LAB gets closer to the SNP in Scotland – politicalbetting.com
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I have a similar friend.rcs1000 said:
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.TheScreamingEagles said:
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?rcs1000 said:
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?Luckyguy1983 said:
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.darkage said:
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.Luckyguy1983 said:
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.darkage said:BartholomewRoberts said:Typical media innumeracy rant incoming ...
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/09/bellway-cuts-jobs-in-anticipation-of-uk-property-market-slowdown
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.1 -
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!Leon said:
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilatingviewcode said:"LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery", Nature,
16 August 2023, see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
I can sense bullshit stories2 -
And the rich lazy fuckers living off their inherited wealth.BlancheLivermore said:
How about adding unearned income to earned income, in two ways. If regular, then divided by your hours worked over the payment period, and taxed at the appropriate hourly rate. If a one off payment, then then divided by the number of hours you’ve worked over the last yearBenpointer said:
Interesting concept, hard to implement. You'd presumably have to tax all unearned income at the maximum rate, which is unlikely to encourage saving.BlancheLivermore said:I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
For retired people, tax people either as if they’re working full time for their income. Or maybe tax it as if they’d worked their average number of hours through their working lives
The real problem with this would be the self-employed, who’d claim to have worked eighteen hours a day for fifty years0 -
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.5 -
It was supposedly going to end with Independence and all be swept under the carpet in an means and ends argument. But Nicola never seemed to really mean that she wanted a second referendum because she couldn't see a way to win. She was right, of course, but inevitably the more delusional supporters are very, very unhappy with her. It's so sad.Malmesbury said:
It’s the crazy nature of what was going on.DavidL said:
Hmm, the reality is that the £600k was treated as party funds and was spent. That was probably ok in the context of the SNP=independence. Proving that there was a more detailed fiduciary obligation in respect of that money is problematic.Malmesbury said:The real question is what happens next with the SNP finance story.
I honestly can't think of an explanation that makes sense of the facts we know.
The bigger problem is that Nicola and her husband seem to have been operating 2 sets of accounts. The "official" version and the unofficial version where funds that they had had donated to them was a sort of amorphous slush fund into which the party, and Nicola and her husband in particular, could dip as and when this matched the greater good. That was a breach of various provisions of the Political Parties Act which is designed to ensure we can see where the funds have come from and what influence, if any, the donors then had. That, in my totally uninformed view, is where the charges will come.
Denying access to the accounts to people with a legal right of access?
The camper van - ok, maybe it was temporary accommodation, given it was parked on driveway and never moved. But surely buying a flat would have been easier, less conspicuous and would be an asset going up in value rather than down?
Maybe I have the wrong mindset. But this stuff could never end well, could it?0 -
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.0 -
I've always been a part of the One Nation wing of the Tory (Thatcherite edition.)Alanbrooke said:
ROFL. I take it this is a new thing since Brexit.TheScreamingEagles said:
Because we care about others and hate to see them struggle.Alanbrooke said:
Most of the Remainers I know are doing well out of Brexit. I cant understand what youre all moaning about.TheScreamingEagles said:
We're worth every penny.Alanbrooke said:
And yet when bankers, directors and professionals pig out on salaries its somehow ok.TheScreamingEagles said:
I'm so old I remember when you and Boris Johnson (and other PBers) were cheering above inflation pay increases in 2021 as a benefit of Brexit.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker is paid slightly more than the average private sector worker
Some of us did warn that inflation would be back and is rather difficult to get rid off, the herpes of economics.
How does that work ?
The irony is I received a large bonus and pay increase thanks to Brexit as my preparations made sure my firm was ready for the disaster that was Boris Johnson's Brexit deal which spent more time on bloody fish than it did on financial services.
Guess which one contributes 0.0001% of GDP and which one is the largest contributor to the Exchequer?
When we were in the EU Finance and professionals imported all the ladies at the dockside and wouldnt pay the locals.
It is why Ken Clarke was always Thatcher's go to guy when she needed major reform.0 -
MRDA.TheScreamingEagles said:
I have a similar friend.rcs1000 said:
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.TheScreamingEagles said:
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?rcs1000 said:
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?Luckyguy1983 said:
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.darkage said:
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.Luckyguy1983 said:
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.darkage said:BartholomewRoberts said:Typical media innumeracy rant incoming ...
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/09/bellway-cuts-jobs-in-anticipation-of-uk-property-market-slowdown
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.0 -
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agreedarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
"contractors"1 -
I am due to give a talk on using the new 'AI' APi's etc to our IT teams. I'd given some example scripts to someone who works in 'the real world' (I'm in H.E) and asked them if it was ok to share.
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks.
* GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed.
* our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes
* we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo
* we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter
* I have way more ideas than I have time.
* our KPIs are all meaningless now
0 -
Indeed. I thought HYUFD was a Conservative who believed in the free market. (No, not really, I don't.)darkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.2 -
S'true tho, innit?Mexicanpete said:
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!Leon said:
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilatingviewcode said:"LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery", Nature,
16 August 2023, see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
I can sense bullshit stories
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE1 -
5) You thought Liz Truss would surprise on the upside as PM and that Starmer would be cowering in free.Leon said:
S'true tho, innit?Mexicanpete said:
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!Leon said:
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilatingviewcode said:"LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery", Nature,
16 August 2023, see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
I can sense bullshit stories
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
6) Last autumn you were shitting your kecks that Putin was going to use nukes.2 -
If those junior doctors in England want higher pay, they might consider these two American states: "We already knew that the highest-earning lawyers, like other elite white-collar professionals, live in high-cost, high-income metropoli such as New York and D.C. But here’s the weird part: That’s not true of doctors. They earn the most in rural states.
The best-paid doctors in America work in the Dakotas, where they averaged $524,000 (South) and $468,000 (North) in 2017 in their prime earning years, including business income and capital gains. That’s well above the already astonishing $405,000 the average U.S. doctor made in the prime earning years, defined here as 40 to 55."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/11/doctor-pay-geography/
Living costs and taxes in the Dakotas are lower than the average for the US, too.
As I do from time to time, I am not defending any of the many American health care systems -- even though I benefit from the largest.
(Yes, that finding came as a surprise to me, too. But it does help explain why dentists in this much more expensive area are so competitive.)
