What has the UK become?

[FlemishDuck]

The dream of automation was that we would all work less and comparatively speaking we probably do (this is just my general feeling with no stats to back it), except we are still on a five day week and are obliged to work until 67.

I suspect we have moved to a more stationary working model in many working areas, meaning less exercise.

I wouldn't say these reactions are necessarily with ought merit in such a complex discussion. I would be of the colloquial impression that we both force a lot of people to be present for 8 hours when there is often only enough work to fill half a day and the rest of the day your just supposed to "act as if you were working". For the same reason, we might see in some country's that the state is starting to create "fake job", aka put people on payrolls for them to have an income while performing a function that isnt really needed, heck some might even be into the business of inventing new regulations and administrative requirements just to have reason to employ more paper pushers.

What i think i a bit amis in these reaction is a consideration as how we distribute the existing workload among more people as to have more people earning an income on an economic activity that matters, while retaining an optimal balance between work and free time.

otoh, the evolution of that rising wealth gap remains there, which seems to logically allow the wealthier class to increasingly get more influence over our democracies, something which i think is somewhat of a danger to our democracies.

As to immigration, there is always this duality that your average society does not need more uneducated workers or atleast that such an influx will create insecurity among the poorer or more uneducated classes, whereas otoh we do seem to need more skilled people for high end jobs that we hardly seem able to fill. Its not like we can choose so easily, we usually would let highly educated people in withought much issue and simply fail to keep the masses of uneducated out. Obviously, when a country has a lot of social programs among which unemployment benifits and healthcare its easy to see how more immigration can put a strain on the costs of said programs lest they are net contributors to the system. Knowing that we tend to pay the cost ourselves for educating people to high levels its actually a fair gain when a highly educated person comes to our country to fullfill that role withought our society having needed to make that investment. Economic immigrants and refugees often come with a fair innitial cost a to integrate and potentially retrain them.

What we do have to recognise is that there is a inherit selfish element in it on the national level, and that this is kinda fine. We tend to see it as rational that a nation state furthers the interest of its own nationals foremost and that either xenophobic or even racist as it could be the ellectorate retains the self determinal right to decide over it. it shouldnt be so much nessecarily be discused from a moral angle rather than a utilitarian one, albeit that those who say "ALL immigrants must go" tend to fail to see how this would hurt the interrest of the nation from said utilitarian perspective.

 

[hilts]

Whilst what you argue is idealistically pure, the cost of implementing it would be too high for a vast swathe of the population, who are already struggling with the cost of living.

Having a vastly British workforce, with a loaf costing £4 isn’t viable.

Odd that we have been the 4th 5th biggest economy for a long time under this cracking idea of growth caused by inflation and population growth but:-

Transport is shit
Education is poor
Roads are crumbling
The air is shit
The water is filled with turds
Their aren't enough houses
Our armed forces have dwindled
Coppers appear to be hiding or actually committing crimes
1000s of shop get ransacked daily.

And I haven't even touched the surface. But it's the only way?

What happens when population eventually stops growing which it must at some point. Who looks after the elderly then, who does the jobs we don't want to do?

Why wait until we have destroyed everything and then have to do something?

Simple we will all be dead by then so who gives a fuck.?

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

Odd that we have been the 4th 5th biggest economy for a long time under this cracking idea of growth caused by inflation and population growth but:-

Transport is shit
Education is poor
Roads are crumbling
The air is shit
The water is filled with turds
Their aren't enough houses
Our armed forces have dwindled
Coppers appear to be hiding or actually committing crimes
1000s of shop get ransacked daily.

And I haven't even touched the surface. But it's the only way?

What happens when population eventually stops growing which it must at some point. Who looks after the elderly then, who does the jobs we don't want to do?

Why wait until we have destroyed everything and then have to do something?

Simple we will all be dead by then so who gives a fuck.?

It’s not the only way. Privatisation has fucked up most of those things, not immigration.

Capitalism is creaking as there are no more margins to cut, whilst shareholders want their profit creamed off.

Scandinavian social democracy within capitalism is probably the way forwards, but with the lack of empathy for anything these days, I can’t see how it would be accepted in this country.

 

[BobKowalski]

Best get them in to wipe your backside and serve you coffees, again will we be importing even more people to look after them too?
For what it's worth I believe the Rwanda solution is a bad one, we need a proper system that allows what we need in and gets rid of the ones who fail quickly.

Asylum is different in that people applying need a system they can apply to and be allowed entry (Numbers also need to be taken into account not just unfettered) but those people coming in through asylum if they fail there has to be a mechanism in place to remove them and quickly.

