Surely when assessing Generalship one must take into consideration the decisiveness of the battle? Until the critical point a successful General avoids battle, preserves their forces, and orchestrates a more decisive battle. In particular aims to have the military advantage in that battle.
General Giap didn't have many victories in the field, but the ones he did win ended wars: Dien Bien Phu and the 1975 Southern campaign. Arguably Tet was a strategic success too, as destroyed American backing for their war.
He wouldn't score well in this guys metric.
It’s the whole point about strategy without tactics being the hardest path to victory, whereas tactics without strategy is simply the noise before defeat.
It didn’t matter how many victories Nazi Germany won in the USSR; the war was lost on 22/06/1941. It didn’t matter how many victories the IJA won in 1941/2; the war was lost when they started it.
Who is "they" and what are they supposed to "do" precisely?
Musk is a prat, a wanker, wrong . . . but none of that is illegal. Nor should it be.
What is important is the right to free speech - which does not just go to those we agree with, but those we disagree with too. It does not just go to those whom we deem to be right, it goes to those who are wrong too. It does not just go to those we like, but it goes to those who are prats and wankers too.
It's very far past just free speech. He's constantly briefing the press - the Mail and the FT this week - that he and his advisers are working on overthrowing the government, and in 9 days he will be one of the two most powerful people in the world.
States act in situations like that.
Briefing the press is free speech. You have the right to say whatever you like to the press, even if states dislike it, otherwise there's no free speech at all.
If he takes action to overthrow the government then that would be illegal, unless it was following constitutional means such as convincing MPs in Parliament to vote a particular way - but briefing the press is not a crime.
Carrying on whistling if you want, but one thing he often is is open about his plans. If he says he and his advisors and working on overthrowing the government, he very likely is
What rot, he's a loudmouth who has very often made "plans" he has not got the ability to deliver.
We'd have self-driving cars by now if he had delivered everything he said he was going to deliver.
If he commits a crime to overthrow the government he should be punished. Speaking is not a crime.
Incitement and subversion are. He's called the government terrorists, Starmer to be jailed, and in August promoted civil war.
During the 1980s, a non trivial number of Labour MPs applauded terrorism - including the Brighton Bombing. They also applauded and furthered the aims of the USSR.
Should they have been jailed?
Elon Musk seems to be the one calling for Labour politicians to be jailed.
For which he is an idiot
Would you have been ok with Ken Livingstone and Corbyn being sent to prison, though?
Yes if they committed a crime for which jail time was the usual punishment.
That's how we roll here, isn't it?
Well, under the usual versions of the laws on “subversion and incitement” from The Goode Olde Days*, they would have got decades behind bars. If the Days were especially Olde, it would been Tower Hill and the chop.
*which were never really good, of course. Unless you were 1% of the 1%
Yes but did they commit a crime that was a crime when they committed it? This is the info I'm missing.
Some here seem to want to bring back the good times of “subversion and incitement”.
Just pointing out that once that train gets rollin’ lots of fun will ensue.
Well it's a complex area. Oh how one yearns for ones that aren't.
I can't solve the question but I can frame it.
We'd all agree that Musk should not be prosecuted for being a dick.
We'd all agree he should be for plotting to incite violence in the UK with a view to replacing Keir Starmer with a fascist dictatorship.
So it's about where we are and where he's going and how to call that point where he needs to have his collar felt.
How do you define plotting?
There’s a reason that sedition fell out of legal favour. Read some history on that.
I don't need to read, Malmesbury. None of do. We have you.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
I will entertain no other discussion in this matter.
I am surprised you go for Eisenhower, who liberated the French, ahead of Wellington and Henry V who destroyed them.
As bad as the French are they aren't Nazis.
Had D-Day failed, like Dieppe, I think Western Europe would have either been occupied by the Russians, or nukes would have been dropped on it in the summer of 1945.
D-Day was certainly one of the most consequential battles ever, particularly for Europe. But don’t forget Eisenhower also started the American involvement in Vietnam.
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
As mentioned upthread:
What were ancient coastlines like during the Ice Age? Has any archaeology been undertaken on lost lands such as Dogger, the Persian Gulf, Sunda Shelf, and Sahul Shelf?
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It ultimately comes down to a desire to live beyond means.
Its something governments are happy to pander to but the desire is too deeply intrinsic among too many people.
There’s actually tons of manufacturing. It’s just not the “half naked men pouring molten steel” type stuff.
The belief that there is no manufacturing is widespread in politics, though.
Mind you, if you tell people that manufacturing was only 32% of the economy in 1970, they don’t believe you….
Economic growth since then has been from services.
Even if manufacturing were to return as a larger share of the economy, it would likely be be highly technical, highly automated and apart from a few security and warehouse personnel employ monthly degree level staff.
If you want mass employment opportunities with decent pay then look to mass housebuilding. Labour's next election depends most on Rayner's plans, backed by Streeting delivering on the NHS.
Who is "they" and what are they supposed to "do" precisely?
Musk is a prat, a wanker, wrong . . . but none of that is illegal. Nor should it be.
What is important is the right to free speech - which does not just go to those we agree with, but those we disagree with too. It does not just go to those whom we deem to be right, it goes to those who are wrong too. It does not just go to those we like, but it goes to those who are prats and wankers too.
It's very far past just free speech. He's constantly briefing the press - the Mail and the FT this week - that he and his advisers are working on overthrowing the government, and in 9 days he will be one of the two most powerful people in the world.
States act in situations like that.
Briefing the press is free speech. You have the right to say whatever you like to the press, even if states dislike it, otherwise there's no free speech at all.
If he takes action to overthrow the government then that would be illegal, unless it was following constitutional means such as convincing MPs in Parliament to vote a particular way - but briefing the press is not a crime.
Carrying on whistling if you want, but one thing he often is is open about his plans. If he says he and his advisors and working on overthrowing the government, he very likely is
What rot, he's a loudmouth who has very often made "plans" he has not got the ability to deliver.
We'd have self-driving cars by now if he had delivered everything he said he was going to deliver.
If he commits a crime to overthrow the government he should be punished. Speaking is not a crime.
Incitement and subversion are. He's called the government terrorists, Starmer to be jailed, and in August promoted civil war.
During the 1980s, a non trivial number of Labour MPs applauded terrorism - including the Brighton Bombing. They also applauded and furthered the aims of the USSR.
Should they have been jailed?
Elon Musk seems to be the one calling for Labour politicians to be jailed.
For which he is an idiot
Would you have been ok with Ken Livingstone and Corbyn being sent to prison, though?
Yes if they committed a crime for which jail time was the usual punishment.
That's how we roll here, isn't it?
Well, under the usual versions of the laws on “subversion and incitement” from The Goode Olde Days*, they would have got decades behind bars. If the Days were especially Olde, it would been Tower Hill and the chop.
*which were never really good, of course. Unless you were 1% of the 1%
Yes but did they commit a crime that was a crime when they committed it? This is the info I'm missing.
Some here seem to want to bring back the good times of “subversion and incitement”.
Just pointing out that once that train gets rollin’ lots of fun will ensue.
Well it's a complex area. Oh how one yearns for ones that aren't.
I can't solve the question but I can frame it.
We'd all agree that Musk should not be prosecuted for being a dick.
We'd all agree he should be for plotting to incite violence in the UK with a view to replacing Keir Starmer with a fascist dictatorship.
So it's about where we are and where he's going and how to call that point where he needs to have his collar felt.
How do you define plotting?
There’s a reason that sedition fell out of legal favour. Read some history on that.
I don't need to read, Malmesbury. None of do. We have you.
We also have the blessed Elon"s own briefings to the Mail and the FT this week, where he seems to have proudly told them that he was.
The proof will be in the pudding 9 days hence, but the befuddled security services will already be onto it, trying to work out if they have any hope.
I will entertain no other discussion in this matter.
I am surprised you go for Eisenhower, who liberated the French, ahead of Wellington and Henry V who destroyed them.
As bad as the French are they aren't Nazis.
Had D-Day failed, like Dieppe, I think Western Europe would have either been occupied by the Russians, or nukes would have been dropped on it in the summer of 1945.
D-Day was certainly one of the most consequential battles ever, particularly for Europe. But don’t forget Eisenhower also started the American involvement in Vietnam.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Who is "they" and what are they supposed to "do" precisely?
Musk is a prat, a wanker, wrong . . . but none of that is illegal. Nor should it be.
What is important is the right to free speech - which does not just go to those we agree with, but those we disagree with too. It does not just go to those whom we deem to be right, it goes to those who are wrong too. It does not just go to those we like, but it goes to those who are prats and wankers too.
It's very far past just free speech. He's constantly briefing the press - the Mail and the FT this week - that he and his advisers are working on overthrowing the government, and in 9 days he will be one of the two most powerful people in the world.
States act in situations like that.
Briefing the press is free speech. You have the right to say whatever you like to the press, even if states dislike it, otherwise there's no free speech at all.
If he takes action to overthrow the government then that would be illegal, unless it was following constitutional means such as convincing MPs in Parliament to vote a particular way - but briefing the press is not a crime.
Carrying on whistling if you want, but one thing he often is is open about his plans. If he says he and his advisors and working on overthrowing the government, he very likely is
What rot, he's a loudmouth who has very often made "plans" he has not got the ability to deliver.
We'd have self-driving cars by now if he had delivered everything he said he was going to deliver.
If he commits a crime to overthrow the government he should be punished. Speaking is not a crime.
Incitement and subversion are. He's called the government terrorists, Starmer to be jailed, and in August promoted civil war.
