I'm a dunce, but on stuff like 70s pop culture or the need for an egalitarian schools system I'm right up in the upper echelons. Thankfully PB covers the full range so you can skew your input to high IQ areas. I think most posters do this. Not all though. Occasionally you'll get someone grinding away on something which they really shouldn't be.
    That is knowledge not IQ.

    IQ solely measures verbal, numerical and logical reasoning ability
    Memory and IQ are related, and memory is similar to knowledge.
    Although there is a strong correlation it isn't 100% by any means. There are plenty of people with excellent memories who are not logical and plenty of very clever people with appalling memories.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458

    Did Trump or other republican leaders ever tell people to avoid the vaccine? I don't remember him doing so.

    Well yes. Several influential republicans and Trump was a supporter of Wakefield so indirectly in the past yes.
  • ydoethur said:

    Did Trump or other republican leaders ever tell people to avoid the vaccine? I don't remember him doing so.

    Good morning everyone; not quite typical Bank Holiday weather; it's not raining! Heavy, miserable looking, cloud though.

    And Mr D, no I don't remember him doing so; he suggested all sorts of rubbish before the vaccine became available, but IIRC he, and/or members of his family, were vaccinated.
    It has been a thoroughly miserable August has it not? I know that it isn't just me up here in the real north east, because I have been reading your own Essex weather updates every day (thanks!).

    Heavily overcast here, 12 degrees, light winds from the north. And the same again tomorrow by the look of it.
    Not really. Last week was glorious sunshine at least where I was.
    And I got singed on Saturday. We've had bits of nice. Its just been cool and damp a lot.
This discussion has been closed.