Not popular with the open border allow everyone in to make our beds brigade but there it is.

Fair enough. I retract my earlier comment.

 

[FlemishDuck]

i have to contemplate how unconstructive Brexit might have been for the matter of economic immigrants. I mean, i can only speculate, but i always had the impression that as to stop the larger flow of economic immigration we had to double our efforts within a European framework to better police key bottlenecks like say the strait of Gibraltar or the body of water between north Africa and Italy, granted that the selfishness of various national interest seems to play into this, as in basically most European country's tend to prefer that the immigrants that they didnt want to arrive pass trough to say a country like the UK (which, for some inexplicable reason the all tend to see as paradise) rather than stick around and Brexit only seems to have stimulated that aproach. I get it, the UK didnt want to fund the likes of Spain and Italy over this i guess ... but ... if youre really going to make it a matter of everyone looking out solely for himself ...

indeed, i get the impression Brexit exactly "threw out the child with the bathwater" to use a Flemish proverb, as in a lot of the highly educated people you probably would have wanted to stay were send away like proffesionals in healthcare and such but it failed to stop the influx of low educated economic immigrants?

 

[BobKowalski]

Odd that we have been the 4th 5th biggest economy for a long time under this cracking idea of growth caused by inflation and population growth but:-

Transport is shit
Education is poor
Roads are crumbling
The air is shit
The water is filled with turds
Their aren't enough houses
Our armed forces have dwindled
Coppers appear to be hiding or actually committing crimes
1000s of shop get ransacked daily.

And I haven't even touched the surface. But it's the only way?

What happens when population eventually stops growing which it must at some point. Who looks after the elderly then, who does the jobs we don't want to do?

Why wait until we have destroyed everything and then have to do something?

Simple we will all be dead by then so who gives a fuck.?

In a sense, developed countries have stopped growing, or at least stopped growing with birth rates no longer matching/exceeding death rates. Growth in people will only come through migration.

The issue for developed countries is that once you improve Heath care, education and opportunities for women; marriage and motherhood become a low option. One of the reasons for angst over immigration from the Right is that they (erroneously) believe immigrant families will have more children then white families - this belief is also behind the Right‘s assault on abortion, contraception and, to a degree, healthcare for women.

But immigrants become natives and with the same health care, opportunities etc next generations adopt the same attitudes.

Even in countries like Bangladesh which are traditionally seen as high birth rate countries, the birth rate is falling to the extent in Bangladesh it is below the natural replacement levels. Education is seen as the prime reason - which partly explains the religious and Conservative hostility to education, science etc especially in some Muslim countries.

You referenced this as a pyramid scheme and to an extent you are not wrong. Europe (EU) saw labour flow from Eastern Europe to West. That is now slowing down as Eastern Europe begins to match and mirror Western Europe hence increased flow of non-EU migration. The system needs people, so what happens when you run out of people?

The answer possibly lies with technology - I say possibly as I’m not entirely convinced - but we are going to have to look at the issue and perhaps recalibrate the way we live our lives and how we measure and value our lives and lifestyles. Does ‘work’ as we know it dominate to much of our thinking and the way it defines us? I don’t have the answer - not even sure I’m asking the right questions - but it is worthy of discussion.

 

[blueinsa]

In short, I’m just pointing out the reality of how the world works and what a developed country like the UK needs to function. You are free not to like it - I’m not keen on how some things have turned out either - but reality, alas, doesn‘t care.

The world Bob works via rules based immigration laws. You might fancy ditching rainy Rochdale for Sydney but try just jumping in a plane and saying you’re going to live and work there without satisfying their immigration laws and policies and you might be in for a shock.

All countries need controlled immigration, more often than not based on skills shortages, we are no different and those coming here to work in sectors we are short in are most welcome and always will be.

Those rocking up on boats with no rights are not. They wouldn’t be welcome anywhere else either like that as well you know, so why should it be different here?

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

The world Bob works via rules based immigration laws. You might fancy ditching rainy Rochdale for Sydney but try just jumping in a plane and saying you’re going to live and work there without satisfying their immigration laws and policies and you might be in for a shock.

All countries need controlled immigration, more often than not based on skills shortages, we are no different and those coming here to work in sectors we are short in are most welcome and always will be.

Those rocking up on boats with no rights are not. They wouldn’t be welcome anywhere else either like that as well you know, so why should it be different here?

They would be if their claim for asylum was successful.

Other countries allow them to put their claims in before risking their lives on dinghies though.