1 -
I do foresee an interesting conundrum for a future government. If they do the logical thing, and recruit enough staff for the NHS to end the agency stuff, there will be some immediate pressure for wages to go up.Carnyx said:
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agreedarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
"contractors"
Because many of the staff are using agency work to top up their salaries. If the opportunity goes away, that’s less money coming in…0 -
1. Not proven.Leon said:
S'true tho, innit?Mexicanpete said:
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!Leon said:
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilatingviewcode said:"LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery", Nature,
16 August 2023, see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
I can sense bullshit stories
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
2. Not proven.
3. You may be onto something.
4. Hmm.0 -
7. Black cabs are done for; Uber uber alles.TheScreamingEagles said:
5) You thought Liz Truss would surprise on the upside as PM and that Starmer would be cowering in free.Leon said:
S'true tho, innit?Mexicanpete said:
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!Leon said:
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilatingviewcode said:"LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery", Nature,
16 August 2023, see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
I can sense bullshit stories
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
6) Last autumn you were shitting your kecks that Putin was going to use nukes.2 -
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard0 -
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.BartholomewRoberts said:
Yet again: We have full employment.Fishing said:
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):BartholomewRoberts said:
You're the economically illiterate one.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
Wage inflation+other inputs inflation=input inflation (dW/dt + dN/dt = dI/dt)
Input inflation-productivity growth=retail inflation (dI/dt + dR/dt = dP/d)
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.3 -
Did you see my post earlier regarding the tweet in the thread?Carnyx said:
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agreedarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
"contractors"
The figures in the tweet are correct for Westminster VI but YouGov used the wrong graphic.1 -
You don’t need highly paid contractors to work as carers in care homesCarnyx said:
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agreedarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
"contractors"
0 -
Card/ApplePay tap only would suffice, as you don’t need a signal for that.Northern_Al said:
Speaking as a 'young pensioner', it's a complete pain to have to download an App for parking (and for lots of other things now). Those who have weaker phone skills must find it virtually impossible. It's worth remembering that poor eyesight is a feature of the elderly as well, making it even harder when out and about. Where I live, it seems to have fuelled an increase in the (probably illegitimate) use of disabled parking badges.twistedfirestopper3 said:.
We've spent the last month living the easy life around Dorset and the New Forest. Probably spent 100-120 quid on parking. It's effing expensive, but the place is rammed so no real alternative. What's bugged me is the inconsistencies and sheer hard work involved in payment methods. Cash/card/phone app. A few times I've had no cash, only to find the parking is cash only, other times I've had a crap signal so app wont work and no cash, or not enough cash but the phone app isn't working and the machine doesn't like my card. Royal pain in the arse!Sandpit said:
My Mum is 75, and gets horribly frustrated by newfangled parking meters. Don’t underestimate the effect of these changes on groups like the elderly.BartholomewRoberts said:
QTWAIN.ydoethur said:The RAC wades in on the great debate of our times:
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/are-drivers-who-pay-with-cash-when-parking-being-discriminated-against/
Discrimination is against protected classes that you can't control.
People who choose to pay extra by using an inferior, insecure and more expensive medium are responsible for paying for their own choices. If you make a choice, take responsibility for your own choices.
Parking anywhere should offer a choice of cash, or card tap. We could all manage one of those.0 -
What on earth were you spending £120k / year on? Platinum plated computers?ohnotnow said:I am due to give a talk on using the new 'AI' APi's etc to our IT teams. I'd given some example scripts to someone who works in 'the real world' (I'm in H.E) and asked them if it was ok to share.
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks.
* GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed.
* our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes
* we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo
* we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter
* I have way more ideas than I have time.
* our KPIs are all meaningless now0 -
Murders?Leon said:Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
I see your eye for detail is improving.
A bit like that roaster SeanT after the Glasgow bin lorry incident who wanted to deport every Muslim to Madagascar.3 -
The only way that the whole camper van story makes sense, is if they intended it to be some sort of election month battle bus, and they figured it was cheaper to buy one than rent one over five or six years. The bit they missed, is that they require constant maintenance and depreciate like crazy. Leaving one parked up for most of the year totally kills it.Malmesbury said:
It’s the crazy nature of what was going on.DavidL said:
Hmm, the reality is that the £600k was treated as party funds and was spent. That was probably ok in the context of the SNP=independence. Proving that there was a more detailed fiduciary obligation in respect of that money is problematic.Malmesbury said:The real question is what happens next with the SNP finance story.
I honestly can't think of an explanation that makes sense of the facts we know.
The bigger problem is that Nicola and her husband seem to have been operating 2 sets of accounts. The "official" version and the unofficial version where funds that they had had donated to them was a sort of amorphous slush fund into which the party, and Nicola and her husband in particular, could dip as and when this matched the greater good. That was a breach of various provisions of the Political Parties Act which is designed to ensure we can see where the funds have come from and what influence, if any, the donors then had. That, in my totally uninformed view, is where the charges will come.
Denying access to the accounts to people with a legal right of access?
The camper van - ok, maybe it was temporary accommodation, given it was parked on driveway and never moved. But surely buying a flat would have been easier, less conspicuous and would be an asset going up in value rather than down?
Maybe I have the wrong mindset. But this stuff could never end well, could it?
All other explanations revolve around nefarious reasons for diverting money from the party funds.0 -
We've had actual Congressional Hearings where Senators and witnesses calmly discussed the retrieval of alien spacecraft, I think 1 is PROVED beyond questionMexicanpete said:
1. Not proven.Leon said:
S'true tho, innit?Mexicanpete said:
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!Leon said:
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilatingviewcode said:"LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery", Nature,
16 August 2023, see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
I can sense bullshit stories
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
2. Not proven.
3. You may be onto something.
4. Hmm.
Of course 2 is true, no one sane believes otherwise, any more
3. Well, derr
4. Was just me having fun or something, I was probably drunk for a week, or on meth, you can't blame me for that0 -
This is an interesting idea. All the people on higher salaries at my office work 4 days weeks because of this, which reduces our tax contribution and depresses our productivity (at least by £ per hour measurement), because the people on lower salaries work a full week.Benpointer said:
And the rich lazy fuckers living off their inherited wealth.BlancheLivermore said:
How about adding unearned income to earned income, in two ways. If regular, then divided by your hours worked over the payment period, and taxed at the appropriate hourly rate. If a one off payment, then then divided by the number of hours you’ve worked over the last yearBenpointer said:
Interesting concept, hard to implement. You'd presumably have to tax all unearned income at the maximum rate, which is unlikely to encourage saving.BlancheLivermore said:I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
For retired people, tax people either as if they’re working full time for their income. Or maybe tax it as if they’d worked their average number of hours through their working lives
The real problem with this would be the self-employed, who’d claim to have worked eighteen hours a day for fifty years
0 -
Congratulations on not addressing any of the barbs in my post and making up an imaginary one. What rhetorical power you have!Luckyguy1983 said:
How is banning homes being built due to people who will shit in the toliets there, when those same people are already shitting in other toilets, so exactly the same pollution is occurring, preventing any of those things from happening?Foxy said:
Yes, what the country needs is jerry built, poorly insulated, energy inefficient, back to back slums built on flood plains. If they were good enough for our great-grandparents...Luckyguy1983 said:
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.darkage said:BartholomewRoberts said:Typical media innumeracy rant incoming ...
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/09/bellway-cuts-jobs-in-anticipation-of-uk-property-market-slowdown
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .0 -
And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners0 -
Mainly paid for by private sector health insurance companies and private sector hospitals not the state of courseJim_Miller said:If those junior doctors in England want higher pay, they might consider these two American states: "We already knew that the highest-earning lawyers, like other elite white-collar professionals, live in high-cost, high-income metropoli such as New York and D.C. But here’s the weird part: That’s not true of doctors. They earn the most in rural states.