During the 1980s, a non trivial number of Labour MPs applauded terrorism - including the Brighton Bombing. They also applauded and furthered the aims of the USSR.
Should they have been jailed?
Elon Musk seems to be the one calling for Labour politicians to be jailed.
For which he is an idiot
Would you have been ok with Ken Livingstone and Corbyn being sent to prison, though?
Yes if they committed a crime for which jail time was the usual punishment.
That's how we roll here, isn't it?
Well, under the usual versions of the laws on “subversion and incitement” from The Goode Olde Days*, they would have got decades behind bars. If the Days were especially Olde, it would been Tower Hill and the chop.
*which were never really good, of course. Unless you were 1% of the 1%
Yes but did they commit a crime that was a crime when they committed it? This is the info I'm missing.
Some here seem to want to bring back the good times of “subversion and incitement”.
Just pointing out that once that train gets rollin’ lots of fun will ensue.
Well it's a complex area. Oh how one yearns for ones that aren't.
I can't solve the question but I can frame it.
We'd all agree that Musk should not be prosecuted for being a dick.
We'd all agree he should be for plotting to incite violence in the UK with a view to replacing Keir Starmer with a fascist dictatorship.
So it's about where we are and where he's going and how to call that point where he needs to have his collar felt.
How do you define plotting?
There’s a reason that sedition fell out of legal favour. Read some history on that.
I don't need to read, Malmesbury. None of do. We have you.
My small c conservatism comes from realising there is nearly nothing new in society and politics. Nearly every idea comes around again.
Those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it. Badly.
The idea of progressives wishing to prosecute “sedition” is amusing.
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
Graham Hancock? ... lol.
Well, he has for ages said “there’s an amazing advanced civilisation dating back tens of thousands of years and it’s all buried and we just don’t know it”. Then bingo - he got lucky? - that seems to be exactly what we’re digging up in the Tas Tepeler. With each new jigsaw piece it gets more profound, more sophisticated - even more disturbing, perhaps
I agree his technique of flying around the world on the Netflix dime pointing at a “weird thing” and saying “see!!” can be wearying if not utterly ridiculous
But even when he’s ridiculous - 80% of the time - he’s quite entertaining. A lot of the flak he gets from “proper” scientists is pure jealousy. They’d LOVE to be on Netflix pointing at shit in Peru and saying “see!”
Who is "they" and what are they supposed to "do" precisely?
Musk is a prat, a wanker, wrong . . . but none of that is illegal. Nor should it be.
What is important is the right to free speech - which does not just go to those we agree with, but those we disagree with too. It does not just go to those whom we deem to be right, it goes to those who are wrong too. It does not just go to those we like, but it goes to those who are prats and wankers too.
It's very far past just free speech. He's constantly briefing the press - the Mail and the FT this week - that he and his advisers are working on overthrowing the government, and in 9 days he will be one of the two most powerful people in the world.
States act in situations like that.
Briefing the press is free speech. You have the right to say whatever you like to the press, even if states dislike it, otherwise there's no free speech at all.
If he takes action to overthrow the government then that would be illegal, unless it was following constitutional means such as convincing MPs in Parliament to vote a particular way - but briefing the press is not a crime.
Carrying on whistling if you want, but one thing he often is is open about his plans. If he says he and his advisors and working on overthrowing the government, he very likely is
What rot, he's a loudmouth who has very often made "plans" he has not got the ability to deliver.
We'd have self-driving cars by now if he had delivered everything he said he was going to deliver.
If he commits a crime to overthrow the government he should be punished. Speaking is not a crime.
Incitement and subversion are. He's called the government terrorists, Starmer to be jailed, and in August promoted civil war.
During the 1980s, a non trivial number of Labour MPs applauded terrorism - including the Brighton Bombing. They also applauded and furthered the aims of the USSR.
Should they have been jailed?
Elon Musk seems to be the one calling for Labour politicians to be jailed.
For which he is an idiot
Would you have been ok with Ken Livingstone and Corbyn being sent to prison, though?
Yes if they committed a crime for which jail time was the usual punishment.
That's how we roll here, isn't it?
Well, under the usual versions of the laws on “subversion and incitement” from The Goode Olde Days*, they would have got decades behind bars. If the Days were especially Olde, it would been Tower Hill and the chop.
*which were never really good, of course. Unless you were 1% of the 1%
Yes but did they commit a crime that was a crime when they committed it? This is the info I'm missing.
Some here seem to want to bring back the good times of “subversion and incitement”.
Just pointing out that once that train gets rollin’ lots of fun will ensue.
Well it's a complex area. Oh how one yearns for ones that aren't.
I can't solve the question but I can frame it.
We'd all agree that Musk should not be prosecuted for being a dick.
We'd all agree he should be for plotting to incite violence in the UK with a view to replacing Keir Starmer with a fascist dictatorship.
So it's about where we are and where he's going and how to call that point where he needs to have his collar felt.
How do you define plotting?
There’s a reason that sedition fell out of legal favour. Read some history on that.
I don't need to read, Malmesbury. None of do. We have you.
My small c conservatism comes from realising there is nearly nothing new in society and politics. Nearly every idea comes around again.
Those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it. Badly.
The idea of progressives wishing to prosecute “sedition” is amusing.
That"s true, in the sense that there's nothing new in the U.S. subverting smaller ckuntrurs We're not Honduras, or Greenland, though, so there's no reason to give up before we've started.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It ultimately comes down to a desire to live beyond means.
Its something governments are happy to pander to but the desire is too deeply intrinsic among too many people.
The Germans were living beyond their means in 1950, but were very far from doing so in 1990.
This wasn't only because of debt cancellation, but mainly because of vastly better investment, training, social and educational policies.
You can't educate your way out of a demographic crisis.
There was this thing a few years ago which some of us might remember called the Covid 19 pandemic, in which everyone was essentially put under house arrest in a desperate effort to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. Fast forward five years and the situation in hospital emergency departments is now described as being as bad as it was during the pandemic, simply because of a difficult flu year.
This is simply because the country has capsized, swamped by a tsunami of need which is presently beyond the ability of the state to cope with. That, in turn, is because the ratio of productive citizens to dependent ones is so bad that the economy, at least as it is currently structured, cannot cope with it.
Before very long we shall be in a situation where acute care has simply fallen over entirely, and anybody turning up in a hospital with some ailment short of a cardiac arrest will have to spend a week on a trolley waiting to be admitted. The response of the Health Secretary to all of this is a combination of soothing and totally empty words, and yet another talking shop intended to put off a decision on the expansion of social care - which is the most vital element needed to shift legions of elderly bed blockers out of hospital wards - until a time far enough in the future that he hopes to have moved on to another job.
Until the truly dire situation in which we find ourselves is appreciated by everybody then things are only going to keep on getting worse.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
Graham Hancock? ... lol.
Well, he has for ages said “there’s an amazing advanced civilisation dating back tens of thousands of years and it’s all buried and we just don’t know it”. Then bingo - he got lucky? - that seems to be exactly what we’re digging up in the Tas Tepeler. With each new jigsaw piece it gets more profound, more sophisticated - even more disturbing, perhaps
I agree his technique of flying around the world on the Netflix dime pointing at a “weird thing” and saying “see!!” can be wearying if not utterly ridiculous
But even when he’s ridiculous - 80% of the time - he’s quite entertaining. A lot of the flak he gets from “proper” scientists is pure jealousy. They’d LOVE to be on Netflix pointing at shit in Peru and saying “see!”
Not where I get my anthropology from. I'll stick to the bbc thank you very much.
I noticed a few months back that a lady I deliver mail to has the same name as one of the producers of a very popular modern sitcom. It's a very common first name, but quite an unusual surname. I did a double-take when I first noticed it at the end of the sitcom
Anyway, today I saw the lady and she started chatting so I decided to mention it - do you know you have the same name as an American TV producer?
Not only did she know, she told me she used to work in TV and spent a few years working in Hollywood. She had to temporarily change her name because she kept on getting confused with the other lady!
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
Bit of a shame that we've made such a mess of our education system then.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
I think they can make a difference at the margin, but by and large falling TFR rates are immune to such measures. Short of outsourcing our government to the Taliban, we have to cope with the TFR that we have.
In any case the sort of subsidies needed would be so redistributive that they would require major cuts affecting the grey vote.
Who is "they" and what are they supposed to "do" precisely?
Musk is a prat, a wanker, wrong . . . but none of that is illegal. Nor should it be.
What is important is the right to free speech - which does not just go to those we agree with, but those we disagree with too. It does not just go to those whom we deem to be right, it goes to those who are wrong too. It does not just go to those we like, but it goes to those who are prats and wankers too.
It's very far past just free speech. He's constantly briefing the press - the Mail and the FT this week - that he and his advisers are working on overthrowing the government, and in 9 days he will be one of the two most powerful people in the world.
States act in situations like that.
Briefing the press is free speech. You have the right to say whatever you like to the press, even if states dislike it, otherwise there's no free speech at all.
If he takes action to overthrow the government then that would be illegal, unless it was following constitutional means such as convincing MPs in Parliament to vote a particular way - but briefing the press is not a crime.
Carrying on whistling if you want, but one thing he often is is open about his plans. If he says he and his advisors and working on overthrowing the government, he very likely is
What rot, he's a loudmouth who has very often made "plans" he has not got the ability to deliver.
We'd have self-driving cars by now if he had delivered everything he said he was going to deliver.
If he commits a crime to overthrow the government he should be punished. Speaking is not a crime.