 

[FlemishDuck]

The answer possibly lies with technology - I say possibly as I’m not entirely convinced - but we are going to have to look at the issue and perhaps recalibrate the way we live our lives and how we measure and value our lives and lifestyles. Does ‘work’ as we know it dominate to much of our thinking and the way it defines us? I don’t have the answer - not even sure I’m asking the right questions - but it is worthy of discussion.

Well i'm quite willing to pick up on that as is it is line with what i started discussing earlier. Yes i do believe technoligy will significantly alter the the matter in the next decades to come.

i think we have come to the point that many people acknowledge the "value misalignment of capitalism", as in capitalism is all nice and great for the economic elite and they therefore have interest to declare its superiority on a regular basis while denouncing any alternative, but that doesnt mean that the lower classes broadly agree with all that afcourse. What has generally been the issue was "well what is the alternative?", the capitalist elite seems to thrive on a situation where you dont see any other choice than to work by its rules.

However, that doesn't mean that it is impossible for people to self organize in alternative economic and social organizations that aim to work outside the capitalist system by a new value-set that aligns more to their own preference. information technology and such things like techno barter can add significant tools to facilitate such organization since it allows sort of "virtual community's" that arnt nessecarily so geographically driven and methods to organize production chains and services with ought the requirements of using money for goods and assets exchange once set up. This in turn can take away significant "oxygen" from the capitalist system by such systems, for example taking away workers and consumers from that system to bring it to a different form of economic organization and goods production/distribution. What this usually requires though is an initial accumulation of economic assets to build upon that works with rules outside the capitalist system and a form of "subjective value driven effeciency" that llows it to thrive , but essentially it's a method by which capitalist elitism is aimed to be diminished by shunning and avoiding it. The more people choose to work for and live within alternative systems which values conforms more to theirs rather than "capitalism", the more capitalism diminishes in size and importance, which crucially is also a process of public choice rather than to be a confrontational one like say Bolshevism was.

In the past this has been executed to a far lesser extend trough "worker cooperatives" like Mondragon, but technological and structural limitations is probably part of why they didnt grow all so much or fast back in the time of their original conception. They are for one quite geographically based rather than exist so much as a spread out system trough various actors and members connected trough internet. They used to be quite limited by the requirement of working within the monetary system whereas techno-barter would allow a growing market of exchange in kind either within or between such cooperatives.

The key then for such cooperatives is to understand what people really want, even up to the subjective individual basis, and see space there to engage people in a system that works trough other values that aligns more to their preferences. Because its really not like all people are nessecarily all so interrested in what capitalism promotes as a largely superficial materialist driven system, people might value other things as well beyond always having more and more consumerist shit and the effeciency of a "subjective value economic system" is the effeciency to conform and provide those desires beyond the abbilety for the monetary of capitalist economy apparently to do so as effeciently. And that would likely materialise as a growing fractured patchwork of economic systems that compete in being able to provide subjective value to its members, because the likely truth is that there is a great valriety of subjective value perspectives that dont align with capitalism and each require their own aproach to maximise the subjective values they aim form.

This can also be further pushed by emergence of more direct democratic systems. By itself such subjective value economic systems can easily be quite "economically democratic" where thats the choice of its members. Direct democracy would simply be a way where society could facilitate the easier growth of such systems by providing a good "entrepeneurial climate" for it, which could succeed providing that a majority can choose for it. Democratically speaking, the populace is the boss, trough self determination it ought to have the right to make such changes anyway, so therefore its also open as an option so to speak, or as a tool that can further accelerate the emergence of such alternative systems.

Not that effeciency is still key, its simply a matter of the effeciency by which an economic model conforms and delivers to the desires of its members. Such systems would compete, some would fail and some would succeed more so than others likely. Thats fine, its kinda a mater then to find the balance between the diversity of choice that exist withinthe populace and the workabillety of various solutions and models.

 

[BobKowalski]

The world Bob works via rules based immigration laws. You might fancy ditching rainy Rochdale for Sydney but try just jumping in a plane and saying you’re going to live and work there without satisfying their immigration laws and policies and you might be in for a shock.

All countries need controlled immigration, more often than not based on skills shortages, we are no different and those coming here to work in sectors we are short in are most welcome and always will be.

Those rocking up on boats with no rights are not. They wouldn’t be welcome anywhere else either like that as well you know, so why should it be different here?

They don’t. The four countries of our union do not practice controlled immigration between the four constituent countries.

The constituent countries of the EU allow free movement and, in some cases, have no internal borders.

The people ‘rocking up in boats’ - because, yes it’s a jolly lark watching your kith and kin drown, are risking all because the Govt ensures that this is the only way to request asylum.