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Nothingtoseehere posted:It's more just astonishment at modern capitalism that we can somehow lose all our industry and still somehow be a rich country? That we still get all these imports of the same goods made overseas somehow and send back... nothing? in return. Balance of payments has been negative for ages and by some magic the city of london makes countries still send things here? Your instinct is correct; we can’t. What actually happened was that the owners of the industry offshored it - the businesses didn’t all go bankrupt, they continued and became more profitable than ever, but the people whose lives were improved by having reliable factory jobs stopped being people living in the UK and started being people living in China. Most people left in the UK were indeed poorer, just not the ones in charge. Jeffrey Winters’s Oligarchy (2012) is a kind of general theory of how since 5000 BC the 0.01% has been loving over everyone else and setting us at each others’ throats and should maybe be added to the OP. It’s as readable as David Graeber, but a lot better researched (DG can be very sloppy). E: the FT is probably doing a deep dive series on Corbyn because its readership want to know more about him than the BBC and rest of the British press will tell them, now that a Corbyn government looks like a 50/50 possibility. It doesn’t usually do hatchet jobs. Also re Pratchett, Guards, Guards! is where I and a lot of other people fell in love with the series; Mort is great as well. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Sep 1, 2019 |
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Sep 1, 2019 15:10
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Barry Foster posted:The fact that this isn't the rule for 99% of jobs blows my loving mind. It's so obviously better for everyone. We're chained to this idiot Victorian era factory time in a period where it's utterly inappropriate. This is really really true. I was lucky enough to get a job where I live in one city and my boss and my direct reports live in another, meaning that both I and they can work from wherever we like so long as the results are there, and it owns: they’ve never missed a deadline or been unable to jump on a call at a few minutes’ notice, and I’ve never had such a good assessment. Never going back to being chained to a desk* * Well except I’m about to do a 6 month secondment to Brazil where I probably will be. Excited that instead of being accidentally shot by the People’s Armed Police when they are eventually called in to HK, I’ll get accidentally shot by Bolsonaro’s boys instead.
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Sep 2, 2019 13:46
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Josef bugman posted:I think he wants folks to love him. I am not even joking in a twisted way I am sure that Boris is trying desperately to get everyone to love him. But he's finally happened into what he thought he wanted, and it isn't filling the hole inside of him. I’m 99% sure you are right about this. I believe that a lot of womanisers, which is one of Boris’s most visible flaws, are driven by extreme approval-seeking behaviour. The clownishness works for this too. It doesn’t stop him being a dangerous proto-fascist poo poo but it maybe does explain why he developed that way instead of, say, taking his privilege and becoming Tony Benn Mk.2
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Sep 3, 2019 02:42
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Feinne posted:The only time I've seen someone reference Sun Tzu in a way that demonstrated they'd actually understood the Art of War was in the parody version in Jingo. Interesting thing about working for a Chinese company: about 90% of the inspirational quotes our leadership uses are either Sun Tzu or Mao.
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Sep 3, 2019 04:31
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Jedit posted:This may be the stupidest thing any human being has ever said. You know what else is an underpaid, thankless and uncelebrated job? Internships. You know who takes internships? Rich people who can afford to work for free. And can you perhaps guess how rich people who don't need the money vote? I'll give you a clue: they're every loving one of them a Tory. Beat me to it (though I don’t think it’s a stupid assumption, just not a thought-through one). There’s a reason every successful anti-corruption drive in history has involved raising government salaries. Basically, don’t give people power and then make them dependent on abusing that power to have nice things.
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Sep 3, 2019 08:45
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Right, but MPs earn over 100k at the moment and are still corrupt as gently caress. The second idea works but only if the same individual can’t immediately walk into a private sector job at several multiples of that salary. As for the first one, well, just across the border in China politicians have a very low official salary - mid-senior level officials in Beijing can be paid as little as RMB 5,000 (GBP 500) per month, in a city that can be as expensive as London. You can decide for yourself whether that makes them more likely to think like the regular citizen or highly motivated to find ways of monetising their power, despite the literal death penalty that accompanies official corruption. We have a different type of corruption in the UK; it’s well institutionalised and operates through the massive wealth transfer to the oligarchy. Underpaying public servants isn’t the answer. I mean, it sucks that we have to bribe people not to abuse their power but we’re all just highly evolved apes unfortunately.