Incitement and subversion are. He's called the government terrorists, Starmer to be jailed, and in August promoted civil war.
During the 1980s, a non trivial number of Labour MPs applauded terrorism - including the Brighton Bombing. They also applauded and furthered the aims of the USSR.
Should they have been jailed?
Elon Musk seems to be the one calling for Labour politicians to be jailed.
For which he is an idiot
Would you have been ok with Ken Livingstone and Corbyn being sent to prison, though?
Yes if they committed a crime for which jail time was the usual punishment.
That's how we roll here, isn't it?
Well, under the usual versions of the laws on “subversion and incitement” from The Goode Olde Days*, they would have got decades behind bars. If the Days were especially Olde, it would been Tower Hill and the chop.
*which were never really good, of course. Unless you were 1% of the 1%
Yes but did they commit a crime that was a crime when they committed it? This is the info I'm missing.
Some here seem to want to bring back the good times of “subversion and incitement”.
Just pointing out that once that train gets rollin’ lots of fun will ensue.
Well it's a complex area. Oh how one yearns for ones that aren't.
I can't solve the question but I can frame it.
We'd all agree that Musk should not be prosecuted for being a dick.
We'd all agree he should be for plotting to incite violence in the UK with a view to replacing Keir Starmer with a fascist dictatorship.
So it's about where we are and where he's going and how to call that point where he needs to have his collar felt.
How do you define plotting?
There’s a reason that sedition fell out of legal favour. Read some history on that.
I don't need to read, Malmesbury. None of do. We have you.
My small c conservatism comes from realising there is nearly nothing new in society and politics. Nearly every idea comes around again.
Those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it. Badly.
The idea of progressives wishing to prosecute “sedition” is amusing.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
Bit of a shame that we've made such a mess of our education system then.
Only the state sector, the private system is the bestest.
Who is "they" and what are they supposed to "do" precisely?
Musk is a prat, a wanker, wrong . . . but none of that is illegal. Nor should it be.
What is important is the right to free speech - which does not just go to those we agree with, but those we disagree with too. It does not just go to those whom we deem to be right, it goes to those who are wrong too. It does not just go to those we like, but it goes to those who are prats and wankers too.
It's very far past just free speech. He's constantly briefing the press - the Mail and the FT this week - that he and his advisers are working on overthrowing the government, and in 9 days he will be one of the two most powerful people in the world.
States act in situations like that.
Briefing the press is free speech. You have the right to say whatever you like to the press, even if states dislike it, otherwise there's no free speech at all.
If he takes action to overthrow the government then that would be illegal, unless it was following constitutional means such as convincing MPs in Parliament to vote a particular way - but briefing the press is not a crime.
Carrying on whistling if you want, but one thing he often is is open about his plans. If he says he and his advisors and working on overthrowing the government, he very likely is
What rot, he's a loudmouth who has very often made "plans" he has not got the ability to deliver.
We'd have self-driving cars by now if he had delivered everything he said he was going to deliver.
If he commits a crime to overthrow the government he should be punished. Speaking is not a crime.
Incitement and subversion are. He's called the government terrorists, Starmer to be jailed, and in August promoted civil war.
During the 1980s, a non trivial number of Labour MPs applauded terrorism - including the Brighton Bombing. They also applauded and furthered the aims of the USSR.
Should they have been jailed?
Elon Musk seems to be the one calling for Labour politicians to be jailed.
For which he is an idiot
Would you have been ok with Ken Livingstone and Corbyn being sent to prison, though?
Yes if they committed a crime for which jail time was the usual punishment.
That's how we roll here, isn't it?
Well, under the usual versions of the laws on “subversion and incitement” from The Goode Olde Days*, they would have got decades behind bars. If the Days were especially Olde, it would been Tower Hill and the chop.
*which were never really good, of course. Unless you were 1% of the 1%
Yes but did they commit a crime that was a crime when they committed it? This is the info I'm missing.
Some here seem to want to bring back the good times of “subversion and incitement”.
Just pointing out that once that train gets rollin’ lots of fun will ensue.
Well it's a complex area. Oh how one yearns for ones that aren't.
I can't solve the question but I can frame it.
We'd all agree that Musk should not be prosecuted for being a dick.
We'd all agree he should be for plotting to incite violence in the UK with a view to replacing Keir Starmer with a fascist dictatorship.
So it's about where we are and where he's going and how to call that point where he needs to have his collar felt.
How do you define plotting?
There’s a reason that sedition fell out of legal favour. Read some history on that.
I don't need to read, Malmesbury. None of do. We have you.
We also have the blessed Elon"s own briefings to the Mail and the FT this week, where he seems to have proudly told them that he was.
The proof will be in the pudding 9 days hence, but the befuddled security services will already be onto it, trying to work out if they have any hope.
He's very full of himself atm, isn't he. Rockets to Mars, AI, electric cars, fomenting hatred of Muslims. It's quite a package.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
It depends what we educate them in.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
I will entertain no other discussion in this matter.
I am surprised you go for Eisenhower, who liberated the French, ahead of Wellington and Henry V who destroyed them.
As bad as the French are they aren't Nazis.
Had D-Day failed, like Dieppe, I think Western Europe would have either been occupied by the Russians, or nukes would have been dropped on it in the summer of 1945.
D-Day was certainly one of the most consequential battles ever, particularly for Europe. But don’t forget Eisenhower also started the American involvement in Vietnam.
I personally blame the French.
Deservedly so. But the US policy of backing French colonialism in Vietnam, in the aftermath of WWII, was one of their more consequential mistakes.
The failure to recognise that Vietnamese leaders were more interested in independence than they were in communism - and that the French colonial project (which had been appalling for Vietnam) was doomed - was a huge strategic mistake.
Once it became framed as a Cold War contest, it became almost impossible for any following President to disengage. Until they were forced to… after killing between a tenth and a fifth of the entire population.
Surely when assessing Generalship one must take into consideration the decisiveness of the battle? Until the critical point a successful General avoids battle, preserves their forces, and orchestrates a more decisive battle. In particular aims to have the military advantage in that battle.
General Giap didn't have many victories in the field, but the ones he did win ended wars: Dien Bien Phu and the 1975 Southern campaign. Arguably Tet was a strategic success too, as destroyed American backing for their war.
He wouldn't score well in this guys metric.
The old comment about winning every battle but losing the war comes to mind, as well.
I also recall one historian who tried to that the Duke of Wellington wasn’t a good general because, in Spain, he relied on his enemies attacking him uphill….
Yes, which is why Hannibal is a loser, ditto the Japanese in WWII despite some stunning early successes.
In which case the North Vietnamese generals come into the picture.
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
Graham Hancock? ... lol.
Well, he has for ages said “there’s an amazing advanced civilisation dating back tens of thousands of years and it’s all buried and we just don’t know it”. Then bingo - he got lucky? - that seems to be exactly what we’re digging up in the Tas Tepeler. With each new jigsaw piece it gets more profound, more sophisticated - even more disturbing, perhaps
I agree his technique of flying around the world on the Netflix dime pointing at a “weird thing” and saying “see!!” can be wearying if not utterly ridiculous
But even when he’s ridiculous - 80% of the time - he’s quite entertaining. A lot of the flak he gets from “proper” scientists is pure jealousy. They’d LOVE to be on Netflix pointing at shit in Peru and saying “see!”
Not where I get my anthropology from. I'll stick to the bbc thank you very much.
Then your anthropology will be incredibly limited, as the BBC can barely afford to send a presenter to Anglesey, let alone Kurdish Turkey or Rapa Nui
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
It depends what we educate them in.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
Hence my niche as an engineer-turned-lawyer
I get your point though generally, but BritishVolt failed and so what? We need to adopt a culture of failure being the driver for better in the future rather than an object of mockery. Those involved in BritishVolt will have learned from that failure, you would hope. The government and/or the local authority also should have learned from that too.
I mentioned last week Salvini's political problems with the trains not running on time.
Another day of serious problems today - the cause, a pantograph and a following train ripping up overhead wires on the approach to Milano Centrale, is bad luck, but the politicised debate in the overall state of the railways has shades of the failing Grayling era in the UK (this was second headline below LA fires).
Pivoting on-topic. Worth noting that a lot of the parties on Italy's right are constituted rather more like Reform than the member organisations we're more used to in the UK. Leader replacement isn't really a big thing with tenures measured in decades and regular splittism the main open option.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Mass immigration is a Ponzi scheme, and not even a very effective one. Stuffing more people into the country simply imbalances the economy even further in the direction of ludicrous property prices and rents, exacerbating poverty, and you then have to keep importing even more people as the ones you've already brought in age and turn into a net burden themselves.
However, we are stuck in this pattern so it'll carry on either until the state is crushed by the weight of dependency and is forced to act, or until so much of the electorate are dirt poor minimum wage robots, burning through most of what little they earn in rents and taxes and scarcely able to afford to eat, that they're numerous enough to vote in a very left wing Government.
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
Graham Hancock? ... lol.
Well, he has for ages said “there’s an amazing advanced civilisation dating back tens of thousands of years and it’s all buried and we just don’t know it”. Then bingo - he got lucky? - that seems to be exactly what we’re digging up in the Tas Tepeler. With each new jigsaw piece it gets more profound, more sophisticated - even more disturbing, perhaps
I agree his technique of flying around the world on the Netflix dime pointing at a “weird thing” and saying “see!!” can be wearying if not utterly ridiculous
But even when he’s ridiculous - 80% of the time - he’s quite entertaining. A lot of the flak he gets from “proper” scientists is pure jealousy. They’d LOVE to be on Netflix pointing at shit in Peru and saying “see!”