The best-paid doctors in America work in the Dakotas, where they averaged $524,000 (South) and $468,000 (North) in 2017 in their prime earning years, including business income and capital gains. That’s well above the already astonishing $405,000 the average U.S. doctor made in the prime earning years, defined here as 40 to 55."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/11/doctor-pay-geography/
Living costs and taxes in the Dakotas are lower than the average for the US, too.
As I do from time to time, I am not defending any of the many American health care systems -- even though I benefit from the largest.
(Yes, that finding came as a surprise to me, too. But it does help explain why dentists in this much more expensive area are so competitive.)0 -
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.Leon said:And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.3 -
Who do you think works in care now? (And as teaching assistants, in the NHS, local government, etc.)HYUFD said:
You don’t need highly paid contractors to work as carers in care homesCarnyx said:
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agreedarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
"contractors"
And how are they paid relative to permanent staff do you think?2 -
I have no idea. I am in the cosy world of H.E. The real world is a mystery.Phil said:
What on earth were you spending £120k / year on? Platinum plated computers?ohnotnow said:I am due to give a talk on using the new 'AI' APi's etc to our IT teams. I'd given some example scripts to someone who works in 'the real world' (I'm in H.E) and asked them if it was ok to share.
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks.
* GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed.
* our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes
* we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo
* we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter
* I have way more ideas than I have time.
* our KPIs are all meaningless now0 -
I have a smart friend who rates Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr, and who also thinks Scottish Indy will only happen with Salmond at the forefront.TheScreamingEagles said:
I have a similar friend.rcs1000 said:
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.TheScreamingEagles said:
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?rcs1000 said:
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?Luckyguy1983 said:
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.darkage said:
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.Luckyguy1983 said:
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.darkage said:BartholomewRoberts said:Typical media innumeracy rant incoming ...
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/09/bellway-cuts-jobs-in-anticipation-of-uk-property-market-slowdown
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
He’s Canadian which is probably some explanation.
0 -
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.Stuartinromford said:
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.BartholomewRoberts said:
Yet again: We have full employment.Fishing said:
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):BartholomewRoberts said:
You're the economically illiterate one.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
Wage inflation+other inputs inflation=input inflation (dW/dt + dN/dt = dI/dt)
Input inflation-productivity growth=retail inflation (dI/dt + dR/dt = dP/d)
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.0 -
If we had a pure free market there would be no NHS at all, patients would pay their doctor or surgeon direct or private health insurance companies they belong to do or they don’t get healthcare at all if they can’t afford it.Carnyx said:
Indeed. I thought HYUFD was a Conservative who believed in the free market. (No, not really, I don't.)darkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
If your goal is to maximise your income then if you are highly skilled you will always earn more in the private sector as wages are set by supply and demand. If you are less skilled though you will earn more in the public sector normally for the same reason0 -
Can you explain what you actually mean by that post? I have an idea, but I am not quite sure.HYUFD said:
You don’t need highly paid contractors to work as carers in care homesCarnyx said:
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agreedarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
"contractors"0 -
The one advantage of a well-designed parking app is one where you can pay for additional parking time in the app, if you happen to be enjoying yourself wherever you are for longer than expected, saving you the trouble of dashing back to the car park to buy another ticket to stick on the dashboard of the car.Eabhal said:
I think I have four apps for parking, and they are all horrible to use, even for someone with decent eyesight (and a familiarity with apps, given my age). Why don't they just use contactless, which has the benefit of working when you don't have signal?Benpointer said:
Point of order - having a disabled parking badge (I've got one) rarely exempts you from carpark parking charges these days. For me the big plus is a parking space wide enough to get in and out of the car from a wheelchair.Northern_Al said:
Speaking as a 'young pensioner', it's a complete pain to have to download an App for parking (and for lots of other things now). Those who have weaker phone skills must find it virtually impossible. It's worth remembering that poor eyesight is a feature of the elderly as well, making it even harder when out and about. Where I live, it seems to have fuelled an increase in the (probably illegitimate) use of disabled parking badges.twistedfirestopper3 said:.
We've spent the last month living the easy life around Dorset and the New Forest. Probably spent 100-120 quid on parking. It's effing expensive, but the place is rammed so no real alternative. What's bugged me is the inconsistencies and sheer hard work involved in payment methods. Cash/card/phone app. A few times I've had no cash, only to find the parking is cash only, other times I've had a crap signal so app wont work and no cash, or not enough cash but the phone app isn't working and the machine doesn't like my card. Royal pain in the arse!Sandpit said:
My Mum is 75, and gets horribly frustrated by newfangled parking meters. Don’t underestimate the effect of these changes on groups like the elderly.BartholomewRoberts said:
QTWAIN.ydoethur said:The RAC wades in on the great debate of our times:
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/are-drivers-who-pay-with-cash-when-parking-being-discriminated-against/
Discrimination is against protected classes that you can't control.
People who choose to pay extra by using an inferior, insecure and more expensive medium are responsible for paying for their own choices. If you make a choice, take responsibility for your own choices.
Parking anywhere should offer a choice of cash, or card tap. We could all manage one of those.
The point about apps and eyesight is a good one. Since disability is a protected characteristic someone might want to take a council to court for discriminating based on a hard to use app.
When they don't work, I just message the offending council on twitter and let them know my registration plate. They usually apologise and appreciate the message. The worse ones are for hillwalking, and you spend the whole day wondering if your car will still be there at the end.1 -
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.0 -
BBC now running a documentary series about Leon's pandemic exploits in Wales:TheScreamingEagles said:
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.Leon said:And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0fvmzmy/henpocalypse0 -
Because two would be sillyydoethur said:
I'm intrigued.TheScreamingEagles said:
But it's like wearing a welly in the shower.Casino_Royale said:
So you're saying Boris should have wore a condom?TheScreamingEagles said:
I'm so old I remember when you and Boris Johnson (and other PBers) were cheering above inflation pay increases in 2021 as a benefit of Brexit.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker is paid slightly more than the average private sector worker
Some of us did warn that inflation would be back and is rather difficult to get rid off, the herpes of economics.
Can't say I disagree.
Why do you wear a single welly in the shower?
2 -
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.0 -
It's broadly the same reason that in most African countries half or more of the doctors work in the capitol. University educated people want to enjoy the pleasures they acquired the taste for. They don't want to talk about hog prices, they want fine dining, live theatre, that sort of thing.Jim_Miller said:If those junior doctors in England want higher pay, they might consider these two American states: "We already knew that the highest-earning lawyers, like other elite white-collar professionals, live in high-cost, high-income metropoli such as New York and D.C. But here’s the weird part: That’s not true of doctors. They earn the most in rural states.
The best-paid doctors in America work in the Dakotas, where they averaged $524,000 (South) and $468,000 (North) in 2017 in their prime earning years, including business income and capital gains. That’s well above the already astonishing $405,000 the average U.S. doctor made in the prime earning years, defined here as 40 to 55."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/11/doctor-pay-geography/
Living costs and taxes in the Dakotas are lower than the average for the US, too.
As I do from time to time, I am not defending any of the many American health care systems -- even though I benefit from the largest.
(Yes, that finding came as a surprise to me, too. But it does help explain why dentists in this much more expensive area are so competitive.)
