The UK strongly backed Denmark over the greenland situation. I’d be a lot more worried about the EU’s “appeasement” of russia (slow acting germany, hungary etc) than the UK’s carefully navigated and level headed US relations. That’s what will undo the EU.
In Scotland one issue is that the UK electricity market is national (unlike in eg norway). So even if local supply is very high and interconnects are not large enough to export to england - we must pay the higher national rate. As octopus ceo suggested if the UK energy market has regional pricing then electricity in scotland would often be a lot cheaper and in some cases industrial demand would move there. But that would disadvantage the SE of England so will never happen.
Conversely, standing charges ARE regionalised - because that does advantage the SE of England. Oh well!
The issue is that quite often the wind doesn’t blow - often for several weeks like last january - and the sun barely shines for much of the year. So renewables mean the country just has to pay for (and subsidise) a whole ton of extra infra but can’t actually retire non-renewable infra because you can’t rely on renewables. This strategy is why UK electricity is so absurdly expensive.
And when presented with this politicians and “green” sorts will handwave about pumped storage or whatever despite that basic back of the envelope calculations will show we can’t build enough of that to store 4 weeks worth of electricity for a whole country.
Much like “intellectual property”, “international law” is a nonsense term that tells you only that the person who employs it lives in their own bubble, captured by powerful interests of others.
And money is just a construct but I still need to pay the mortgage. And international rules removed the hole in the ozone layer, reduced cheminal weapons stockpiles by something like 99%, and ICJ rulings have adjudicated to force entire countries to comply with compromises.
I would be curious about the logic that allows you to call intellectual property a nonsense term while still allowing other property to make sense. Both are social constructs.
It would be great to run this on a collection of interesting threads over different periods and not just one snapshot. For example, the thread from the day Trump got elected in 2016, the thread from the day of brexit and so on. Those are the times when people make many passionate predictions about how the future will play out, be good to see them retroactively scored.
Raising taxes is only “necessary” because of their total lack of gumption when it comes to reducing spending. For example, 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP and that has been meteorically increasing as a proportion in the last few years. Labour bottled it in the face of their own backbench rebellion over very reasonable measures earlier in the year, and now they are coming to pick our pockets.
They’ll say they are making hard, necessary decisions, but the truth is that ramming up taxes is the default mode easy decision for labour.
It seems like it's a conservative fantasy that all public money is being wasted but until I see detailed information on where and why (Chesterton's fence style) it is being wasted, I can't take them seriously
It seems like people are vastly overestimating the amount of money being wasted. If it was that easy, it would have probably been done. In serious circles (outside overt MAGA propaganda ecosystem) I believe DOGE is considered quite a failure.
I'd be much more sympathetic to a tax system reform as it seems that in democracies, there is a vast amount of tax "gerrymandering" in order to favor your voter base... but of course no politician wants to remove that option
> 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP
In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?
(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)
Raising taxes is necessary because the previous governments have decimated the tax base. As of now, a median UK PAYE worker is paying about 13% on their income. A median German worker is paying about 30%.
This remarkable result was achieved by the backdoor: successive conservative governments obscured the stagnation by constantly increasing the personal allowance far in advance of the inflation. This bought them votes [1], but as a result we have a baroque tax system that tries to squeeze tax from less visible, often counter-productive places, and still doesn't collect nearly enough to cover necessary expenses. After a decade of cuts, every public service is cut to the bone, and there's no money to invest into hospitals, roads, or trains to increase the overall productivity.
PIP bullshit is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
Yes, as someone who regularly interviews candidates in the UK - if I see "foreign university I've never heard of + masters at a british university" then it is a huge negative signal, they are nearly always idiots. My favourite was the person with an MSc in CS from Edinburgh University who couldn't even do fizz-buzz level super-basic coding tasks.
At this point I just try and avoid selecting people for interview who fit this profile at all.
There have been "conversion course" MSc courses in UK universities for a long time - when I was doing a CS first degree the department ran one of these courses and, presumably to save money, the MSc folks would share some of our classes.
Usually they were completely lost but at the end of it they got a "better" degree than ours, which was annoying...
Sounds a bit like the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. In it there’s constant “evolution” between different trading strategies that become more or less efficient over time.
So here, Phase 1 would be a market dominated by EMH believers who passively invest. In phase 2, speculative “noisy” traders start to exploit this landscape to profit. In phase 3 there’s a crisis or period of high volatility. The old complacent EMH strategies suffer losses and become extinct. Then no doubt in phase 4 the market moves to some new equilibrium with new strategies dominant!
So in this AMH theory what you describe is a natural process of evolution.
I have a feeling this migrant didn’t get off a dinghy with all the other engineers and scientists so probably isn’t raising a lot of concern for most. Conflating “immigration is too high” with “anyone who thinks immigration is too high is a racist who thinks they are all freeloaders” doesn’t work anymore, no amount of media propaganda will change that.
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