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Given that neo-liberalism isn't going away, I'd at least like to suffer under it in a country with warm weather, better food, and a more interesting landscape.
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May 6, 2014 17:04
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There are no parts of the world where you can hide from what most of us here rally against hth. e: You can find a better climate tho.
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May 6, 2014 17:05
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SybilVimes posted:I disagree with that, I worked with a spanish company (as essentially a contractor via my UK employer), and while there were language troubles, they had an english speaker or two there, and when I went over there to do some intensive time with them, it was possible to work with them quite easily, and I felt that I'd probably have picked up bits of the language pretty quickly if I were to work with them physically for more than a few days.  Isnt the main problem though that hardly any of us UK citizens are at least bi-lingual? It seems like practically everyone else has at least 2 languages. English and whatever. More compulsary learning of another language in schools maybe?
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May 6, 2014 17:06
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Seaside Loafer posted:It seems like practically everyone else has at least 2 languages. English and whatever. If that were true, there would be absolutely no issue with working abroad as an English speaker; right now, it depends on the country. I know that Sweden has a very high rate of English as a foreign language, but when a French group were in my uni, I had severe difficulty communicating concepts to them a lot of the time. Idiomatic language is the hardest part of communication across languages and that doesn't come easily until you're immersed. I definitely agree with "more language", but the issue as an English speaking country is, which one? For the continent, it's easier, since English has become the international language for most things, with French the international language for the rest. Again, it's a skill that most people in Britain wouldn't use because the neighbours we commonly visit are also English speaking nations. At least with France, they can travel to Germany and communicate in English.
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May 6, 2014 17:16
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Right so to clarify for the EU zone French is the most usefull second language to have?
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May 6, 2014 17:27
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Seaside Loafer posted:Right so to clarify for the EU zone French is the most usefull second language to have? It really really depends on where you want to go and what you want to do. Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are all latin languages with enough commonalities to make knowing one helpful for getting by in the others (knowing Italian really helped me learn French and I can pretty much follow most media or conversations in Spanish and communicate well enough). Italian and Spanish have more in common with each other than with French though. German is somewhat similar to the Scandinavian languages, but Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are so similar between each other that people speak effortlessly with each other in them. If you want to go to Scandinavia, learn Norwegian. If it's the south you're interested in, learn Spanish or Italian. Germany won't be useful unless you want to go to Germany specifically.
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May 6, 2014 17:32
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Seaside Loafer posted:Right so to clarify for the EU zone French is the most usefull second language to have? In western europe, yeah, the further east you go the more likely I'd expect german to supplant that.
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May 6, 2014 17:32
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Seaside Loafer posted:Right so to clarify for the EU zone French is the most usefull second language to have? Maybe? The use of French beyond France is more limited to stuff like the internals of the EU and that. Could easily be German, due to both Germany and Austria using it. With French under your belt, related languages like Spanish, Italian, Romansh etc. become a lot easier, though, compared to German where the benefits are (mostly) given by knowing English. EDIT: If you want to learn an EU language for the sake of learning an EU language, go with Norwegian, Swedish or Danish. Knowing English will likely give you the most benefit going into them.
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May 6, 2014 17:35
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Seaside Loafer posted:Ok thank you i'll store that info in the memory banks The trouble is that it takes kids 7 years full immersion to become fluent in a language, that's 7 years of largely nothing but that language. Where are the expert language teachers going to come from to teach in primary schools at anything other than one hour per week? The current provision that I've seen is really patchy, excellent French teachers, and then godawful Mandarin teachers (native speakers via the Confucius Institute), but it's still only one hour per week, with no guarantee of it continuing year to year. Teachers do their best, but there will never be enough specialist primary teachers for languages to be anything other than a waste of time at primary school. Then we have to select the other language to learn, non-English speaking countries have it easier, they just learn English and there's lots of good and easily accessible (not to mention kid friendly) media to draw on and actually enjoy if you're a child learning English. Chances are your home TV networks show lots of subtitled US programmes or films, failing that the Internet will provide. What language should we be trying to teach our children? If we say, let's let schools decide (as we do now) then there's no continuity between primary and secondary (and primary suffers from lack of provision/time/specialists), if we say everyone is going to learn X, then we'll have people moaning that we don't teach Y. Every time some politician says we should teach our children to be bilingual, someone should ask where the money is coming from and what subjects we're going to eliminate from the curriculum (I suggest Design and Technology personally, utterly useless poo poo subject at primary school, but that only gives us one additional hour per week). HortonNash fucked around with this message at 17:40 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 17:36
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Seaside Loafer posted:The scandanvion counttrys are supposed to be pretty great arent they, lots of co-ops etc? Sweden was lefty mecca but the downturn has been pulling all the scando countries to the right quite hard.