You get the same effect in the UK. So it is hard to recruit good medical staff on the Lincs Coast despite cheap housing etc.0 -
Unless they were planning on campaigning non stop this makes no sense. Which is why campaign buses are rented for the few weeks every few years that they are needed.Sandpit said:
The only way that the whole camper van story makes sense, is if they intended it to be some sort of election month battle bus, and they figured it was cheaper to buy one than rent one over five or six years. The bit they missed, is that they require constant maintenance and depreciate like crazy. Leaving one parked up for most of the year totally kills it.Malmesbury said:
It’s the crazy nature of what was going on.DavidL said:
Hmm, the reality is that the £600k was treated as party funds and was spent. That was probably ok in the context of the SNP=independence. Proving that there was a more detailed fiduciary obligation in respect of that money is problematic.Malmesbury said:The real question is what happens next with the SNP finance story.
I honestly can't think of an explanation that makes sense of the facts we know.
The bigger problem is that Nicola and her husband seem to have been operating 2 sets of accounts. The "official" version and the unofficial version where funds that they had had donated to them was a sort of amorphous slush fund into which the party, and Nicola and her husband in particular, could dip as and when this matched the greater good. That was a breach of various provisions of the Political Parties Act which is designed to ensure we can see where the funds have come from and what influence, if any, the donors then had. That, in my totally uninformed view, is where the charges will come.
Denying access to the accounts to people with a legal right of access?
The camper van - ok, maybe it was temporary accommodation, given it was parked on driveway and never moved. But surely buying a flat would have been easier, less conspicuous and would be an asset going up in value rather than down?
Maybe I have the wrong mindset. But this stuff could never end well, could it?
All other explanations revolve around nefarious reasons for diverting money from the party funds.1 -
Combination of the personal allowance clawback at £100k, and the pension pot limits? Yes, taxing people at nearly 70% makes them want to work less.Eabhal said:
This is an interesting idea. All the people on higher salaries at my office work 4 days weeks because of this, which reduces our tax contribution and depresses our productivity (at least by £ per hour measurement), because the people on lower salaries work a full week.Benpointer said:
And the rich lazy fuckers living off their inherited wealth.BlancheLivermore said:
How about adding unearned income to earned income, in two ways. If regular, then divided by your hours worked over the payment period, and taxed at the appropriate hourly rate. If a one off payment, then then divided by the number of hours you’ve worked over the last yearBenpointer said:
Interesting concept, hard to implement. You'd presumably have to tax all unearned income at the maximum rate, which is unlikely to encourage saving.BlancheLivermore said:I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
For retired people, tax people either as if they’re working full time for their income. Or maybe tax it as if they’d worked their average number of hours through their working lives
The real problem with this would be the self-employed, who’d claim to have worked eighteen hours a day for fifty years
I remember bumping into what I assume is the issue @BlancheLivermore was alluding to earlier, of working so much overtime that the marginal tax rate went from 20% to 40%. Funnily enough, I monitored the overtime after that.1 -
Being pedantic, but there's a little point in that anecdote that throws up warning signs in my mind. It is this:ohnotnow said:I am due to give a talk on using the new 'AI' APi's etc to our IT teams. I'd given some example scripts to someone who works in 'the real world' (I'm in H.E) and asked them if it was ok to share.
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks.
* GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed.
* our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes
* we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo
* we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter
* I have way more ideas than I have time.
* our KPIs are all meaningless now
"Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality"
How do you know the 3 million are of equal accuracy/quality? Have they all been checked, and if so, how? Were only a small sample checked, in which case how cure can you be of the overall quality?
Things like 'three million' are really large and impressive numbers in this context. They should also be treated with scepticism. It doesn't mean they're wrong, but I'm always wary.
Also, the clients get results in minutes. That indicates that the AI's output is *not* being human-checked. I ight suggest that there are certain dangers in that, especially if the dataset sitting under the AI changes.0 -
From the WaPo article I linked to, earlier: "The government also influences physician pay directly through Medicare, perhaps the biggest spigot of health-care cash on Planet Earth. Typically, people in low-income areas can’t spend as much and merchants tend to earn less. But that’s not the case for health care, in large part because Medicare ensures that retirement-age Americans — by far the biggest health-care consumers — can afford about as much in South Dakota as they can in South Beach. Which means doctors work in one of the few industries where demand is not necessarily determined by disposable income."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
US Medicare covers about 65 million people. In 2022, total spending for the program "topped $900 billion".
1 -
Set the DeLorean for 4th July 1948.HYUFD said:
If we had a pure free market there would be no NHS at all, patients would pay their doctor or surgeon direct or private health insurance companies they belong to do or they don’t get healthcare at all if they can’t afford it.Carnyx said:
Indeed. I thought HYUFD was a Conservative who believed in the free market. (No, not really, I don't.)darkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
If your goal is to maximise your income then if you are highly skilled you will always earn more in the private sector as wages are set by supply and demand. If you are less skilled though you will earn more in the public sector normally for the same reason0 -
Errr, public sector education productivity has been flat been flat since 2007.BartholomewRoberts said:
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.Stuartinromford said:
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.BartholomewRoberts said:
Yet again: We have full employment.Fishing said:
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):BartholomewRoberts said:
You're the economically illiterate one.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
Wage inflation+other inputs inflation=input inflation (dW/dt + dN/dt = dI/dt)
Input inflation-productivity growth=retail inflation (dI/dt + dR/dt = dP/d)
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
Real wage increases != productivity gains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Edit: apologies, education productivity has actually decreased since 1997.1 -
Well, no, there isn't. The tax code charges you the same based on your earnings, regardless of how many hours you worked to earn them. It charges you more if you earn more, on the basis that of you earn more you have already paid for the essentials and so can afford to pay a higher rate of tax - broader shoulders and all that.BlancheLivermore said:
There's currently a tax disincentive against me working more hoursLostPassword said:
That's an interesting idea, but it provides a tax incentive for low productivity, which I don't think is a good idea.BlancheLivermore said:I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
In what universe does that make sense?0 -
But all of the political parties want to rent the busses at the same time, so they’re paying peak rental rates. I bet that some young squirt figured it was cheaper to buy a bus pay top dollar to rent them.Malmesbury said:
Unless they were planning on campaigning non stop this makes no sense. Which is why campaign buses are rented for the few weeks every few years that they are needed.Sandpit said:
The only way that the whole camper van story makes sense, is if they intended it to be some sort of election month battle bus, and they figured it was cheaper to buy one than rent one over five or six years. The bit they missed, is that they require constant maintenance and depreciate like crazy. Leaving one parked up for most of the year totally kills it.Malmesbury said:
It’s the crazy nature of what was going on.DavidL said:
Hmm, the reality is that the £600k was treated as party funds and was spent. That was probably ok in the context of the SNP=independence. Proving that there was a more detailed fiduciary obligation in respect of that money is problematic.Malmesbury said:The real question is what happens next with the SNP finance story.
I honestly can't think of an explanation that makes sense of the facts we know.