Not where I get my anthropology from. I'll stick to the bbc thank you very much.
Surely when assessing Generalship one must take into consideration the decisiveness of the battle? Until the critical point a successful General avoids battle, preserves their forces, and orchestrates a more decisive battle. In particular aims to have the military advantage in that battle.
General Giap didn't have many victories in the field, but the ones he did win ended wars: Dien Bien Phu and the 1975 Southern campaign. Arguably Tet was a strategic success too, as destroyed American backing for their war.
He wouldn't score well in this guys metric.
The old comment about winning every battle but losing the war comes to mind, as well.
I also recall one historian who tried to that the Duke of Wellington wasn’t a good general because, in Spain, he relied on his enemies attacking him uphill….
Yes, which is why Hannibal is a loser, ditto the Japanese in WWII despite some stunning early successes.
In which case the North Vietnamese generals come into the picture.
The Tet Offensive, incidentally, may well have been as much about sacrificing the Viet Cong, to reduce their political strength as about the military outcome.
Shades of Franco packing all the most obstreperous types off to fight to the Blue Division…..
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
It depends what we educate them in.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
Hence my niche as an engineer-turned-lawyer
I get your point though generally, but BritishVolt failed and so what? We need to adopt a culture of failure being the driver for better in the future rather than an object of mockery. Those involved in BritishVolt will have learned from that failure, you would hope. The government and/or the local authority also should have learned from that too.
However I should also add that in my view people should not benefit from failure, which is different. For example the Government or local authorities shouldn’t simply give out money, they should take equity or charges so that if ventures don’t work out then some value can be extracted back.
I will entertain no other discussion in this matter.
I am surprised you go for Eisenhower, who liberated the French, ahead of Wellington and Henry V who destroyed them.
As bad as the French are they aren't Nazis.
Had D-Day failed, like Dieppe, I think Western Europe would have either been occupied by the Russians, or nukes would have been dropped on it in the summer of 1945.
D-Day was certainly one of the most consequential battles ever, particularly for Europe. But don’t forget Eisenhower also started the American involvement in Vietnam.
I personally blame the French.
Deservedly so. But the US policy of backing French colonialism in Vietnam, in the aftermath of WWII, was one of their more consequential mistakes.
The failure to recognise that Vietnamese leaders were more interested in independence than they were in communism - and that the French colonial project (which had been appalling for Vietnam) was doomed - was a huge strategic mistake.
Imagine how arrogant the US would be if it hadn’t gone through Vietnam and the Iran hostage debacle though.
They have a few case studies of geopolitical hubris, some of which also implicate the UK. Bay of Pigs; Vietnam; Iran hostages; Somalia; Afghanistan; Iraq. But I would say Afghanistan could have been a success if it had been done differently.
Then a few examples of excessive reticence when they might have averted catastrophe: Rwanda; Syria after the chemical attacks; Bosnia early on; Georgia 2008; Ukraine 2014.
Libya 2011 was our and Sarkozy’s hubris, not Americas. Though I’m not sure what the alternative history looks like there.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It ultimately comes down to a desire to live beyond means.
Its something governments are happy to pander to but the desire is too deeply intrinsic among too many people.
The Germans were living beyond their means in 1950, but were very far from doing so in 1990.
This wasn't only because of debt cancellation, but mainly because of vastly better investment, training, social and educational policies.
You can't educate your way out of a demographic crisis.
There was this thing a few years ago which some of us might remember called the Covid 19 pandemic, in which everyone was essentially put under house arrest in a desperate effort to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. Fast forward five years and the situation in hospital emergency departments is now described as being as bad as it was during the pandemic, simply because of a difficult flu year.
This is simply because the country has capsized, swamped by a tsunami of need which is presently beyond the ability of the state to cope with. That, in turn, is because the ratio of productive citizens to dependent ones is so bad that the economy, at least as it is currently structured, cannot cope with it.
Before very long we shall be in a situation where acute care has simply fallen over entirely, and anybody turning up in a hospital with some ailment short of a cardiac arrest will have to spend a week on a trolley waiting to be admitted. The response of the Health Secretary to all of this is a combination of soothing and totally empty words, and yet another talking shop intended to put off a decision on the expansion of social care - which is the most vital element needed to shift legions of elderly bed blockers out of hospital wards - until a time far enough in the future that he hopes to have moved on to another job.
Until the truly dire situation in which we find ourselves is appreciated by everybody then things are only going to keep on getting worse.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Mass immigration is a Ponzi scheme, and not even a very effective one. Stuffing more people into the country simply imbalances the economy even further in the direction of ludicrous property prices and rents, exacerbating poverty, and you then have to keep importing even more people as the ones you've already brought in age and turn into a net burden themselves.
However, we are stuck in this pattern so it'll carry on either until the state is crushed by the weight of dependency and is forced to act, or until so much of the electorate are dirt poor minimum wage robots, burning through most of what little they earn in rents and taxes and scarcely able to afford to eat, that they're numerous enough to vote in a very left wing Government.
More broadly, and taking the lens off immigration given it’s simply a reshuffling of populations not a net global impact, population growth is a Ponzi scheme. And a fiendishly difficult one to resolve.
Growing population: growing economy, low dependency ratio, low tax burden, social mobility. But less and less space and more and more environmental destruction.
Shrinking population: stagnating economy, deflation, high tax burden, feudalism. But a lighter touch on the environment and less strain on resources.
I will entertain no other discussion in this matter.
I am surprised you go for Eisenhower, who liberated the French, ahead of Wellington and Henry V who destroyed them.
As bad as the French are they aren't Nazis.
Had D-Day failed, like Dieppe, I think Western Europe would have either been occupied by the Russians, or nukes would have been dropped on it in the summer of 1945.
D-Day was certainly one of the most consequential battles ever, particularly for Europe. But don’t forget Eisenhower also started the American involvement in Vietnam.
I personally blame the French.
Deservedly so. But the US policy of backing French colonialism in Vietnam, in the aftermath of WWII, was one of their more consequential mistakes.
The failure to recognise that Vietnamese leaders were more interested in independence than they were in communism - and that the French colonial project (which had been appalling for Vietnam) was doomed - was a huge strategic mistake.
Imagine how arrogant the US would be if it hadn’t gone through Vietnam and the Iran hostage debacle though.
They have a few case studies of geopolitical hubris, some of which also implicate the UK. Bay of Pigs; Vietnam; Iran hostages; Somalia; Afghanistan; Iraq. But I would say Afghanistan could have been a success if it had been done differently.
Then a few examples of excessive reticence when they might have averted catastrophe: Rwanda; Syria after the chemical attacks; Bosnia early on; Georgia 2008; Ukraine 2014.
Libya 2011 was our and Sarkozy’s hubris, not Americas. Though I’m not sure what the alternative history looks like there.
On MAGA Social Media there is a lot of revisionist history over Vietnam, very much the view that the US Military were winning the war, but there was a stab in the back from woke lefty Liberals.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
Bit of a shame that we've made such a mess of our education system then.
Only the state sector, the private system is the bestest.
Time to privatise the education system.
Academy groups?
It's like privatisation without the hassle of having to find pupils with wealthy parents to pay the fees.
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
Graham Hancock? ... lol.
Well, he has for ages said “there’s an amazing advanced civilisation dating back tens of thousands of years and it’s all buried and we just don’t know it”. Then bingo - he got lucky? - that seems to be exactly what we’re digging up in the Tas Tepeler. With each new jigsaw piece it gets more profound, more sophisticated - even more disturbing, perhaps
I agree his technique of flying around the world on the Netflix dime pointing at a “weird thing” and saying “see!!” can be wearying if not utterly ridiculous
But even when he’s ridiculous - 80% of the time - he’s quite entertaining. A lot of the flak he gets from “proper” scientists is pure jealousy. They’d LOVE to be on Netflix pointing at shit in Peru and saying “see!”
Not where I get my anthropology from. I'll stick to the bbc thank you very much.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
It depends what we educate them in.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
Hence my niche as an engineer-turned-lawyer
I get your point though generally, but BritishVolt failed and so what? We need to adopt a culture of failure being the driver for better in the future rather than an object of mockery. Those involved in BritishVolt will have learned from that failure, you would hope. The government and/or the local authority also should have learned from that too.
The lesson learned will be that industry is too complicated for politicians and civil servants to understand, and that it’s safer to stick with shuffling paper and money.
What’s not entirely obvious to me is why the UK’s gilts are so unpopular when the UK has the lowest debt:GDP level in the G7 bar Germany. And it is only mid-tier on size of fiscal deficit.
Edit: Although I am decidedly underwhelmed by Reeves, a lot of the anti-UK sentiment seems very overblown. Again, looking at the OECD, the UK has a great deal going for it.
What’s not entirely obvious to me is why the UK’s gilts are so unpopular when the UK has the lowest debt:GDP level in the G7 bar Germany. And it is only mid-tier on size of fiscal deficit.
More threats of destabilisation from the US than Germany ? And also possible destabilisation of its American economic & defence relationships, perhaps.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
It depends what we educate them in.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
Hence my niche as an engineer-turned-lawyer
I get your point though generally, but BritishVolt failed and so what? We need to adopt a culture of failure being the driver for better in the future rather than an object of mockery. Those involved in BritishVolt will have learned from that failure, you would hope. The government and/or the local authority also should have learned from that too.