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May 6, 2014 17:59
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German is more useful than French I would say, especially in engineering and sciences. We are probably all better off learning mandarin anyway, so we can greet are new overlords properly. People can learn languages very quickly, but it requires full immersion. Your languages also get forgotten if you don't use them for example Louis CK was born in Mexico and spoke only Spanish until he was 8. Now he is significantly below fluent as he only uses it a few times a year to speak to relatives. But rejoice, it is now easier to learn a language than it has EVER been. There are tonnes of free resources, from dictionaries on the internet and vocab systems to skype pals who are willing to teach people. My favored vocab app is Babbel, it is free for vocab. The UK is an amazing country to live in. Seriously, as bad as you think it is here it is normally worse elsewhere. Our tepid climate, with a distinct lack of major weather/tectonic activity and abundant arable land makes it a geographically safe place to live. Our countryside is beautiful, landscapes in Northumberland and the Lake District are awesome. Culturally we are thriving, the food here is great and there are communities that look after each other. Politically speaking the UK is neoliberal, however there is a strong leftist undercurrent. The simple fact that we can moan on an internet forum which can be easily linked to ourselves (no one here is using TOR I would bet) and not be arrested or directly persecuted is pretty rare. We live in a country where the rule of law is respected, and where there are free elections. The corruption we have in the UK is no where near as bad as many other countries. The NHS has been mentioned before, and is the crowning glory of the UK. Now I do not believe that we should rest on our laurels, there is a lot more that needs to be done to make this a fairer society, but screaming about neoliberal conspiracies and throwing your toys out the pram is not the way to go about it. To complain about how bad we have it when, for example, young girls were abducted from a school and their government did NOTHING about it smacks of, at the best, a lack of self awareness.
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May 6, 2014 18:02
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Spangly A posted:Sweden was lefty mecca but the downturn has been pulling all the scando countries to the right quite hard. They have a pretty murky history of sterilising people though don't they.
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May 6, 2014 18:07
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CancerCakes posted:People can learn languages very quickly, but it requires full immersion. It takes a non-English speaking child 7 years to attain fluency under full immersion in an English primary school, longer if they cannot read/write their "home" language, they will still struggle with idioms and colloquialisms and you have to be wary of cultural differences too (I thought every kid knew the game battleships and planned a Y5 maths lesson around it, turns out Polish kids don't and the two in my class at the time were extremely confused).
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May 6, 2014 18:15
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Spangly A posted:But that's a stupid argument since we're EU citizens and our options include France, Germany and Sweden to name a few. For now. I wonder what our options would be if we withdrew. (And what would happen to all the British people already resident in the rest of Europe) Edit: I worked for a software company in Norway for a year and a bit. Not speaking Norwegian was no problem - the company language was English and everyone there was really fluent (Granted, programmers worldwide tend to use English as an international language). The tricky bit was actually trying to learn Norwegian since the moment I opened my mouth and started uttering halting grammatical abominations, anyone I was speaking to would reply in perfect English 
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May 6, 2014 18:16
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HortonNash posted:They have a pretty murky history of sterilising people though don't they. Yeah, Sweden stopped compulsory sterilisation in 1976, and Switzerland was even later - mid-1980s. I studied a while in Sweden, and while Sweden is in some respects quite leftist and socially progressive, it's incredibly authoritarian in its approach, and it's 'equality in that everyone is the same, and should act the same', rather than being particularly tolerant of variance/diversity.
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May 6, 2014 18:17
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HortonNash posted:They have a pretty murky history of sterilising people though don't they. Scandanavian countries conform to the old left-right alignment better than pretty much anywhere else. There was a ridiculously strong social floor, fair pay, fantastic entitlements, and in general a strong belief that the government's job is to provide, from a legal perspective. The flip side of this for the old left was; we provide, yet morally arbitrate. Frankly I can deal with countries with a murky human rights record when their adopted children do better academically and personally than our mainstream educated children, in terms of qualifications and mental health. We're not exactly going to point fingers. It's kinda irrelevant as the King announced the end of the welfare state a while ago. Every fucker is a liberal given the chance. Death to humanity.
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May 6, 2014 18:18
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Pesmerga posted:Yeah, Sweden stopped compulsory sterilisation in 1976, Uh, no
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May 6, 2014 18:22
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JFairfax posted:One key thing is the NHS, being poor in the US is a whole other ballgame because you could literally be bankrupted instead of getting the treatment you need. Exactly. It's a shame the NHS is being told to save money and cut back etc. Sure the NHS isn't perfect, it has flaws and needs a little tweeking but saying do exactly what you're doing now and more but with less money is idiotic. The cracks are showing and there's only going to be more strain as the population ages.