The bigger problem is that Nicola and her husband seem to have been operating 2 sets of accounts. The "official" version and the unofficial version where funds that they had had donated to them was a sort of amorphous slush fund into which the party, and Nicola and her husband in particular, could dip as and when this matched the greater good. That was a breach of various provisions of the Political Parties Act which is designed to ensure we can see where the funds have come from and what influence, if any, the donors then had. That, in my totally uninformed view, is where the charges will come.
Denying access to the accounts to people with a legal right of access?
The camper van - ok, maybe it was temporary accommodation, given it was parked on driveway and never moved. But surely buying a flat would have been easier, less conspicuous and would be an asset going up in value rather than down?
Maybe I have the wrong mindset. But this stuff could never end well, could it?
All other explanations revolve around nefarious reasons for diverting money from the party funds.
That, or something nefarious.0 -
I'm wondering in light of TSE's other posts if it was a signal conspiracy was a foot.viewcode said:
Because two would be sillyydoethur said:
I'm intrigued.TheScreamingEagles said:
But it's like wearing a welly in the shower.Casino_Royale said:
So you're saying Boris should have wore a condom?TheScreamingEagles said:
I'm so old I remember when you and Boris Johnson (and other PBers) were cheering above inflation pay increases in 2021 as a benefit of Brexit.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker is paid slightly more than the average private sector worker
Some of us did warn that inflation would be back and is rather difficult to get rid off, the herpes of economics.
Can't say I disagree.
Why do you wear a single welly in the shower?1 -
I would have thought they had had enough with Quebec NationalistsTheuniondivvie said:
I have a smart friend who rates Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr, and who also thinks Scottish Indy will only happen with Salmond at the forefront.TheScreamingEagles said:
I have a similar friend.rcs1000 said:
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.TheScreamingEagles said:
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?rcs1000 said:
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?Luckyguy1983 said:
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.darkage said:
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.Luckyguy1983 said:
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.darkage said:BartholomewRoberts said:Typical media innumeracy rant incoming ...
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/09/bellway-cuts-jobs-in-anticipation-of-uk-property-market-slowdown
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
He’s Canadian which is probably some explanation.
0 -
By contrast when I went through passport control while entering a foreign country a couple of weeks ago it was a breeze.TimS said:Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
It kind of reminded me of self-service tills (done well) at a supermarket.
The room had an array of self-service machines (dozens of them) which we walked up to a free one of. There were about 2 staff available on the floor to help anyone having an issue with the machines, but they looked pretty idle as the machines were really easy to use.
The machine scanned our passports, took a photo in turn of myself and my wife (not the children) and asked questions after which it printed a receipt with a barcode. Then went to the desk, handed over our receipt, which was scanned, the light lit green and we were waved through. All done in about three minutes from entering the queue for passport control to being through it.
If countries have a problem handling passport control, they should fix it.0 -
You can't pin that one on Leon, that was a guy called Eadric. Although Eadric like Leon seemed to have some sort of romantic relationship with that guy from the Speccie.TheScreamingEagles said:
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.Leon said:And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.0 -
My overtime was unpaid. I was subsequently awarded a significant settlement for being under the minimum wage.Sandpit said:
Combination of the personal allowance clawback at £100k, and the pension pot limits? Yes, taxing people at nearly 70% makes them want to work less.Eabhal said:
This is an interesting idea. All the people on higher salaries at my office work 4 days weeks because of this, which reduces our tax contribution and depresses our productivity (at least by £ per hour measurement), because the people on lower salaries work a full week.Benpointer said:
And the rich lazy fuckers living off their inherited wealth.BlancheLivermore said:
How about adding unearned income to earned income, in two ways. If regular, then divided by your hours worked over the payment period, and taxed at the appropriate hourly rate. If a one off payment, then then divided by the number of hours you’ve worked over the last yearBenpointer said:
Interesting concept, hard to implement. You'd presumably have to tax all unearned income at the maximum rate, which is unlikely to encourage saving.BlancheLivermore said:I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
For retired people, tax people either as if they’re working full time for their income. Or maybe tax it as if they’d worked their average number of hours through their working lives
The real problem with this would be the self-employed, who’d claim to have worked eighteen hours a day for fifty years
I remember bumping into what I assume is the issue @BlancheLivermore was alluding to earlier, of working so much overtime that the marginal tax rate went from 20% to 40%. Funnily enough, I monitored the overtime after that.2 -
I used to have a really intelligent friend, absolute expert in his field of history, who lived in rural England, his social media posts generally consisted ofTheuniondivvie said:
I have a smart friend who rates Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr, and who also thinks Scottish Indy will only happen with Salmond at the forefront.TheScreamingEagles said:
I have a similar friend.rcs1000 said:
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.TheScreamingEagles said:
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?rcs1000 said:
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?Luckyguy1983 said:
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.darkage said:
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.Luckyguy1983 said:
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.darkage said:BartholomewRoberts said:Typical media innumeracy rant incoming ...
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/09/bellway-cuts-jobs-in-anticipation-of-uk-property-market-slowdown
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
He’s Canadian which is probably some explanation.
1) Complaining about poor broadband and mobile coverage in rural UK saying it was causing a left behind society
2) Complaining about mobile masts causing cancer and being an eyesore in rural England
3) Proud that he had put in an objection to masts being erected or roads being dug up for fibre cables.
4) Posting outlandish conspiracy theories.0 -
You may well appreciate that many people advocate for a flat tax rate. This encourages everyone to work and earn more.BlancheLivermore said:
There's currently a tax disincentive against me working more hoursLostPassword said:
That's an interesting idea, but it provides a tax incentive for low productivity, which I don't think is a good idea.BlancheLivermore said:I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
In what universe does that make sense?2 -
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.Leon said:Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard0 -
If entering Shenghen zone you need a stamp to prove date of entry as now restricted to 90 days.BartholomewRoberts said:
By contrast when I went through passport control while entering a foreign country a couple of weeks ago it was a breeze.TimS said:Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
It kind of reminded me of self-service tills (done well) at a supermarket.
The room had an array of self-service machines (dozens of them) which we walked up to a free one of. There were about 2 staff available on the floor to help anyone having an issue with the machines, but they looked pretty idle as the machines were really easy to use.
The machine scanned our passports, took a photo in turn of myself and my wife (not the children) and asked questions after which it printed a receipt with a barcode. Then went to the desk, handed over our receipt, which was scanned, the light lit green and we were waved through. All done in about three minutes from entering the queue for passport control to being through it.
If countries have a problem handling passport control, they should fix it.0 -
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?kinabalu said:
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.Leon said:Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
Does he??
0 -
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
0 -
Did you misread what I wrote?Eabhal said:
Errr, public sector education productivity has been flat been flat since 2007.BartholomewRoberts said:
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.Stuartinromford said:
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.BartholomewRoberts said:
Yet again: We have full employment.Fishing said:
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):BartholomewRoberts said:
You're the economically illiterate one.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
Wage inflation+other inputs inflation=input inflation (dW/dt + dN/dt = dI/dt)
Input inflation-productivity growth=retail inflation (dI/dt + dR/dt = dP/d)
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
Real wage increases != productivity gains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Edit: apologies, education productivity has actually decreased since 1997.