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Sep 3, 2019 11:30
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This is why I tell people never to lock themselves into an escalation strategy, because it usually fails. If Boris had ever had to negotiate for anything real in his life, he would have learned this a long time ago.
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Sep 4, 2019 03:51
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Every form of government, from our Parliament to the Americans’ separation of powers to China’s one-party state to a hypothetical future eco-socialist dictatorship of the gardenariat, is pure smoke and mirrors, where the only ultimate rule is “what you can get away with”. A political system is everyone in the country buying into the collective pretence that This Is The Way Things Are Done Here. Threatening people with violence is a very effective way of getting people to join in your collective pretence, which is what Mao meant by “All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, but even that’s not the whole truth: if people are prepared to get shot then you have no coercive power over them. I actually think it’s a strength of the UK system to be relatively honest about this. The fact that we have had more and longer political stability than just about any other country, despite having a grossly unfair distribution of wealth stretching back way longer than the existence of parliament, probably has some connection to our form of government. I see our collective pretence as “these 650 individuals represent all of us, so we are OK with them making decisions”. It’s not the worst, tbh.
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Sep 4, 2019 05:22
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Senor Tron posted:People see democracy as being a way of ensuring that everyone is represented and has a say. That works so long as the losers accept the validity of an election result. The more times in a row that happens the better. There’s a lot of evidence now from our and the US’s various post-colonial
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Sep 4, 2019 05:51
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GreyjoyBastard posted:johnson is short, fails to perform (Across, 5)
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Sep 4, 2019 08:13
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The alternative is this group of clowns coming back together and making peace and there’s probably too much personal animosity involved. Boris is staggeringly untrustworthy even by the standards of Tory party leaders and as a result nobody in his party trusts him. So what’s the point of fixing the relationship, if you can’t believe a word he says?
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Sep 4, 2019 12:07
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OddObserver posted:If you pardon this ignorant American for asking, what would it take to get rid of the whole "House of Lords" thing? The Lords is fine, and replacing it with an elected chamber would not be an improvement. It’s much cooler-headed and more sensible than the commons because it’s not so strongly party-political - see how they actually reached a compromise tonight. As mentioned before ITT, a lot of the Lords are subject matter experts who perform a useful role in scrutinising bad legislation. Electing the Lords would just make it another chamber full of braying idiots and we’ve already got one of those.
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Sep 5, 2019 01:59
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I’m in GMT+7 rn, it’s nice to see other people in the thread before mid afternoon. Re political capital, IMO it’s more like a badboy counter in a paradox game: how much you can get away with before everyone else drops their squabbling to kick your poo poo in. For an example of what a political leader running out of political capital looks like, see Johnson, B.
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Sep 5, 2019 06:26
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Guavanaut posted:The Lords isn't fine, it's massive compared to any other upper house, and it's full of old fucks who were mates/nonces with some previous cabinet member from the 70s and got made a life peer and now just show up to claim expenses. Also members given representation purely on account of their ordained religious role, which would generally not be okay outside of an actual religious organization or, say, Iran. Also they have gently caress all useful power, which is good given their lack of legitimacy, but not necessarily what you want from a chamber of account and review. I mean, that would be better still, but to my knowledge the only two positions championed by any party are (1) don’t touch it and (2) get rid of it, and of those options I prefer (1).
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Sep 5, 2019 09:38
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Holy gently caress I have never seen a human being whose picture screams so loudly “German Sex Tourist”.
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Sep 5, 2019 09:40
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Can we all take a moment to appreciate Corbyn's official portrait, especially in stories like these. He looks so goddamn smug and he deserves to be that smug It’s because his eyes are looking to the side, which is a really confident and charming expression. I have an amazing two photos from when my dad was still alive; one of me, late 20s and ok looking but tryhard af and one of my dad, 72 and looking twinkly eyed and silver foxish and, like, a million times better looking than I did, with dad having essentially the same expression as JC there.