There is little evidence of recognition of the problem. Especially from those involved with BritishVolt. Who seem to believe that if someone had kept shovelling money at them, a battery factory would have built itself.
The point is that if we don’t get the culture of technology+finance+sociology+politics combined, things won’t change.
And while “proper leaders” are generalists (accountants and lawyers) who don’t want to understand technology, we wont succeed in technology.
Embracing failure is an important piece, I agree. But so is understanding how to use it.
To upset some people here - consider how SpaceX pivoted to stainless steel from carbon fibre. The carbon fibre solution failed - grew in cost and weight. The traditional approach would to have carried on the investment on sunk cost grounds, wait until the project failed and abandon everything.
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
Graham Hancock? ... lol.
Well, he has for ages said “there’s an amazing advanced civilisation dating back tens of thousands of years and it’s all buried and we just don’t know it”. Then bingo - he got lucky? - that seems to be exactly what we’re digging up in the Tas Tepeler. With each new jigsaw piece it gets more profound, more sophisticated - even more disturbing, perhaps
I agree his technique of flying around the world on the Netflix dime pointing at a “weird thing” and saying “see!!” can be wearying if not utterly ridiculous
But even when he’s ridiculous - 80% of the time - he’s quite entertaining. A lot of the flak he gets from “proper” scientists is pure jealousy. They’d LOVE to be on Netflix pointing at shit in Peru and saying “see!”
Not where I get my anthropology from. I'll stick to the bbc thank you very much.
Then your anthropology will be incredibly limited, as the BBC can barely afford to send a presenter to Anglesey, let alone Kurdish Turkey or Rapa Nui
I was using "bbc" as shorthand for serious and grounded in science, probability and logic. Like me on a good day.
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
Yes, that’s how the methodology works. “Wins against replacement” (WAR).
It’s a pretty dodgy methodology, though. One also has to consider was aims, and the outcome. Had Napoleon finally been defeated defending France, then fair enough, but the guy was just an inveterate warmonger and would-be tyrant.
He even out-Nelsoned Nelson with his final words in battle (a victory more crushing than Trafalgar): "The war is at its height – wear my armor and beat my war drums. Do not announce my death."
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Mass immigration is a Ponzi scheme, and not even a very effective one. Stuffing more people into the country simply imbalances the economy even further in the direction of ludicrous property prices and rents, exacerbating poverty, and you then have to keep importing even more people as the ones you've already brought in age and turn into a net burden themselves.
However, we are stuck in this pattern so it'll carry on either until the state is crushed by the weight of dependency and is forced to act, or until so much of the electorate are dirt poor minimum wage robots, burning through most of what little they earn in rents and taxes and scarcely able to afford to eat, that they're numerous enough to vote in a very left wing Government.
More broadly, and taking the lens off immigration given it’s simply a reshuffling of populations not a net global impact, population growth is a Ponzi scheme. And a fiendishly difficult one to resolve.
Growing population: growing economy, low dependency ratio, low tax burden, social mobility. But less and less space and more and more environmental destruction.
Shrinking population: stagnating economy, deflation, high tax burden, feudalism. But a lighter touch on the environment and less strain on resources.
With increasing productivity a smaller workforce can support both higher living standards and an aging population pyramid.
Adding people to the *same* economy doesn’t alter GDP per head much.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
It depends what we educate them in.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
Hence my niche as an engineer-turned-lawyer
I get your point though generally, but BritishVolt failed and so what? We need to adopt a culture of failure being the driver for better in the future rather than an object of mockery. Those involved in BritishVolt will have learned from that failure, you would hope. The government and/or the local authority also should have learned from that too.
There is little evidence of recognition of the problem. Especially from those involved with BritishVolt. Who seem to believe that if someone had kept shovelling money at them, a battery factory would have built itself.
The point is that if we don’t get the culture of technology+finance+sociology+politics combined, things won’t change.
And while “proper leaders” are generalists (accountants and lawyers) who don’t want to understand technology, we wont succeed in technology.
Embracing failure is an important piece, I agree. But so is understanding how to use it.
To upset some people here - consider how SpaceX pivoted to stainless steel from carbon fibre. The carbon fibre solution failed - grew in cost and weight. The traditional approach would to have carried on the investment on sunk cost grounds, wait until the project failed and abandon everything.
We would probably need to import the expertise/technology for any big expansion of battery manufacturing. Either Chinese - which is currently the best - or Korean.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
It depends what we educate them in.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
Hence my niche as an engineer-turned-lawyer
I get your point though generally, but BritishVolt failed and so what? We need to adopt a culture of failure being the driver for better in the future rather than an object of mockery. Those involved in BritishVolt will have learned from that failure, you would hope. The government and/or the local authority also should have learned from that too.
The lesson learned will be that industry is too complicated for politicians and civil servants to understand, and that it’s safer to stick with shuffling paper and money.
More, the lesson that industry is full of nasty technology and {snigger} maths. Best stay away from that.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It ultimately comes down to a desire to live beyond means.
Its something governments are happy to pander to but the desire is too deeply intrinsic among too many people.
The Germans were living beyond their means in 1950, but were very far from doing so in 1990.
This wasn't only because of debt cancellation, but mainly because of vastly better investment, training, social and educational policies.
You can't educate your way out of a demographic crisis.
There was this thing a few years ago which some of us might remember called the Covid 19 pandemic, in which everyone was essentially put under house arrest in a desperate effort to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. Fast forward five years and the situation in hospital emergency departments is now described as being as bad as it was during the pandemic, simply because of a difficult flu year.
This is simply because the country has capsized, swamped by a tsunami of need which is presently beyond the ability of the state to cope with. That, in turn, is because the ratio of productive citizens to dependent ones is so bad that the economy, at least as it is currently structured, cannot cope with it.
Before very long we shall be in a situation where acute care has simply fallen over entirely, and anybody turning up in a hospital with some ailment short of a cardiac arrest will have to spend a week on a trolley waiting to be admitted. The response of the Health Secretary to all of this is a combination of soothing and totally empty words, and yet another talking shop intended to put off a decision on the expansion of social care - which is the most vital element needed to shift legions of elderly bed blockers out of hospital wards - until a time far enough in the future that he hopes to have moved on to another job.
Until the truly dire situation in which we find ourselves is appreciated by everybody then things are only going to keep on getting worse.
You're a cheerful fucker, aren't you?
I'm a realist. Two things that there's little point in doing:
1. Ignoring problems just because they are challenging, but also 2. Worrying about things that you personally have almost zero control over. Which is why I seldom bother to discuss this stuff anymore and am, therefore, really quite cheerful most of the time
All I can really do is have private health cover and, being the age I now am, keep my fingers crossed that, if things are going to go properly to shit, that happens after me and the husband are safely dead of old age. Nothing I say or do is going to make the blindest bit of difference to any of these problems.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It ultimately comes down to a desire to live beyond means.
Its something governments are happy to pander to but the desire is too deeply intrinsic among too many people.
The Germans were living beyond their means in 1950, but were very far from doing so in 1990.
This wasn't only because of debt cancellation, but mainly because of vastly better investment, training, social and educational policies.
Perhaps you could wave a magic wand to allow this country to have vastly better investment, training, social and educational policies.
Failing that we will have to live within whatever means we have.
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
Yes, that’s how the methodology works. “Wins against replacement” (WAR).
It’s a pretty dodgy methodology, though. One also has to consider was aims, and the outcome. Had Napoleon finally been defeated defending France, then fair enough, but the guy was just an inveterate warmonger and would-be tyrant.
He even out-Nelsoned Nelson with his final words in battle (a victory more crushing than Trafalgar): "The war is at its height – wear my armor and beat my war drums. Do not announce my death."
Statue in the centre of Seoul.
What an unusual-looking plinth. It looks almost made foe Yi-Sun to skateboard down, off and into the adoring crowds in the square, there.
Rangoon is a bit of a shithole. A shithole full of post imperial noom but a bit of a shithole nonethiess
We built an entire and magnificent Victorian/Edwardian city on the banks of the woogly-waggly here, a mighty grid of banks and churches and city halls and customs houses and ornate Anglo-Burmese train stations - surrounding the golden pagodas - and now it all rots like a collection of Sicilian palazzi and trees grow through the roofs of the Port Authority HQ and Mon women, cheeks daubed with yellow thanaka paste, squat in the mildewed porches of the shuttered Strand Hotel selling tiny lychees and cheap Chinese dolls
There's some value in seeing it, though, as it's a perfect microcosm of much of the post-Imperial third world. At least that's what I thought when I was there a decade ago.
We introduced state of the art Victorian governance and since we left, rather than build on our achievements with the added blessings of self-determination and democracy they have let it fall apart and the rest of the place with it.
A pattern replicated in many places, sadly, from Hong Kong to Freetown to Khartoum to Salisbury to ...
It's 15 years ago that I was there. I quite liked Rangoon, which I found to be very different to a lot of South East Asia, perhaps a view to what Thailand and Vietnam looked like before the impact of the West. Even then though the number of Chinese goods was driving out local goods. I was mostly in Upper Burma though, which is the heartland of Burmese culture.
Burma was run as an outpost of British India, particularly to provide rice to Bengal. In 1942 Rangoon was 50% Bengali, most of whom fled, and often died, in the Empires longest retreat to India. This is a large factor in both the wartime Bengal famine, and the continuing animosity of Burmese to Muslims (seen as an Imperial presence inflicted by Britain on them). State of the art Victorian governance consisted of no say for local people in governance and forced extraction of resources at the point of a gun.