Productivity may not directly increase in education, but it increases in society which is fuelled by education and that pays for pay rises for teachers.
If people learn well at school and gets a well paid job as a lawyer or banker or software engineer or anything else then they will pay taxes accordingly. Which can pay teachers. Which can improve education, which leads to better paid workers of the future, which leads to economic growth, which leads to taxes, which leads to being able to pay more wages.
Is an educated software engineer's productivity all due to the software industry? Or is some of it due to being educated which enabled them to become a software engineer in the first place?0 -
Yes because rich people need more take home pay to make them motivated to work, while poor people need less take home pay to motivate themselves.AlistairM said:
You may well appreciate that many people advocate for a flat tax rate. This encourages everyone to work and earn more.BlancheLivermore said:
There's currently a tax disincentive against me working more hoursLostPassword said:
That's an interesting idea, but it provides a tax incentive for low productivity, which I don't think is a good idea.BlancheLivermore said:I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
In what universe does that make sense?1 -
No, I want Fauci tried - and potentially put in jail for many years - for trying to cover-up the Lab Leak. Which he did. Because he personally funded the laboratory in question to do gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses. Which he didTheScreamingEagles said:
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.Leon said:And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.0 -
I have this image of a huge lardy-white coil of writhing sweaty bodies: Leon, Eadric, LadyG, all sliding past and into each other, like a greasy antiwoke ouroborous at the bottom of its pit.Mexicanpete said:
You can't pin that one on Leon, that was a guy called Eadric. Although Eadric like Leon seemed to have some sort of romantic relationship with that guy from the Speccie.TheScreamingEagles said:
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.Leon said:And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
Pause
The ticket collector who was looking over my shoulder as I composed that sentence hurried away hurriedly.
4 -
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
2 -
Blimey, you're really in danger of going full Plato.Leon said:
No, I want Fauci tried - and potentially put in jail for many years - for trying to cover-up the Lab Leak. Which he did. Because he personally funded the laboratory in question to do gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses. Which he didTheScreamingEagles said:
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.Leon said:And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.1 -
She finally waved him through. Indian passport I think. Then on to me:TimS said:Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
“why are you here?”
“Um, for a business meeting”
(Leafing through passport) “you come here often.”
“Er yes” (am i being chatted up by the border guard?)
“You know about the 90 day rule?”
“Yes, I’m nowhere near”
(Dismissive wave from my border guard friend of the hand and off I toddle).
And it then strikes me that working out how many days someone has spent in the last 12 months based on passport stamps would be quite an exercise. Thankfully not been subjected to that yet.0 -
In my experience, at least in Amsterdam and Stockholm, if you tell them that you are going on to another country, then thats it, end of questions. They only carry out an interrogation if you tell them that you are staying in the country you have landed at. It is starting to get really annoying though. At Helsinki I had to wait 45 minutes. Such a contrast with the UK where people from the EU can just go through automated gates in a few minutes, same as British citizens.TimS said:Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
0 -
So, you have a problem with Khan being strong on anti Trans hate crime rather than feeling some solidarity with a dark skinned suspect? You think that a bad thing? 🤔Leon said:
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?kinabalu said:
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.Leon said:Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
Does he??2 -
Possibly not the best comparison, given the circs... ☹️TheScreamingEagles said:
Blimey, you're really in danger of going full Plato.Leon said:
No, I want Fauci tried - and potentially put in jail for many years - for trying to cover-up the Lab Leak. Which he did. Because he personally funded the laboratory in question to do gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses. Which he didTheScreamingEagles said:
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.Leon said:And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.0 -
Dr. Foxy - The WaPo article shows that US doctor training is heavily concentrated in urban areas. And the authors agree with your argument.
In my home state, Washington State University is expanding its own medical school, which is located at the eastern end of the state. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2023/aug/11/wsu-spokanes-new-school-of-medicine-building-is-re/
(The population of the Spokane metropolitan area is almost 600 K, of which the city itself has about a third.)0 -
Which is their choice, and they can handle it how they choose. If its causing issues, they should fix it if they want to.Foxy said:
If entering Shenghen zone you need a stamp to prove date of entry as now restricted to 90 days.BartholomewRoberts said:
By contrast when I went through passport control while entering a foreign country a couple of weeks ago it was a breeze.TimS said:Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
It kind of reminded me of self-service tills (done well) at a supermarket.
The room had an array of self-service machines (dozens of them) which we walked up to a free one of. There were about 2 staff available on the floor to help anyone having an issue with the machines, but they looked pretty idle as the machines were really easy to use.
The machine scanned our passports, took a photo in turn of myself and my wife (not the children) and asked questions after which it printed a receipt with a barcode. Then went to the desk, handed over our receipt, which was scanned, the light lit green and we were waved through. All done in about three minutes from entering the queue for passport control to being through it.
If countries have a problem handling passport control, they should fix it.
The country I visited has a days limit on how long people can be there too (for UK passport holders its six months typically), but there's no stamp its all computerised and electronically recorded which is what the machine dealt with when going through in a breeze.
Personally I think its a shame we don't get stamps anymore. It was good to be able to collect stamps and look back at stamps in your book.0 -
Unlike the mayor, I would have waited at least an hour before jumping to blame the Clapham atrocities on the "Tories and Terfs" for stoking the "culture wars"Foxy said:
So, you have a problem with Khan being strong on anti Trans hate crime rather than feeling some solidarity with a dark skinned suspect? You think that a bad thing? 🤔Leon said:
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?kinabalu said:
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.Leon said:Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
Does he??
0 -
Just to clarify its actually 90 days out of 180. This (along with the interrogations) will hopefully be resolved when the new ETIAS system is rolled out, all the information will be collected automatically. But the ETIAS system is always just about to be introduced and keeps getting put back - has been the case for the past few years and the latest estimate is 'after the paris olympics'.TimS said:
She finally waved him through. Indian passport I think. Then on to me:TimS said:Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
“why are you here?”
“Um, for a business meeting”
(Leafing through passport) “you come here often.”
“Er yes” (am i being chatted up by the border guard?)
“You know about the 90 day rule?”
“Yes, I’m nowhere near”
(Dismissive wave from my border guard friend of the hand and off I toddle).
And it then strikes me that working out how many days someone has spent in the last 12 months based on passport stamps would be quite an exercise. Thankfully not been subjected to that yet.0 -
This is an area where one world government is required. One UN-mandated app called “global park” applying to all paid parking on the planet. Ideally the same app could be used to book public transport, pay road tolls and organise babysitters.LostPassword said:
The one advantage of a well-designed parking app is one where you can pay for additional parking time in the app, if you happen to be enjoying yourself wherever you are for longer than expected, saving you the trouble of dashing back to the car park to buy another ticket to stick on the dashboard of the car.Eabhal said:
I think I have four apps for parking, and they are all horrible to use, even for someone with decent eyesight (and a familiarity with apps, given my age). Why don't they just use contactless, which has the benefit of working when you don't have signal?Benpointer said:
Point of order - having a disabled parking badge (I've got one) rarely exempts you from carpark parking charges these days. For me the big plus is a parking space wide enough to get in and out of the car from a wheelchair.Northern_Al said:
Speaking as a 'young pensioner', it's a complete pain to have to download an App for parking (and for lots of other things now). Those who have weaker phone skills must find it virtually impossible. It's worth remembering that poor eyesight is a feature of the elderly as well, making it even harder when out and about. Where I live, it seems to have fuelled an increase in the (probably illegitimate) use of disabled parking badges.twistedfirestopper3 said:.
