We should be thinking pretty hard right about now why this kind of progress and saving these expenses is a BAD thing for humanity. The answer will touch deeply ingrained ideas about what and who should underpin and benefit from progress and value in society.
Other than london and a couple of other cities, most of the country was already ranked as most deprived in Europe.
Throw in Brexit, cost of living and most normal people are fucked.
I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened. NHS is struggling. Pay rises are around 0% for most people I know. Food inflation is around 16%. Foodbanks are struggling to feed families.
Companies are making record profits, these are distributed as dividends to shareholders (the rich) who then go on to buy more shares or other assets (e.g. houses)
Where I live most houses are Air B&B for a lot of the year, this has destroyed most villages by the coast. House prices have doubled or more. So a lot of those families have moved into towns, forced to rent rather than buy. Tons of money that used to go into mortgages (investments) is now funnelled to rich people who own the housing stock.
There's a lot of crazy stuff going on. The UK has a shrinking middle class. The middle class used to drive the economy. The rich poor divide is breaking the country.
A better TAX system would fix most of the problems. But our government is not interested.
I think you are right on the symptoms, and some of the causes, but let me add some from the other side, as I think left and right both make good points and you have to be intellectually honest if you want to move forward.
There are some multinationals who escape taxation, but even if that were perfectly addressed it wouldn't solve the UK's issues. Tax receipts are already close to 40% of GDP, these are record highs, frankly there are few countries where going over 40% is both possible or sustainable. (The US is at 25% for reference).
House prices are high because for 15 years mortgages were basically at 0% interest. This didn't actually make housing more affordable through cheap mortgages, if just inflated house prices. The endless schemes to help young people buy property just makes this worse, as the schemes are just built into the price.
Lastly, and this is usually hard to hear for people of your persuasion, you just can't add 500k-1m NET people to a country and expect housing to be just as available, and the health service to not be under massive strain. It's a physical impossibility. YES, I know many immigrants work in the NHS. That is not a valid rebuke to the problem. 1m net immigrants last year is 1m more people who need health services. The NHS has received massively more funding since covid and just can't cope.
I'm not against migration, but the sheer numbers need to be talked about. You can't keep a sustainable country at these levels.
Finally, the UK has relied on financial and advisory services for decades as the core of its economy. This seems to be working less and less, tech is taking over. the 80-90s were about finance, since then it's been about tech. Slowly the country is falling behind.
This is a chronic issue in almost all of europe, but at least there there is high end manufacturing, and eastern europe has tonnes of catching up to do which grows the economy.
> * Net migration was unusually high in 2022, as several factors came together at the same time, including the war in Ukraine"[1]. *
Even so, the net migration numbers were nowhere close to 1 million. From the same source as above,
> * With this caveat in mind, estimates from the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022. *
You suggested that the UK adds 500k-1m migrants every year, but the actual number seems to be pretty much at the bottom of that range. The number of students coming to the UK has also increased significantly (it does contribute to increase in net migration stats).
The ONS still predicts (with a considerable amount of uncertainty I'll admit) that the net migration numbers will fall significantly in the next 5 or so years.
I don’t think it matters really whether it’s 500k or 1m, if you have a massive housing shortage and a failing health service.
That’s still almost 1% addition to the population every year.
Even if that means 100k families, you still need an extra 100k houses or flats ideally per year. That is impossible, even with super efficient planning laws.
I found the same link as the other reply, and I notice the UK's net migration is broadly in line with other wealthier European countries and the USA.
You absolutely can have this level of migration, but you need to build the infrastructure to support it (homes, schools, hospitals etc).
Relevant statistics on number of dwellings are here [1], and they seem to fit the population increase, but I don't have time to find similar statistics on school places, hospitals etc.
It was a typical blame-the-immigrants comment with no evidence.
I don't mind what arguments people make when they provide some evidence to support them, but the commenter wrote "physical impossibility" when it took me 2 minutes to find statistics to the contrary for their first point.
I'm not sure why this pose was downvoted, apart from mentioning brexit.
I used to live in the countryside, the 90s had a background of rapid improvements in schools and hospitals. 2000s full of out of town megashops killing the high street. 2010s public service cuts. 2020 stuff just not working.
The scale of the housing price problem is difficult to behold.
https://www.adzuna.co.uk/jobs/salaries/norfolk is the average wage. The average house price is 10x the average wage. but thats not evenly distributed. if you live up in the northern part, the average house price is 100x times wage.
The UK was already extraordinarily unequal in the 2000s, however inflation, benefit "adjustment" and general failure in policy.
House prices are awful, and with the current mortgage rates it makes it even harder. Last July when we first started looking at what sort of deposit we would need and how much mortgage payments would be it looked like we would be spending an additional £400 a month (which is fine, I wouldn't have to save for a house after all). But since the catastrophic economic policies of our shortest term prime minisiter we would be paying an extra £1000 a month over our current rent.
The house 2 doors down was last sold for £80k about 20 years ago. The house over the road that has just gone up for sale is asking for £300k. I'm lucky that my salary is over the median, but a 3-bed semi detached is like 10x the median salary (£26k). The same sort of property that my parents generation bought for 5x the median salary back in the 90s.