I really liked Burma and might get back there sometime. It has a dreadful and barbaric military government, but magnificent and largely intact cultures and landscapes. There may well be regime change at some point as the military have had a number of recent setbacks in the ongoing civil wars. The rebels vary from pro-democracy students to Narco-oligarchs, via a multiplicity of minority nationalists. To say that Myanmar politics is opaque is one of the great understatement.
Does it have anything to rival that famous Cambodian Temple city ?
The legend of Angkor Wat, I think it's called.
I have not been to Angkor Wat, but Bagan is one of the great sites. It was a city of 1 million people at one time, but all that is left now is the stone pagodas, perhaps a thousand of them in various states of ruin and size, with the civilian buildings all rotted away, leaving a massive plain of stupas.
Shortly before I visited all the local people were cleared off the site, at gunpoint by the SLORC military, without compensation, in order to make it more of a tourist site. Burma is full of that sort of brutal history amongst the beauty.
Angkor Wat is arguably THE single most impressive monument from the pre-modern world. And yes I’m including the pantheon, pyramids, Hagia Sophia, any medieval cathedrals (tho if you take them all together), Luxor; macchu pichu, Teotihuacan, and all
I’ve seen them all and Angkor Wat remains - to my mind - in a dreamy world of its own. Albeit now blighted by billions of tourists
I’ll be interested to compare Bagan. I very much doubt it’s in the same league but it does sound fabulous
I am excluding Gobekli Tepe and the tas Tepeler because you have to. They are more like alien cities from Martian invasions
I was going to say Gobekli Tepe is surely the most amazing example of ancient civilisation. Dated to 10,000 BC and it's just insane. Demolishes the idea that ancient humans were simple hunter gatherers and the African origin theory. It's been, err, interesting watching woke scientists try harder and harder to hold onto the African origin theory to the point of attempting to excommunicate scientists who dare to defy the prevailing theory. It's always amazing how scientific method takes a back seat when establishment approved ideas get disproved.
How exactly does it demolish Out of Africa?
That sounds an odd claim. GT is dated to 10,000 BC, whilst the OOA theory is based around a timespan 100-200,000 years ago. So the two sit very well together.
OOA theory may be wrong - in outline and especially in detail - but I cannot see how the existence of GT disproves it.
Yes, I thought the startling thing about GT was more around the emergence of complex societies needed (or what was presumed to be needed) to construct remarkable, er, constructions, so early on, not where it was. It's not like it's a million miles from other cradles of civilization (or Africa for that matter).
The truly remarkable thing about Tas Tapeler is that what we are unearthing may be the ENDpoint of a great civilisation stretching back thousands of years before this. Which means agriculture might have killed it off?
We just dunno. That would - inter alia - mean Graham Hancock is at least partly right (even if his worldwide comet theories are “a stretch”) which would annoy and destroy a lot of orthodox science
I agree that Gobekli does little to challenge the Out of Africa theory, tho that does now face challenges of its own with all sorts of anomalous hominids now springing up in Asia/indonesia etc
Graham Hancock? ... lol.
Well, he has for ages said “there’s an amazing advanced civilisation dating back tens of thousands of years and it’s all buried and we just don’t know it”. Then bingo - he got lucky? - that seems to be exactly what we’re digging up in the Tas Tepeler. With each new jigsaw piece it gets more profound, more sophisticated - even more disturbing, perhaps
I agree his technique of flying around the world on the Netflix dime pointing at a “weird thing” and saying “see!!” can be wearying if not utterly ridiculous
But even when he’s ridiculous - 80% of the time - he’s quite entertaining. A lot of the flak he gets from “proper” scientists is pure jealousy. They’d LOVE to be on Netflix pointing at shit in Peru and saying “see!”
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
Yes, that’s how the methodology works. “Wins against replacement” (WAR).
It’s a pretty dodgy methodology, though. One also has to consider was aims, and the outcome. Had Napoleon finally been defeated defending France, then fair enough, but the guy was just an inveterate warmonger and would-be tyrant.
He even out-Nelsoned Nelson with his final words in battle (a victory more crushing than Trafalgar): "The war is at its height – wear my armor and beat my war drums. Do not announce my death."
Statue in the centre of Seoul.
What an unusual-looking plinth. It looks almost made foe Yi-Sun to skateboard down, off and into the adoring crowds in the square, there.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
More to the point - productivity,
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Education can therefore increase productivity as an educated workforce can innovate
It depends what we educate them in.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
Hence my niche as an engineer-turned-lawyer
I get your point though generally, but BritishVolt failed and so what? We need to adopt a culture of failure being the driver for better in the future rather than an object of mockery. Those involved in BritishVolt will have learned from that failure, you would hope. The government and/or the local authority also should have learned from that too.
There is little evidence of recognition of the problem. Especially from those involved with BritishVolt. Who seem to believe that if someone had kept shovelling money at them, a battery factory would have built itself.
The point is that if we don’t get the culture of technology+finance+sociology+politics combined, things won’t change.
And while “proper leaders” are generalists (accountants and lawyers) who don’t want to understand technology, we wont succeed in technology.
Embracing failure is an important piece, I agree. But so is understanding how to use it.
To upset some people here - consider how SpaceX pivoted to stainless steel from carbon fibre. The carbon fibre solution failed - grew in cost and weight. The traditional approach would to have carried on the investment on sunk cost grounds, wait until the project failed and abandon everything.
We would probably need to import the expertise/technology for any big expansion of battery manufacturing. Either Chinese - which is currently the best - or Korean.
I would have got Panasonic to partner up for the first couple of factories, myself.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
Why not go the whole hog and abolish child benefit and spend the money on giving a welcome bonus to immigrants? That's the logic of your position.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It ultimately comes down to a desire to live beyond means.
Its something governments are happy to pander to but the desire is too deeply intrinsic among too many people.
The Germans were living beyond their means in 1950, but were very far from doing so in 1990.
This wasn't only because of debt cancellation, but mainly because of vastly better investment, training, social and educational policies.
You can't educate your way out of a demographic crisis.
There was this thing a few years ago which some of us might remember called the Covid 19 pandemic, in which everyone was essentially put under house arrest in a desperate effort to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. Fast forward five years and the situation in hospital emergency departments is now described as being as bad as it was during the pandemic, simply because of a difficult flu year.
This is simply because the country has capsized, swamped by a tsunami of need which is presently beyond the ability of the state to cope with. That, in turn, is because the ratio of productive citizens to dependent ones is so bad that the economy, at least as it is currently structured, cannot cope with it.
Before very long we shall be in a situation where acute care has simply fallen over entirely, and anybody turning up in a hospital with some ailment short of a cardiac arrest will have to spend a week on a trolley waiting to be admitted. The response of the Health Secretary to all of this is a combination of soothing and totally empty words, and yet another talking shop intended to put off a decision on the expansion of social care - which is the most vital element needed to shift legions of elderly bed blockers out of hospital wards - until a time far enough in the future that he hopes to have moved on to another job.
Until the truly dire situation in which we find ourselves is appreciated by everybody then things are only going to keep on getting worse.
You're a cheerful fucker, aren't you?
Well, I'm delighted to hear it but did you really have to give details about your mutual sex life to the rest of us?
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It ultimately comes down to a desire to live beyond means.
Its something governments are happy to pander to but the desire is too deeply intrinsic among too many people.
The Germans were living beyond their means in 1950, but were very far from doing so in 1990.
This wasn't only because of debt cancellation, but mainly because of vastly better investment, training, social and educational policies.
You can't educate your way out of a demographic crisis.
There was this thing a few years ago which some of us might remember called the Covid 19 pandemic, in which everyone was essentially put under house arrest in a desperate effort to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. Fast forward five years and the situation in hospital emergency departments is now described as being as bad as it was during the pandemic, simply because of a difficult flu year.
This is simply because the country has capsized, swamped by a tsunami of need which is presently beyond the ability of the state to cope with. That, in turn, is because the ratio of productive citizens to dependent ones is so bad that the economy, at least as it is currently structured, cannot cope with it.
Before very long we shall be in a situation where acute care has simply fallen over entirely, and anybody turning up in a hospital with some ailment short of a cardiac arrest will have to spend a week on a trolley waiting to be admitted. The response of the Health Secretary to all of this is a combination of soothing and totally empty words, and yet another talking shop intended to put off a decision on the expansion of social care - which is the most vital element needed to shift legions of elderly bed blockers out of hospital wards - until a time far enough in the future that he hopes to have moved on to another job.
Until the truly dire situation in which we find ourselves is appreciated by everybody then things are only going to keep on getting worse.
You're a cheerful fucker, aren't you?
I'm a realist. Two things that there's little point in doing:
1. Ignoring problems just because they are challenging, but also 2. Worrying about things that you personally have almost zero control over. Which is why I seldom bother to discuss this stuff anymore and am, therefore, really quite cheerful most of the time
All I can really do is have private health cover and, being the age I now am, keep my fingers crossed that, if things are going to go properly to shit, that happens after me and the husband are safely dead of old age. Nothing I say or do is going to make the blindest bit of difference to any of these problems.
I wasn't being entirely serious. In fact, I have much sympathy with your analysis, but I find you overly pessimistic. I'm knocking on a bit, and don't have private health insurance. But I've had two separate bouts of cancer in the last seven years and while the NHS has been administratively incompetent, the diagnosis and treatment I've received has been superb. I'd like more money to be spent on the NHS and other public services, and I think the country is rich enough to afford that despite the naysayers. So I vote accordingly, and hope for the best. But I'm far from giving up hope.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
And the alternative is an immigrant driven ponzi scheme which arrives at the same ultimate destination. We are a small island with finite resources, we cannot keep expanding the population by >1% every year.