We've spent the last month living the easy life around Dorset and the New Forest. Probably spent 100-120 quid on parking. It's effing expensive, but the place is rammed so no real alternative. What's bugged me is the inconsistencies and sheer hard work involved in payment methods. Cash/card/phone app. A few times I've had no cash, only to find the parking is cash only, other times I've had a crap signal so app wont work and no cash, or not enough cash but the phone app isn't working and the machine doesn't like my card. Royal pain in the arse!Sandpit said:
My Mum is 75, and gets horribly frustrated by newfangled parking meters. Don’t underestimate the effect of these changes on groups like the elderly.BartholomewRoberts said:
QTWAIN.ydoethur said:The RAC wades in on the great debate of our times:
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/are-drivers-who-pay-with-cash-when-parking-being-discriminated-against/
Discrimination is against protected classes that you can't control.
People who choose to pay extra by using an inferior, insecure and more expensive medium are responsible for paying for their own choices. If you make a choice, take responsibility for your own choices.
Parking anywhere should offer a choice of cash, or card tap. We could all manage one of those.
The point about apps and eyesight is a good one. Since disability is a protected characteristic someone might want to take a council to court for discriminating based on a hard to use app.
When they don't work, I just message the offending council on twitter and let them know my registration plate. They usually apologise and appreciate the message. The worse ones are for hillwalking, and you spend the whole day wondering if your car will still be there at the end.0 -
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
0 -
You said that teacher productivity was increasing. You suggested that the economy has become better educated and more productive because of that. The data does not support your assumption.BartholomewRoberts said:
Did you misread what I wrote?Eabhal said:
Errr, public sector education productivity has been flat been flat since 2007.BartholomewRoberts said:
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.Stuartinromford said:
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.BartholomewRoberts said:
Yet again: We have full employment.Fishing said:
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):BartholomewRoberts said:
You're the economically illiterate one.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
Wage inflation+other inputs inflation=input inflation (dW/dt + dN/dt = dI/dt)
Input inflation-productivity growth=retail inflation (dI/dt + dR/dt = dP/d)
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
Real wage increases != productivity gains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Edit: apologies, education productivity has actually decreased since 1997.
Productivity may not directly increase in education, but it increases in society which is fuelled by education and that pays for pay rises for teachers.
If people learn well at school and gets a well paid job as a lawyer or banker or software engineer or anything else then they will pay taxes accordingly. Which can pay teachers. Which can improve education, which leads to better paid workers of the future, which leads to economic growth, which leads to taxes, which leads to being able to pay more wages.
Is an educated software engineer's productivity all due to the software industry? Or is some of it due to being educated which enabled them to become a software engineer in the first place?
I appreciate you like to come here and pontificate on all topics, but when myself and others respond with data or evidence that helps the debate along, you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
However, I appreciate that you have pivoted away from your original view and now describe the Baumol effect (sort of). My experience of software engineers is they gain all their knowledge from Monster Energy drinks.
0 -
All those are true, unlike many of the beliefs adopted by dear old Plato (RIP)TheScreamingEagles said:
Blimey, you're really in danger of going full Plato.Leon said:
No, I want Fauci tried - and potentially put in jail for many years - for trying to cover-up the Lab Leak. Which he did. Because he personally funded the laboratory in question to do gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses. Which he didTheScreamingEagles said:
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.Leon said:And let's not forget 5
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
"In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan
A spokesman for Dr. Fauci says he has been “entirely truthful,” but a new letter belatedly acknowledging the National Institutes of Health’s support for virus-enhancing research adds more heat to the ongoing debate over whether a lab leak could have sparked the pandemic."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan0 -
That's precisely what they are doing. There is a market for doctors and nurses, and the Australians are paying the going rate.HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages0 -
Incidentally while it took us about three minutes from start to finish to get through passport control in our recent flight, it took someone we were travelling with less time, since the questions we answered on a machine they'd pre-answered on an app, so they just had to get their photo taken and it was done.
I wasn't aware of the app.
Countries struggling with passport control should sort it out, that's on them. Its not rocket science to do it well.0 -
Yes as Australia has more private healthcare, especially amongst high earners, than we do and the private sector pays more than the public sector at the top end and always willEabhal said:
That's precisely what they are doing. There is a market for doctors and nurses, and the Australians are paying the going rate.HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
0 -
I was suggesting that teacher productivity should not just be considered as teacher productivity itself as it gets measured as that's lies, damned lies and statistics; but as societal productivity overall as without education all the rest of the well paid productive jobs wouldn't exist either.Eabhal said:
You said that teacher productivity was increasing. You suggested that the economy has become better educated and more productive because of that. The data does not support your assumption.BartholomewRoberts said:
Did you misread what I wrote?Eabhal said:
Errr, public sector education productivity has been flat been flat since 2007.BartholomewRoberts said:
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.Stuartinromford said:
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.BartholomewRoberts said:
Yet again: We have full employment.Fishing said:
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):BartholomewRoberts said:
You're the economically illiterate one.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
Wage inflation+other inputs inflation=input inflation (dW/dt + dN/dt = dI/dt)
Input inflation-productivity growth=retail inflation (dI/dt + dR/dt = dP/d)
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
Real wage increases != productivity gains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Edit: apologies, education productivity has actually decreased since 1997.
Productivity may not directly increase in education, but it increases in society which is fuelled by education and that pays for pay rises for teachers.
If people learn well at school and gets a well paid job as a lawyer or banker or software engineer or anything else then they will pay taxes accordingly. Which can pay teachers. Which can improve education, which leads to better paid workers of the future, which leads to economic growth, which leads to taxes, which leads to being able to pay more wages.
Is an educated software engineer's productivity all due to the software industry? Or is some of it due to being educated which enabled them to become a software engineer in the first place?
I appreciate you like to come here and pontificate on all topics, but when myself and others respond with data or evidence that helps the debate along, you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
However, I appreciate that you have pivoted away from your original view and now describe the Baumol effect (sort of). My experience of software engineers is they gain all their knowledge from Monster Energy drinks.
Yes I was also describing the Baumol effect and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.