And that's fine if the median salary increased by 7% a year (hint: it hasn't)
The houses here used to be affordable for a middle income person or family. Now they aren't, that's the issue, not the sticker price.
edit tldr:
At the same time houses have gone up in price, wages have stagnated, rent has increased and inflation has increased. So we earn the same, pay more for rent, utilities and food, and have to save more (10% deposit is usually the minimum).
UK was already creaking at the seems in the 2000's. I left in 2011 and have spent the last 5 years crawling up a sewer pipe of regulations trying to get my post brexit immigration sorted.
Brexit was just a fantasy of better days to come that was actually pretext for a right wing power grab. And what do right wingers ultimately want? A world of red in tooth and claw capitalism with themselves as the permanent winners, right up until they are hit with one of life's unexpected curve balls then they come crying to the state to save them.
Harsh but fair. It's not significantly different in the US.
You know, it's not different in ANY of the empires, past or present. Look at Russia and it's just a couple decades of further decline, but the same thing.
If hackers and nerd idealists are worth anything, it's for trying to solve all this against a background of constant push-back. I sometimes wonder if the most important thing I could possibly do is try to depict this larger picture in such a way that people got it.
> You know, it's not different in ANY of the empires, past or present. Look at Russia and it's just a couple decades of further decline, but the same thing.
I very seriously doubt that US or even the UK will look like Russia in a couple decades. Russia was historically a backwards agricultural country, that went through breakneck centrally-planned industrialization during the Soviet era, which ultimately collapsed under its own mismanagement, corruption and stupidity. Now they're just playing in the rubbles, getting most of their money from selling vast Siberian mineral riches. Whereas US/UK for the past 200 years have been at the forefront of enlightenment, industrialization, innovation, scientific discoveries, creation of complex and extremely well performing businesses etc. All that is constitutes an enormous capital that can't be just pissed away in a couple decades.
> If hackers and nerd idealists are worth anything, it's for trying to solve all this against a background of constant push-back. I sometimes wonder if the most important thing I could possibly do is try to depict this larger picture in such a way that people got it.
Thinking about this, it actually reminds me of season 2 of Clarkson's Farm. He might not be what you think of when you think of a prototypical hacker, but Clarkson actually is one. In the series he constantly found loopholes to evade the tyrannical council although they sadly ended up winning in the end. Although it makes you think that if someone with his influence and resources can't find a way through the bureaucratic minefield to open a restaurant in an disused barn in the middle of a field on his own property what hope do the rest of us have.
Closest I've got is a game concept where it's your job to manipulate populations's attitudes. However, this assumes that gamifying something and having people able to do it themselves, would give them insight into seeing it on a grand scale around them… and it assumes they'd be able to do anything useful about it if they did get that insight.
Might be like trying to guide chaos. Get beyond the Dunbar number and you're in trouble.
> UK was already creaking at the seems in the 2000's. I left in 2011 and have spent the last 5 years crawling up a sewer pipe of regulations trying to get my post brexit immigration sorted.
As someone planning to leave and never come back, can you give me a brief overview of some of the shit I might not know about that I'm going to have to deal with?
Make sure your gov.gateway is accessible for later pension stuff.
Make sure you can keep your uk bank account if in the new country - i couldnt. Had to close it and transfer costs are high in emergencies.
If your bank has an app Make sure it will work in thd new country. I had to change to UK on my phone for a year (Google rule?) to be able to get an app.
We're a fair few years on, but I changed to a very large bank before emigrating. Nowadays a second account with Wise or similar would probably suffice for occasional use.
I should have moved my UK phone number to a pre-pay plan on a premium network (O2, Vodafone etc), I left it on a budget one which cancelled it with very little notice.
Well EU immigration basically made it tougher for brits to emigrate, which is fair enough.
I can't elaborate too much but high skilled and family reunification pathways are still open, but the tests and documentation are more onerous than before brexit.
stop being misled. tories, labour, it doesn't matter. two sides, same coin. government needs to end. international banking cartel needs to end. the synagogue of satan needs to end. evil needs to end.
I don't know those people. I think averages that include London and other cities don't represent most of the country. Average salary for where I live is £10,000 less than the UK average (I just looked it up)
> I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened
Why would not working result in higher pay? Especially in a field where the product is increasingly seen as a luxury that costs as much as a downpayment for a house and ultimately not a essential requirement for employment.
Striking provides a forcing function to reveal the actual value to the employer of your labor.
In certain fields (e.g. medicine, academics) there are huge centers that represent the majority of jobs for a region. Specialized workers here find it harder to job hop, as there are fewer opportunities.
Striking provides another means to better pay. Say you value my work at $40/hr, but are currently paying my at $20/hr. In domains where employees don't have much recourse to just go find another employer, strikes provide a good mechanism to call the bluff of an employer. If they really only value your work at $20/hr, they'll not be willing to pay any more. If they do value it more highly, striking makes it so they have to choose between making concessions or losing work they value.
I mean I might be biased because this strategy worked for me. But how about, hear me out. Instead of not working you try working harder and providing unique value to your employer.