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May 6, 2014 18:35
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Thrasophius posted:Exactly. It's a shame the NHS is being told to save money and cut back etc. Sure the NHS isn't perfect, it has flaws and needs a little tweeking but saying do exactly what you're doing now and more but with less money is idiotic. The cracks are showing and there's only going to be more strain as the population ages. There really weren't many healthcare providers in the entire world better than the NHS and I can think of precisely none that were free bar prescription. It was also 4th-6th most efficient fairly consistently. And then we hired a guy to lend "international expertise" who previously worked in the country that ranked below Serbia and one place above Iran in the WHO tables.
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May 6, 2014 18:46
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Thrasophius posted:Exactly. It's a shame the NHS is being told to save money and cut back etc. Sure the NHS isn't perfect, it has flaws and needs a little tweeking but saying do exactly what you're doing now and more but with less money is idiotic. The cracks are showing and there's only going to be more strain as the population ages. It didn't help that they imported a poo poo ton of managers from the private sector in the early 2000s with no experience of public service sector work who then proceeded to treat it like a private sector organisation (and import management speak en masse). I joined the NHS (a large London specialist hospital) in 1998 and by the time I was made redundant in 2010 the organisation was unrecognisable. The huge input of cash during the Labour years made a massive difference in service provision but the new management made the place nightmarish to work in, with low morale and an overriding corporate ethos (the hospital I worked at spent 10s of thousands on a branding exercise to select a corporate colour scheme and font!). They even set up a specialist Arab private patient unit to attract money from the gulf, but the effort spent to attract private patients in general was sickening. The end for my job was the decision to limit novel in house research and expend all effort on attracting and servicing corporate sponsored research. The NHS is amazing, I'd be dead and my family bankrupt without it, but in trying to save it the last government let the management classes in, and they don't care about public sector work ethics.
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May 6, 2014 18:48
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Trickjaw posted:Just putting some washing out, and the Queen is in town today. I could hear them at the Cathederal belting out God Save the Queen. Gawd bless ah, Makes you prahd, etc. Hello fellow Queen-visited-now-we're-a-city [sic] Goon!
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May 6, 2014 18:50
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LemonDrizzle posted:It's a mountain with land that's only fit for grazing sheep (i.e. it's too steep/rocky to do anything more valuable with). There's no "quick profit" to be had; anyone buying it will be getting it purely as a status symbol. I don't know man.          
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May 6, 2014 18:51
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frontlineKHAAAN! posted:Hello fellow Queen-visited-now-we're-a-city [sic] Goon! There's never another unfortunate Chelmsfordian ITT
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May 6, 2014 18:52
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Christ, I was unaware of this, I was only referring to the sterilisation on eugenics grounds of the disabled, and other 'undesirables'. That was ignorance on my part, rather than anything malicious.
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May 6, 2014 18:54
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Trickjaw posted:There's never another unfortunate Chelmsfordian ITT We should coordinate heckling UKIP outside Waterstones.
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May 6, 2014 18:57
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While we are "better than lot of countries" we are hell bent on throwing ourselves on a poo poo slide further down the Neo Liberal rabbit hole. The future projections look fairly bleak. Granted there isnt probably many, or any, places much better. If they are they are on the same course as us in any case. Lest I remind everyone. We are currently in the process of privatising the NHS (and almost everything else - selling them usually below their true value), student loans are being hawked out to private interests, University fees are being allowed to rise and rise, we have cut legal aid so people cannot get the funds to go to court and receive a fair trial, we also have scarecely any interest in building any more homes for people so renters can continue to benefit from the fact we dont have enough. We are (on the whole) content with enriching the already haves at an alarming rate and saying gently caress the poor very loudly when our politicians think they can get away with it (a lot recently). A decent proportion of people are not getting a living wage, businesses can (with the help of Government) keep you on their books and literally not give you any hours so they have to pay you very much, this counts as work so you dont receive as much benfits. Our benefits system is being changed to pay as few people as they can get away with, and people with disablities are treated as surplus to requirements. We want to cut Green energy and frack the ever living poo poo out of our countryside. The stand out good thing we have gotten recently, that I can remember, is that gay people have the right to get married now. This is a good thing, but I think the list of genuine good things is way waaay shorter than the bad. Ive probably missed a few off of mine I admit. Yes I may be a pessimist, but saying we have it good is only relative to how bad other places are. We have it ok, we could do a lot lot better. But we wont. Touchdown Boy fucked around with this message at 19:05 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 19:03
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frontlineKHAAAN! posted:We should coordinate heckling UKIP outside Waterstones. I only thought it was that strange Violin lessons man outside Waterstones, but anytime comrade. Then retire for a beer as proper Englishmen do.
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May 6, 2014 19:05
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Just popping in to say gently caress the a12 and doublefuck lorry drivers.
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May 6, 2014 19:12
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Oh of course, the UK is definitely better than some other countries. In the same vein, smacking yourself in the genitals with a baby sledgehammer is definitely better than using a spiked mace covered in acid. People may still want to search out the elusive toffee hammer. Trickjaw posted:There's never another unfortunate Chelmsfordian ITT you wankers could try and get me out of southend don't, no-one makes it out of here unharmed, burn everything.