The only difference is that when the ponzi scheme finally collapses, we will have loads more of the world's poor to feed and house in their old age than if we pull the plug now.
The future is austerity and a high dependency ratio. That's baked in. The only question is when will governments stop kicking the can, thus making the problem worse, as well as very slightly in the future.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
The logic of that is an increasing group of poorly paid, poorly educated natives looking at another, distinct group, doing much better than them economically and socially.
This pattern occurred in many bits of the British Empire. It did not produce social harmony. Strangely.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
Unfortunately we’ve often been importing the opposite
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
The logic of that is an increasing group of poorly paid, poorly educated natives looking at another, distinct group, doing much better than them economically and socially.
This pattern occurred in many bits of the British Empire. It did not produce social harmony. Strangely.
I agree, and that is the fundamental flaw with our points based system.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
We should be looking to *export* doctors and nurses.
Due to the epic increases in living standard and expectations in much of the world, medical staff will be in short supply, now and in the future.
Instead of depending on stripping Africa (and elsewhere) of medical staff, we should be educating not 75% of the NHS requirement, but 125%.
The Imperial British Dilapidations of Rangoon, Myanmar
For some reason your Rangoon making me of the film Empire of The Sun, although that was filmed in Shanghai, I think.
And set in Shanghai - great film and book. Dunno if the CCP would be happy to allow that kind of freedom now.
No doubt Ballard would have found Rangoon interesting if he did visit, though he may have had his fill of full-fat end of empire during the war.
Ballard would have loved modern Rangoon. Not least because of the layers. On top of the ancient pagodas and imperial British ruins you’ve got the new wartime layer - sandbags and barbed wire and soldiers - it does feel fairly warlike. And then on top of that you’ve got the 2025 vibe, the new century - so under some mildewed ruined grandiose British porch a block down from the half-ruined 4th century stupa, and surrounded by razor wire and piles of ruinous litter there’s a kid eagerly scrolling vids on his smartphone
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
We should be looking to *export* doctors and nurses.
Due to the epic increases in living standard and expectations in much of the world, medical staff will be in short supply, now and in the future.
Instead of depending on stripping Africa (and elsewhere) of medical staff, we should be educating not 75% of the NHS requirement, but 125%.
Think of it as our reparations….
Anyone else notice how quiet things have gone over the extra 10 000 Medical School places.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
That's the spirit!
If you can persuade the next 15 Education ministers over the course of the next two-three years that would also be very helpful.
Outside of slogans - education and possibly more importantly capability seem to be way, way down the list of 'national priorities'. Outside of hoovering up fees and shuffling debt figures around. 'Somewhat above the middle' in any given league table seems to be where we're aiming.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
We should be looking to *export* doctors and nurses.
Due to the epic increases in living standard and expectations in much of the world, medical staff will be in short supply, now and in the future.
Instead of depending on stripping Africa (and elsewhere) of medical staff, we should be educating not 75% of the NHS requirement, but 125%.
Think of it as our reparations….
Anyone else notice how quiet things have gone over the extra 10 000 Medical School places.
It's tumbleweed time...
What might work is something like the triple lock.
“We will expand medical education capacity by 1% of the NHS requirements every year”
What’s not entirely obvious to me is why the UK’s gilts are so unpopular when the UK has the lowest debt:GDP level in the G7 bar Germany. And it is only mid-tier on size of fiscal deficit.
Edit: Although I am decidedly underwhelmed by Reeves, a lot of the anti-UK sentiment seems very overblown. Again, looking at the OECD, the UK has a great deal going for it.
Presumably it's got at least something to do with the fact that Reeve's credibility is shot. She's enacted a cash grabbing anti-growth budget which is hurting the private sector badly, she's also borrowing a shed load of extra cash with no plausible plan to ever shrink (never mind close) the deficit. From a bond holders point of view, there's a significant risk the printing presses go brrrrr and the currency gets devalued...
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
We should be looking to *export* doctors and nurses.
Due to the epic increases in living standard and expectations in much of the world, medical staff will be in short supply, now and in the future.
Instead of depending on stripping Africa (and elsewhere) of medical staff, we should be educating not 75% of the NHS requirement, but 125%.
Think of it as our reparations….
Anyone else notice how quiet things have gone over the extra 10 000 Medical School places.
It's tumbleweed time...
What might work is something like the triple lock.
“We will expand medical education capacity by 1% of the NHS requirements every year”
Once that momentum is started….
I think the penny has dropped that the physical and personnel needed to double our output of doctors simply doesn't exist, even if the money did. That's before we get to the problem of finding suitable candidates.
Experienced Medical Educationalists like yours truly are in short supply, and we can't be simultaneously training the students and cracking through the waiting lists.
The Imperial British Dilapidations of Rangoon, Myanmar
For some reason your Rangoon making me of the film Empire of The Sun, although that was filmed in Shanghai, I think.
And set in Shanghai - great film and book. Dunno if the CCP would be happy to allow that kind of freedom now.
No doubt Ballard would have found Rangoon interesting if he did visit, though he may have had his fill of full-fat end of empire during the war.
Ballard would have loved modern Rangoon. Not least because of the layers. On top of the ancient pagodas and imperial British ruins you’ve got the new wartime layer - sandbags and barbed wire and soldiers - it does feel fairly warlike. And then on top of that you’ve got the 2025 vibe, the new century - so under some mildewed ruined grandiose British porch a block down from the half-ruined 4th century stupa, and surrounded by razor wire and piles of ruinous litter there’s a kid eagerly scrolling vids on his smartphone
Not exactly Rangoon. But it brings to mind Ballard's "Drowned World" - the faded, decaying story in the sweltering leftovers of the current world. There's a quite good R4 adaptation available on archive.org :
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
On the baby front? We need a bit of both, I'd have thought.
What’s not entirely obvious to me is why the UK’s gilts are so unpopular when the UK has the lowest debt:GDP level in the G7 bar Germany. And it is only mid-tier on size of fiscal deficit.
More threats of destabilisation from the US than Germany ? And also possible destabilisation of its American economic & defence relationships, perhaps.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
We should be looking to *export* doctors and nurses.
Due to the epic increases in living standard and expectations in much of the world, medical staff will be in short supply, now and in the future.
Instead of depending on stripping Africa (and elsewhere) of medical staff, we should be educating not 75% of the NHS requirement, but 125%.
Think of it as our reparations….
Anyone else notice how quiet things have gone over the extra 10 000 Medical School places.
It's tumbleweed time...
What might work is something like the triple lock.
“We will expand medical education capacity by 1% of the NHS requirements every year”
Once that momentum is started….
I think the penny has dropped that the physical and personnel needed to double our output of doctors simply doesn't exist, even if the money did. That's before we get to the problem of finding suitable candidates.
Experienced Medical Educationalists like yours truly are in short supply, and we can't be simultaneously training the students and cracking through the waiting lists.
To which the sane reply is to have a gradual, consistent target, based increasing the training capability steadily over time.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
If it’s just us, and not other European countries that need such drastic treatment, we would need to look at the reasons why. Destroying manufacturing, austerity, selling the family silver. Perhaps then, people would see the damage that Thatcher, Brown and Osborne inflicted on us.
It is not just us. Most rich world countries face sluggish growth, and are living beyond their means.
Now, compared to most people, in most times, we’ve all drawn first prize in the lottery of life.
Demographics. (Specifically, demographics is destiny as Auguste Comte noted about 200 years ago.)
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
Absolutely. The price of zero immigration is a high dependency burden and endless austerity.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Playing devil’s advocate, you could accompany it with policies designed to vastly increase the number of births i.e. subsidies for mothers
Natalist Autarky, that would be in the lingo? It has its supporters, I gather.
Why is importing people better than local manufacture?
Because we don't pay for schooling and training?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
In my view we should be striving for the average brit to be better educated and better qualified than the rest of the world
We should be looking to *export* doctors and nurses.
Due to the epic increases in living standard and expectations in much of the world, medical staff will be in short supply, now and in the future.
Instead of depending on stripping Africa (and elsewhere) of medical staff, we should be educating not 75% of the NHS requirement, but 125%.
Think of it as our reparations….
Anyone else notice how quiet things have gone over the extra 10 000 Medical School places.
It's tumbleweed time...
What might work is something like the triple lock.
“We will expand medical education capacity by 1% of the NHS requirements every year”
Once that momentum is started….
I think the penny has dropped that the physical and personnel needed to double our output of doctors simply doesn't exist, even if the money did. That's before we get to the problem of finding suitable candidates.
Experienced Medical Educationalists like yours truly are in short supply, and we can't be simultaneously training the students and cracking through the waiting lists.
There are plenty of students being rejected for medical courses with straight A’s.
What’s not entirely obvious to me is why the UK’s gilts are so unpopular when the UK has the lowest debt:GDP level in the G7 bar Germany. And it is only mid-tier on size of fiscal deficit.
More threats of destabilisation from the US than Germany ? And also possible destabilisation of its American economic & defence relationships, perhaps.
The UK has never looked so alone.
A million people turned up. A whole 180,000 had a job!
Comments
It didn’t matter how many victories Nazi Germany won in the USSR; the war was lost on 22/06/1941. It didn’t matter how many victories the IJA won in 1941/2; the war was lost when they started it.