Hard to swallow for union types but it’s how I ended up being paid significantly more and having no issues buying a house.
This approach only works if your employer knows you have other options and risk leaving if you aren't properly compensated.
In an environment where your employer knows you don't have any options, there is no incentive for them to pay you any higher regardless of how much effort/value you provide.
This doesn't address the issue specified above. In this example, you already provide unique value to your employer at $20/hr over what they're paying you.
If you have no recourse when they value your work at $40/hr, what recourse would you have when they value your work at $60/hr but still pay you $20/hr?
Being a more valuable employee works great in combination with exercising leverage over your employer (quit-threat, striking, competitive labor market), since those threaten to take that value away from your employer if they don't play ball.
A lot of people get student loans. A lot of people never end up making enough to even begin repaying their student loans if they've taken a degree that's not in demand, or they never end up paying it back before it is just eventually written off. The student loans aren't like a normal loan. Yes, it may be to the sum of what you could put towards a downpayment on a house, but it isn't the same as that's something someone would have to repay, regardless of how much they were making.
As a lot of people can access further education, they take the opportunity even if it isn't necessary for employment. Most students work whilst studying, even with a student loan, because the loan almost certainly doesn't cover their rent, food, transport and textbooks for example. Most young people you see working in hospitality are probably in university studying.
What's the alternative to make ends meet for students? OnlyFans?
When ChatGPT first came out I was asking it to draw pictures of goblins and wizards using Python and Turtle - it's pretty bloody good at it. You can ask it to make the goblin angry or happy or whatever.
There is some sort of magic in which the LLM is imagining what a goblin looks like, then converts those thoughts to turtle commands and then finally adds python. It's quite impressive.
For example, the eyes, head, hair, horns etc are all in the correct place.... how? Using imagination?
I think somewhere down the rabbit hole we lost perspective of what neural nets are doing and how we got to the post-GPT world. Remember deep neural-networks? The idea is that each layer _deeper_ the software encodes more _hidden_ relationships from the training data. That's where this "magic" is embedded. At certain depths the neural-net stores relationships that go beyond our human reasoning and conscious understanding, and the software results generated from these depths are unsettling and tend to startle us. Interesting enough, these are things we are perfectly capable of doing but unable to actually query in our heads as we, just like ChatGPT, do not posses the ability to physically examine our own neural-net content.
Only high value species are interesting for the cultivated meat indsutry. The overwhelming majority of salmon is farmed, especially atlantic salmon [1, page 17]. Yellowtail tuna is increasinly farmed as well, but sure wild stocks of tuna are still getting depleted.
Eating chicken or some other meat is not better than eating fish.
We all (students and staff) use it a lot. It'll write lectures, help think up interesting worksheet ideas, help students code, help them think of things to write about, how to structure assignments.
I needed a lecture on regex, ChatGPT wrote it for my in 30 seconds. Then I asked it for some problems for the students to solve and it wrote those too.
It may not be relevant to you, but for some of us it is changing the way we work. That hasn't happened since the dawn of the internet, or social media, or mobile phones.
The next generation are using it, and using it a lot.
A good, as if the profession of teaching needed to be hollowed out even more. Now, instead of a carefully assembled and designed curriculum, students will be fed literal autogenerated nonsense.
If you do something in your area of expertise half-way with AI, someone somewhere WILL try to do it all the way and market replacing your expertise with just more black boxes for cheaper, and the people who pay you who aren't experts in your field, WILL be sold on that offer.
Nobody will listen to you when you talk about how it is problematic or wrong or error prone or anything. Think of how angrily people argue about Tesla's camera based self driving, think of all the bad takes people have about how "it's safer than a real person" despite the lopsided and bad statistics behind that claim. Now instead of arguing this with strangers on the internet about an extremely rare outcome that could theoretically kill a random person, now you are having this exact style of conversation with your boss about how the AI model he is saying will replace you has an entire class of errors that humans aren't familiar with and don't seem to notice very well and will absolutely hurt things, but only rarely, in the future.
Get ready for a future where pretty much everything inexplicably fails 1 out of 50 times and nobody will ever be able to tell you why, they won't be able to fix it, and companies prefer this anyway.
If it's anything like my experiences so far, that lecture is likely to be riddled with plausible but incorrect statements. Any chance you could paste it here?
> The next generation are using it, and using it a lot.
So we should expect the Flynn effect to reverse even harder the coming years? The modern classroom is already making kids dumber, this might actually reverse many of the effects of education and put us back very far.
As someone who works in education, we education nurses, the public services (think police, fire, army etc) IT, coding, space tech, brickies, chefs, etc etc etc .... so many lecturers have an exit plan, or are already gone.
The very foundadtions of the country are being removed. How do you run an economy when there's no one educated enough to do it? Even if we drop 1% of the future leaders, business owners, start up founders, and whatever .... what is the UK then? I don't think we'll be fine, we're slowly sinking and everyone is banging pots for the NHS and saying 'keep calm!' and selling their houses to AirBNB lettting agents and NOT VOTING and we still have the most stupid voting system on planet earth so nothing can change.