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May 6, 2014 19:24
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ThomasPaine posted:
Well in Sweden's case, not at all. Our emerging sketchy xenophobe party are clueless about economic policies and end up voting for 80% of what our ruling neoliberal parties vote for. In practice they're for the dismantling of the welfare state, more profits for the capital class and eroding of worker's rights. If you remove their immigration policy they're a pretty standard socially conservative economic right party.
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May 6, 2014 19:30
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Hi guys. I hear that the neighbouring field has more vibrant grass. Confirm / deny?
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May 6, 2014 19:31
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haakman posted:Just popping in to say gently caress the a12 and doublefuck lorry drivers. What happened it used to be pretty mellow? Seaside Loafer fucked around with this message at 19:35 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 19:33
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Seaside Loafer posted:Ah, I used to know it well. Colchester, Tiptree, Kelevedon, Whitham, hatfield pev(however you spell that) that place before Chelmsford etc. Its been tory through and through since before time. I would say its odd you know all the places along the A12 that are notorious for cottaging, but then we know how you suffer from digestive stress.
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May 6, 2014 19:50
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Spangly A posted:There really weren't many healthcare providers in the entire world better than the NHS and I can think of precisely none that were free bar prescription. It was also 4th-6th most efficient fairly consistently. This is pretty disingenuous - he may have worked in the US, but not in public healthcare. He worked for a major private health corporation whose mission was to hamstring and destroy public healthcare, and that's been going pretty well! This is the problem with all this "some people have it worse than you" talk - that's irrelevant, the point is things should be a lot better than they are. We're one of the world's richest* and most powerful countries, shot through with ill-gotten wealth and hurtling along on historical momentum. We've had more of an opportunity to build a strong and fair society, and the social institutions that go with it - and we actually did build a lot of those things, people fought for those changes, and instead of moving forward we're actually rolling it all back. What does the UK have to offer really, globally? A highly educated, skilled and experienced workforce? Cheap or high-tech manufacturing? We're a small nation moving more and more towards a service industry, pricing people out of education, punishing people who are unable to work, increasingly propped up by our ridiculous financial sector and its associated network of tax havens. Instead of investing in the country and developing modern infrastructure, we're selling everything off cheap and spending more by asking private companies to do the same job less efficiently for a higher cost, while everything else is left to rust. There's going to be gently caress all left, and at some point we're going to have that cartoon moment where we look down and realise the ground disappeared a long time back, and we've been trucking along on thin air ever since. Rebuilding all these important social institutions won't just be expensive and time-consuming, they might actually become impossible when Britain isn't at the big table anymore. It's these wasted opportunities that people are mad about
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May 6, 2014 19:57
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baka kaba posted:This is pretty disingenuous - he may have worked in the US, but not in public healthcare. He worked for a major private health corporation whose mission was to hamstring and destroy public healthcare, and that's been going pretty well! What this guy says. Also, I don't know anything about it myself but I was talking to someone the other day who insisted that France's healthcare system was even better the the NHS. True/false?
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May 6, 2014 20:01
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Trickjaw I was more talking about the road but my upper esophagus irritation is doing allot better thank you Seriously that was always quites a nice drive, has it gone mental or have i missed the point/joke. Seaside Loafer fucked around with this message at 20:06 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 20:04
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ThomasPaine posted:What this guy says. The french like shoving medicine up your back passage as opposed to straight into the veins so its true
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May 6, 2014 20:09
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Burning sheep and putting tyres in roads actually protects your public services. Who knew. The french have pretty sweet benefits and the CEOs of the big corporations scratch each other's backs, like CEO of Citroen would do deals with other big companies on company cars, and agree that said cars get discounts at Total garages, whilst all of these firms would get mobile phones supplied by Orange FR. They still have a pretty good state pension plan IIRC that you can still contribute to even if you live abroad. JFairfax fucked around with this message at 20:21 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 20:18
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ThomasPaine posted:What this guy says. French healthcare is the best in the world bar none, and they spend less total than the American government spent on its privatised healthcare system pre-ACA. It's less efficient than the NHS was though, they spend enormous sums on it. By far above pretty much everyone else in the EU; their system was basically what Labour wanted. Lots of beurocrats doing their jobs, lots of medical redundancy. When you get to that level of healthcare you start running into diminishing returns quickly because you haven't got much to do that isn't just spreading the workload to multiple jobs to keep individual efficiency up. It's a fantastic system but it necessitates a high tax rate, it's over 10% of all of France's GDP last I checked.
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May 6, 2014 20:29
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The NHS is one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world, so pretty much everywhere else with comparable standards of healthcare will spend more money on it than we do.
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