Economies grew very quickly when birth rates dipped and women could spend much more time in the workforce. And this was combined with the echo of the Second World War, which meant we didn't have too many old people to support.
Now we have lots of old people sucking up the economic output of workers, constraining growth. With fertility rates so far below replacement, the issue gets more and more acute. Ultimately, people who aren't working need to live off the economic output of those who are. (Work is ephemeral, you really can't save it up for later.)
The British government amerliorated the problem by importing lots of people of working age to maintain the dependency ratio. But this wasn't without its own costs: in terms of housing availability and the inevitable issues that occur when people with different cultures live together.
Nobody has actually addressed this issue yet.
What were ancient coastlines like during the Ice Age?
Has any archaeology been undertaken on lost lands such as Dogger, the Persian Gulf, Sunda Shelf, and Sahul Shelf?
Even if manufacturing were to return as a larger share of the economy, it would likely be be highly technical, highly automated and apart from a few security and warehouse personnel employ monthly degree level staff.
If you want mass employment opportunities with decent pay then look to mass housebuilding. Labour's next election depends most on Rayner's plans, backed by Streeting delivering on the NHS.
The proof will be in the pudding 9 days hence, but the befuddled security services will already be onto it, trying to work out if they have any hope.
I thought Marshal Pétain thought he was doing the right thing in 1940, as an 84 year old he should have better things to be doing.
That would be the choice if an honest one was put to the electorate.
Those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it. Badly.
The idea of progressives wishing to prosecute “sedition” is amusing.
I agree his technique of flying around the world on the Netflix dime pointing at a “weird thing” and saying “see!!” can be wearying if not utterly ridiculous
But even when he’s ridiculous - 80% of the time - he’s quite entertaining. A lot of the flak he gets from “proper” scientists is pure jealousy. They’d LOVE to be on Netflix pointing at shit in Peru and saying “see!”
We're not Honduras, or Greenland, though, so there's no reason to give up before we've started.
There was this thing a few years ago which some of us might remember called the Covid 19 pandemic, in which everyone was essentially put under house arrest in a desperate effort to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. Fast forward five years and the situation in hospital emergency departments is now described as being as bad as it was during the pandemic, simply because of a difficult flu year.
This is simply because the country has capsized, swamped by a tsunami of need which is presently beyond the ability of the state to cope with. That, in turn, is because the ratio of productive citizens to dependent ones is so bad that the economy, at least as it is currently structured, cannot cope with it.
Before very long we shall be in a situation where acute care has simply fallen over entirely, and anybody turning up in a hospital with some ailment short of a cardiac arrest will have to spend a week on a trolley waiting to be admitted. The response of the Health Secretary to all of this is a combination of soothing and totally empty words, and yet another talking shop intended to put off a decision on the expansion of social care - which is the most vital element needed to shift legions of elderly bed blockers out of hospital wards - until a time far enough in the future that he hopes to have moved on to another job.
Until the truly dire situation in which we find ourselves is appreciated by everybody then things are only going to keep on getting worse.
There are some weird attitudes to this still. Talk about it, and I’ll guarantee someone will sneer about “flogging the workers”
Real productivity increases *reduce* the amount of work required to create a product. Less effort for the result.
It is at the heart of the vast increase in living standards since WWII.
And productivity increases have stalled in the U.K.
Anyway, today I saw the lady and she started chatting so I decided to mention it - do you know you have the same name as an American TV producer?
Not only did she know, she told me she used to work in TV and spent a few years working in Hollywood. She had to temporarily change her name because she kept on getting confused with the other lady!
In any case the sort of subsidies needed would be so redistributive that they would require major cuts affecting the grey vote.
Time to privatise the education system.
Which is why I want to merge the academic and “technical” training. In much of the modern economy we need people who understand (and do) both “white collar” and “blue collar” tasks.
The Britishvolt comedy is perfect example of the problem - they didn’t have anyone who actually knew much about manufacturing batteries or the science behind it. So they did a moderately clever property deal and thought that they would hire in all that dirty technology knowledge as an afterthought.
But the US policy of backing French colonialism in Vietnam, in the aftermath of WWII, was one of their more consequential mistakes.
The failure to recognise that Vietnamese leaders were more interested in independence than they were in communism - and that the French colonial project (which had been appalling for Vietnam) was doomed - was a huge strategic mistake.
Once it became framed as a Cold War contest, it became almost impossible for any following President to disengage. Until they were forced to… after killing between a tenth and a fifth of the entire population.
https://grahamhancock.com/drsunilatlantis/
I get your point though generally, but BritishVolt failed and so what? We need to adopt a culture of failure being the driver for better in the future rather than an object of mockery. Those involved in BritishVolt will have learned from that failure, you would hope. The government and/or the local authority also should have learned from that too.
Another day of serious problems today - the cause, a pantograph and a following train ripping up overhead wires on the approach to Milano Centrale, is bad luck, but the politicised debate in the overall state of the railways has shades of the failing Grayling era in the UK (this was second headline below LA fires).
Link (in Italian):
https://tg24.sky.it/cronaca/2025/01/11/treni-milano-ritardi
Pivoting on-topic. Worth noting that a lot of the parties on Italy's right are constituted rather more like Reform than the member organisations we're more used to in the UK. Leader replacement isn't really a big thing with tenures measured in decades and regular splittism the main open option.
However, we are stuck in this pattern so it'll carry on either until the state is crushed by the weight of dependency and is forced to act, or until so much of the electorate are dirt poor minimum wage robots, burning through most of what little they earn in rents and taxes and scarcely able to afford to eat, that they're numerous enough to vote in a very left wing Government.
Shades of Franco packing all the most obstreperous types off to fight to the Blue Division…..
They have a few case studies of geopolitical hubris, some of which also implicate the UK. Bay of Pigs; Vietnam; Iran hostages; Somalia; Afghanistan; Iraq. But I would say Afghanistan could have been a success if it had been done differently.
Then a few examples of excessive reticence when they might have averted catastrophe: Rwanda; Syria after the chemical attacks; Bosnia early on; Georgia 2008; Ukraine 2014.
Libya 2011 was our and Sarkozy’s hubris, not Americas. Though I’m not sure what the alternative history looks like there.
Growing population: growing economy, low dependency ratio, low tax burden, social mobility. But less and less space and more and more environmental destruction.
Shrinking population: stagnating economy, deflation, high tax burden, feudalism. But a lighter touch on the environment and less strain on resources.
It's like privatisation without the hassle of having to find pupils with wealthy parents to pay the fees.
Luvvly Jubbly.
Edit: Although I am decidedly underwhelmed by Reeves, a lot of the anti-UK sentiment seems very overblown. Again, looking at the OECD, the UK has a great deal going for it.
The UK has never looked so alone.
The point is that if we don’t get the culture of technology+finance+sociology+politics combined, things won’t change.
And while “proper leaders” are generalists (accountants and lawyers) who don’t want to understand technology, we wont succeed in technology.
Embracing failure is an important piece, I agree. But so is understanding how to use it.
To upset some people here - consider how SpaceX pivoted to stainless steel from carbon fibre. The carbon fibre solution failed - grew in cost and weight. The traditional approach would to have carried on the investment on sunk cost grounds, wait until the project failed and abandon everything.
Adding people to the *same* economy doesn’t alter GDP per head much.
Either Chinese - which is currently the best - or Korean.
1. Ignoring problems just because they are challenging, but also
2. Worrying about things that you personally have almost zero control over. Which is why I seldom bother to discuss this stuff anymore and am, therefore, really quite cheerful most of the time
All I can really do is have private health cover and, being the age I now am, keep my fingers crossed that, if things are going to go properly to shit, that happens after me and the husband are safely dead of old age. Nothing I say or do is going to make the blindest bit of difference to any of these problems.
Failing that we will have to live within whatever means we have.
They’ve actually done that in several places.
Is it time to resolve it with a duel?
A high proportion of immigrants are better qualified than the average Brit.
The only difference is that when the ponzi scheme finally collapses, we will have loads more of the world's poor to feed and house in their old age than if we pull the plug now.
The future is austerity and a high dependency ratio. That's baked in. The only question is when will governments stop kicking the can, thus making the problem worse, as well as very slightly in the future.
No doubt Ballard would have found Rangoon interesting if he did visit, though he may have had his fill of full-fat end of empire during the war.
Does she wear a necklace?
This pattern occurred in many bits of the British Empire. It did not produce social harmony. Strangely.
Due to the epic increases in living standard and expectations in much of the world, medical staff will be in short supply, now and in the future.
Instead of depending on stripping Africa (and elsewhere) of medical staff, we should be educating not 75% of the NHS requirement, but 125%.
Think of it as our reparations….
It's tumbleweed time...
If you can persuade the next 15 Education ministers over the course of the next two-three years that would also be very helpful.
Outside of slogans - education and possibly more importantly capability seem to be way, way down the list of 'national priorities'. Outside of hoovering up fees and shuffling debt figures around. 'Somewhat above the middle' in any given league table seems to be where we're aiming.
Aim mid. Aim slow.
It's sort of meta with an imaginary number thrown in
Ever so wisely written by Wes, adopted by Labour and various Councils controlling Thing towns
“We will expand medical education capacity by 1% of the NHS requirements every year”
Once that momentum is started….
From a bond holders point of view, there's a significant risk the printing presses go brrrrr and the currency gets devalued...
Experienced Medical Educationalists like yours truly are in short supply, and we can't be simultaneously training the students and cracking through the waiting lists.
https://archive.org/details/DangerousVisionsS1/1-02-TheDrownedWorld.mp3