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Sep 5, 2019 12:14
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Ms Adequate posted:Sounds to me like you've been exposed to conflict in your past that made you really uncomfortable with it now. I'm the same, the fights I saw and heard as a kid have made me INCREDIBLY conflict-averse today, hearing people raise their voices at each other can give me panic attacks for example, and I absolutely cannot stand to be in the presence of an argument. I think you probably need to talk to a therapist to get help overcoming it I'm right in the cause, because that's the kind of poo poo that gets deep. My parents separated when I was 7, after years of every night being an angry screaming fight. I don’t know if this is why I grew up wildly conflict avoidant or if it was even a contributing factor, but it seems to be a common thing for a lot of people. In the end I was brutalised by my career into being a lot more comfortable with conflict but I can’t recommend the process. First off, it’s not always and everywhere a problem: it’s a style and a lot of senior people have it too. Negotiating thread favourite book “bargaining for advantage” has a good comparison of different styles including how to make use of being someone who doesn’t like conflict in one of the appendices, so you might check that out. Alternatively, a lot of companies do conflict training - Intel for example does something called I think “wolf school” where you’re taken to an offsite to practice yelling at and contradicting your boss and other senior people, so that in a situation where you need to do that for real you won’t freeze up. That always sounded like a good idea. Maybe you can get them to pay for a course on that?
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Sep 6, 2019 03:30
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willie_dee posted:I am not recommending this. Did your voice get squeaky? I used to have a colleague who had roided up - he was a sweet, kind of nerdy Asian-American guy who was built like a brick shithouse but had an incongruously high voice like he had been inhaling helium.
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Sep 6, 2019 07:46
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Corbyn is a good parliamentarian; he’s not a particularly effective speaker in the weird theatre that is parliamentary debate (not awful but not great) but he knows the rules and as mentioned above, has the discipline to keep quiet when there’s no need to speak.
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Sep 7, 2019 02:35
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Azza Bamboo posted:I think taxi driving and letting including hotels should be a licensed activity and that doing it through an app should be no exception. I disagree about taxi driving: there’s no evidence to suggest it’s safer than the app-based systems and strong evidence suggesting ride-hailing drivers are a lot safer than licensed taxi drivers (link is in Chinese and goes to Supreme Court findings that taxi drivers are more than 10x more likely to be a danger to their passengers than ride-hailing drivers). In most cities the taxi license is nothing to do with safety or being a better driver, and everything to do with who gets to exercise a monopoly and extract the rent from that. While we’re on rent as a topic, I agree obtaining rent from owning a property is the one most immoral way of obtaining money from capital accumulation - which is itself the most immoral way of obtaining money short of direct physical violence - but in a world where the 0.01% have both all the money and all the political influence, I’m not going to get mad at bob the builder renting out a second home to fund his retirement - so long as he votes labour and understands that a labour government will take away that part of his wealth eventually (or at least make it a lot less valuable). Smashing the current system is going to be a lot easier if a majority (or even a plurality) of petty bourgeois can be turned first; without them, it may not be possible at all.
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Sep 9, 2019 01:06
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Eschenique posted:Why does Johnson want a snap election and Corbyn doesn't? Johnson wants to do an election now where his propaganda is that he is the Champion of the Will of the People, which is being frustrated by Traitors and Communists and Remoaners. Corbyn and everyone sensible wants to force Johnson to break his promise to leave with no deal on October 31 and only fight an election then. The hope is that this will wreck Johnson’s credibility with the gammon vote.
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Sep 9, 2019 07:07
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Hmm, why would illegal taxi drivers in China have a much lower rate of reported offences? JFC people and dismissing statistics. Uber’s hilariously evil business practices aside, if you think app-based ride hailing , where every ride is traceable, is more likely to have unreported crime than some dude in a Xiali who picks up a customer from the roadside, you’re hugely wrong. Not every taxi driver on the planet is a London cabbie, and not all regulation has the intention or effect of improving standards. I’m also not aware of any evidence that people are reluctant to report crime on minicabs or ride hailing cars - which makes sense, because it would be insane to not report someone assaulting or mugging you just because it was an Uber or Ola driver or whatever. I mean if you want to argue against the gig economy go right ahead, there are plenty of good reasons, but “more safety” isn’t an accurate reason to prefer licensed taxis.
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Sep 9, 2019 11:23
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This might be the most ridiculous bit of Uber-justification I've ever seen.