LOL @ Monster Energy drinks. That's true too. 🤣0 -
Right. But the public sector in the UK also operates in a labour market. There isn't a special button on the top of a public servant's head that turns off all responses to incentives.HYUFD said:
Yes as Australia has more private healthcare, especially amongst high earners, than we do and the private sector pays more than the public sector at the top end and always willEabhal said:
That's precisely what they are doing. There is a market for doctors and nurses, and the Australians are paying the going rate.HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
The sense of duty (or whatever) is worth about £15,000, in my experience. Look how the armed forces are having to incentivise people at the moment.0 -
A Tory who doesn't claim to love the NHS and believes the pre1948 health system was better. Fair play.HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages0 -
One of a number of hopefully quick wins for Starmer:darkage said:
In my experience, at least in Amsterdam and Stockholm, if you tell them that you are going on to another country, then thats it, end of questions. They only carry out an interrogation if you tell them that you are staying in the country you have landed at. It is starting to get really annoying though. At Helsinki I had to wait 45 minutes. Such a contrast with the UK where people from the EU can just go through automated gates in a few minutes, same as British citizens.TimS said:Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
- Make the Schengen travel limit 182 days in 365 rather than 90 in 180, to allow for seasonal work in skiing or summer holiday resorts. Reciprocal for UK so a win-win
- Ease up the rules for travelling musicians as was originally offered
- Allow ID cards at Uk border again, so the school trips come back
- Join the EEA and customs Union
- Rejoin EU
- Join Schengen
- join the Euro
- Form an EU army
Etc4 -
You've lost me, I'm afraid.Leon said:
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?kinabalu said:
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.Leon said:Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
Does he??
0 -
It's not a pure market, but equally it's not pure command economy either. I mean, the government could introduce a kind of National Service, but I doubt it would be popular, except with people who wouldn't have to do it.HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
Bottom line is simple. There are lots of sectors where the government is responsible and potential employees are saying "at those rates, you're having a laugh".
How far do you think crossing your arms and saying "you simply shouldn't demand more money" is going to get you?1 -
No I support some state healthcare, especially for low and average earners. I am not myself a pure free marketeerMexicanpete said:
A Tory who doesn't claim to love the NHS and believes the pre1948 health system was better. Fair play.HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
0 -
I did, thank you.TheScreamingEagles said:
Did you see my post earlier regarding the tweet in the thread?Carnyx said:
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agreedarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
"contractors"
The figures in the tweet are correct for Westminster VI but YouGov used the wrong graphic.1 -
Radio shock-jocks and foreign spies are pawns for ancient giants and are releasing behavior modifying chemicals in Scotland.0
-
HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
You are correct re the market between patients and Providers. However Providers need to buy goods and services,HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
No one (I hope) disagrees that there’s a free market for Trust to purchase (say) bin bags. Given the shortage of medical staff most Trusts have to hire agency nurses and locum medics at well above AfC rates.
Demand exceeds supply for clinicians and this is the market referred to above.
To reduce prices, you need to increase supply which is hard for nurses and very hard for doctors.
0 -
The English government is planning to address this in a particularly cack-handed way via Foundation Job allocations (equivalent of a 2 year internship in USA), by taking out both the Situational Judgement Test, and of academic achievement from the allocation process. This means that expressed preference of the applicant is the only thing that matters in allocating those jobs.Jim_Miller said:Dr. Foxy - The WaPo article shows that US doctor training is heavily concentrated in urban areas. And the authors agree with your argument.
In my home state, Washington State University is expanding its own medical school, which is located at the eastern end of the state. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2023/aug/11/wsu-spokanes-new-school-of-medicine-building-is-re/
(The population of the Spokane metropolitan area is almost 600 K, of which the city itself has about a third.)
So applicants from Lincoln University get an equal chance of getting that professorial job at Imperial as the student who did a PhD with that Prof. Equally the Bright Young Thing gets an equal chance of being sent to Boston Lincs.
Not surprisingly the reaction is likely to be no thanks, and emigration.2 -
Aye, fuck it. Might as well join Schengen and the Euro now, for the lolz. Who cares what currency we are in anyway when nobody in their right mind uses pointless slips of paper and stupid shards of metal to pay for stuff anymore?TimS said:
One of a number of hopefully quick wins for Starmer:darkage said:
In my experience, at least in Amsterdam and Stockholm, if you tell them that you are going on to another country, then thats it, end of questions. They only carry out an interrogation if you tell them that you are staying in the country you have landed at. It is starting to get really annoying though. At Helsinki I had to wait 45 minutes. Such a contrast with the UK where people from the EU can just go through automated gates in a few minutes, same as British citizens.TimS said:Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
- Make the Schengen travel limit 182 days in 365 rather than 90 in 180, to allow for seasonal work in skiing or summer holiday resorts. Reciprocal for UK so a win-win
- Ease up the rules for travelling musicians as was originally offered
- Allow ID cards at Uk border again, so the school trips come back
- Join the EEA and customs Union
- Rejoin EU
- Join Schengen
- join the Euro
- Form an EU army
Etc1 -
OK, let's make it simpler for youkinabalu said:
You've lost me, I'm afraid.Leon said:
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?kinabalu said:
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.Leon said:Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
Does he??
Do you think it was wise for the Mayor of London, following the Clapham attacks, to leap into the Twitter about 2 hours later and blame them on people who "stoke the culture wars against LGBTQ people" (ie Tories and Terfs, because who else did he mean) when a moment's thought might have given him pause, to consider that there are surely other, equally likely or likelier suspects with very different reasons?
Do you agree that this was 1 ill advised and 2 typically wanky of people like him?1 -
The irony is that the government has now spent a billion on NHS medical strike cover and related expenses, which exceeds the cost of settling, and shows no sign of settling.Stuartinromford said:
It's not a pure market, but equally it's not pure command economy either. I mean, the government could introduce a kind of National Service, but I doubt it would be popular, except with people who wouldn't have to do it.HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
Bottom line is simple. There are lots of sectors where the government is responsible and potential employees are saying "at those rates, you're having a laugh".
How far do you think crossing your arms and saying "you simply shouldn't demand more money" is going to get you?
It would have been less inflationary to have settled...0 -
He doesn’t look like Joanna Cherry either, so that’s two Jo’s he looks unlikekinabalu said:
You've lost me, I'm afraid.Leon said:
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?kinabalu said:
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.Leon said:Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
Does he??
(Yes, I’m as lost as you are)
1 -
That's only because you are desperate to justify the regressive income tax laughingly called "National Insurance Class 1" and stop it being applied to pensioners to avoid damaging your voters' finances and inheritances.HYUFD said:
No I support some state healthcare, especially for low and average earners. I am not myself a pure free marketeerMexicanpete said:
A Tory who doesn't claim to love the NHS and believes the pre1948 health system was better. Fair play.HYUFD said:
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insuranceEabhal said:
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.HYUFD said:
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.darkage said:
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.HYUFD said:
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are gettingdarkage said:
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.HYUFD said:
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for thatdarkage said:
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.HYUFD said:
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.darkage said:
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.HYUFD said:
Absolutely not.Foxy said:I see that in Scotland the Junior doctors have overwhelmingly accepted a 12.4% pay deal, plus guarantee of at least CPI for the next 3 years.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/bma-scotland-junior-doctors-vote-to-accept-scottish-governments-pay-offer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker wage is now growing more than the average private sector worker wage. 'Annual average total pay growth for the private sector was 7.9% in April to June 2023, and 9.6% for the public sector. '
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2023#:~:text=Annual average total pay growth,payments made in June 2023.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
You know, the one you pretend is actually insurance and a subscription to the NHS.3
This discussion has been closed.