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Guavanaut posted:So what you're saying is that we should nationalize Uber and make the anonymized data public and the code open source? You joke (I think) but I actually suspect that’s the logical endpoint of ride-hailing. It’s network effects all the way down. E: you can see this from China and other countries where private car ownership isn’t well established; the ready availability of ride hailing had caused China’s car market, which was what all the auto manufacturers have been counting on, to implode. All the OEMs are worried, and they’re right to be. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Sep 9, 2019 |
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Sep 9, 2019 11:59
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Guavanaut posted:It's what I'd like to happen. Or more likely, they should be run by the municipalities rather than nation-states. Not only because of my like of municipalism and the right to the city, but because logically most people are going to be taking Ubers within a particular county or municipality, the average Uber journey is 5-7 miles. Also traditionally it was the municipality that ran the trams or buses and gave out the taxi medallions, so it'd make more sense than National Uber or Uber England or whatever. The scale effects are relevant to this though. As of today, what Uber competitors like DiDi in China and Grab in SEA do is to sign partnerships with the big oil companies to get cheap petrol for drivers. That cuts operating costs massively. Uber doesn’t make that an automatic right and preserves it for a favoured few drivers of course because, as mentioned, hilariously evil. But it is at least in theory a viable model for a state-run company - so long as it can leverage that scale.
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Sep 9, 2019 12:05
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ronya posted:is there much of a network effect, really? there's nothing stopping drivers or customers from having ten apps on their phone. the value-add to drivers of being able to suggest customers who will bring them closer to a particular point is an end-of-shift thing It’s surprisingly difficult to create a challenger. I keep pointing at China because it’s currently the world’s largest ride hailing market, where despite a concerted political effort last year to unseat DiDi and a lot of support from various government factions, they are still reported as having 90%ish market share - and every new safety measure is another barrier to entry. Similarly Uber and Lyft in the US are probably not going anywhere soon.
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Sep 9, 2019 12:39
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Hell of a risk given how much these things can be self-fulfilling prophecies. Hmm. Massive risk, uncertain payoff...Dominic Cummings?
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Sep 9, 2019 16:50
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Borrovan posted:imo this LD A50 thing is good for Jeremy Corbyn. Their core voter base are big brained very rational adults who are obsessed with compromise and decorum, very few of whom will openly back totally ignoring a referendum (& as someone already said, the ones that would aren't voting Labour anyway). The move just exposes the core hypocrisy of the LDs' position. LD core base will like the A50 thing, I don’t think any of them particularly care about the principle of respecting the referendum. For the rest of it, politics is tribal. Most people who will vote LD right now aren’t doing it based on a detailed reading of policies or the overwhelming personal charisma of Jo Swinson, they’re doing it because they are horrified by the Tories and nervous of Labour under Corbyn for various reasons, from “he’ll take away what I have” to “he’s the second coming of Adolf Eichmann”. None of those reasons bear scrutiny but I’ll bet on the early heat death of the universe before I’ll bet on my fellow countrymen being reflective enough to spot that.
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Sep 10, 2019 10:11
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Guavanaut posted:Little boxes, on the hillside, and they're all made of epistemology. Not an emptyquote
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Sep 10, 2019 12:03
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I’m not sure that hostility to evidence based decision making is the best position either tbh. “In favour so long as it’s honest” seems better. I’ve recently worked for two companies: the first one pretended to make decisions based on data and evidence but didn’t (it was actually driven by a complex set of social and political needs that could keep an anthropologist busily employed for a lifetime). The second one actually does. Unsurprisingly, the first company is moribund and the current one is growing.
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Sep 10, 2019 19:39
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Flayer posted:It would be glorious if Parliament sits next week My kids have been watching the cartoon 3below on Netflix, and I am therefore choosing to believe you said this in Nick Offerman’s voice, including a gleeful accent on “glorious”.
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Sep 11, 2019 10:35
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Bobstar posted:Liking the look of that Watch casting. Everyone has their own fantasy casting (Hugh Laurie for Vimes, do not mock me!) but if there's one thing this country isn't short of, it's good actors, virtually all unknown of course. Washed-up House era Hugh Laurie would have made a good Vimes. Really though you just need a classic alcoholic gumshoe down on his luck. Guards! Guards is such a good book. E: There’s a concept, the nobility of failure, that you don’t hear about so much these days; early Vimes has it in spades, and it’s pretty much the foundation of noir.
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Sep 12, 2019 12:22
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Diet Crack posted:I’m fairly convinced that any pro brexit supporter on twitter with a bunch of flags after their handle and all caps are most certainly bots. They regurgitate the same message over and over again. It’s always the Union Jack, the us flag, Israel’s flag and then maybe Australia and New Zealand thrown in for good measure. Maybe an Esq too. You have too high an opinion of your fellow man.
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Sep 12, 2019 14:01
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Gort posted:I haven't enjoyed the writing of anything Rhianna Pratchett has been involved in. She’s fine, just not the prodigious talent her dad was. A famous parent is a hell of a burden; I can understand why a lot of people go in totally the opposite direction for their career
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Sep 12, 2019 14:20
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Guavanaut posted:I'm Disgusting Gorden Nugent, 69 National comparisons of happy hour / macho drinking: China, where I was for last 10 years: people mostly don’t do HH drinks; macho drinking is drinking spirits that could double very well as paint stripper and probably make you go blind (40%+abv), over dinner in a large group. Brazil, where I am now: seems like people get a beer or glass of wine around 7-8pm and hang out somewhere with music drinking it slowly; maybe have another one and then go home or go on to food and clubs/bars. Dancing may or may not be involved.
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Sep 13, 2019 17:30
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Gets me every time What a mouth, what a mouth, what a north and south, blimey what a mouth ‘e’s got
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Sep 15, 2019 12:38
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The FT is taking a new editorial position based around reforming capitalism: https://aboutus.ft.com/en-gb/new-agenda/?segmentId=a1d33df9-8595-fa79-f5e7-6b8b918be777 I suspect this will end up being the result of keeping up the pressure for socialism: since the USSR collapsed and until the emergence of credible socialist movements in the US and UK, there wasn’t really any threat to keep capital from going off the rails. Now there is, we can see one part of the wealthy reluctantly accepting that they need to share if they want to avoid guillotines and heads on spikes (the other, Brexity part wants to go full steam ahead and rule through explicit, not implicit, violence). All the more reason to keep up the pressure for full communism now, but it is nice to see the Overton window shifting in the correct direction for once.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:26
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Lord Ludikrous posted:So a few weeks ago I excitedly announced in this thread that I was going to be a dad. Deepest deepest condolences, that’s an awful thing to handle. Hope you and your wife get through it as well as anyone can.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:20
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Re the FT, this is centrism doing what it’s supposed to do instead of whatever the gently caress the LDs are doing: responding to resurgent socialism by challenging the wealth distribution. Offering change-lite. Centrism isn’t a coherent platform, it exists only to tip the scales towards one of the two actual political positions.
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Sep 18, 2019 13:04
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Bobstar posted:Yeah I guess I was wondering if it could be made to appear stable over a human lifetime, by slowing the rate of growth and exploitation, but I think Guava's right, the people trying that wouldn't have been allowed to be in charge. To improve living conditions for the majority you don’t necessarily need to slow the rate of growth, just the rate at which capital centralises in the hands of the absolute richest 0.01%. There is a question about natural resources and sustainability, but that is separate. The 60s were capitalist but the spread of wealth was far broader based and capital didn’t accumulate nearly as fast in the hands of the ultra rich. At a guess, this was because the kind of business people did back then needed a lot more labour relative to a modern business, which is at least automated and (for the really big ones) almost entirely digital and therefore scaleable. E: and capitalism genuinely has been a sustained source of poverty reduction for hundreds of millions in China exactly because those businesses were all employing a poo poo-ton of people. Of course, all that money came almost directly out of the pockets of the western working classes, and disproportionately went to native Chinese capitalists due to highly effective state level protectionism. We’re into the second and third generations of rich (ie failsons) in China now. It’s going to be wild when the dynamic of increased prosperity for most people year on year falls apart. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Sep 18, 2019 |
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Sep 18, 2019 14:56
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Guavanaut posted:Five months after no deal brexit, the food has run out, medicines have run out, the NHS has been sold to Wal-Mart, and potable water is £1.20/l The more controversial the decision the more the judges will want to be sure they have covered their reasoning really really well. This decision will maybe be a little bit controversial however it is decided.
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Sep 19, 2019 16:17
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