>Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.

>Children are livestreaming on the social media app for hours, pleading for digital gifts with a cash value. The BBC saw streams earning up to $1,000 (£900) an hour, but found the people in the camps received only a tiny fraction of that.

>A reporter in Syria contacted one of the TikTok-affiliated agencies saying he was living in the camps. He obtained an account and went live, while BBC staff in London sent TikTok gifts worth $106 from another account. At the end of the livestream, the balance of the Syrian test account was $33. TikTok had taken 69% of the value of the gifts. The $33 remaining from the BBC's $106 gift was reduced by a further 10% when it was withdrawn from the local money transfer shop. TikTok middlemen would take 35% of the remainder, leaving a family with just $19.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-63213567

Digital begging where your end cut is about 18% of the amount donated. What a time to be alive.

>>71389
>The company said this type of content was not allowed on its platform, and it said its commission from digital gifts was significantly less than 70%.
>TikTok said it would take prompt action against "exploitative begging".
So they're taking less than 70% and anyway it's not allowed so anyone who complains about that gets banned. While saying the beggars are being exploitative. That's something.

>>71389
Damn, I wish I could have gotten in on the ground floor of being trapped in a Syrian refugee camp. It's basically like if you bought BitCoin in 2009 and sold it 18 months ago.

>>71389

Well it serves them right, if they had any sense they'd judt use venmo or buymeacoffeeor whatever, like all those yank blm grifters guilting free money out of white people just for being black.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLy9NHXsIoo

>>71612

I'd love to see Armando Iannucci recast Dev Patel in an episode of "The Comic Strip Presents: The Hunt for Rishi Sunak's Mandate".

>>71612

i would of told him to fuck off

>>71612
Is the focus of this the underlying assumption that the economy is so bad that people in employment need to use soup kitchens? I hope it is because while I've heard he's actually measured and sensible from my mate in parliament, he's still an utter twat for stuff like this.

>>71615

He's a bright bloke, but he has lived in a bubble of extreme privilege for all of his life. He went to school at Winchester, which costs £45k a year. He honestly doesn't understand how life works for normal people. His first job had a six-figure starting salary; within five years he was a partner at a hedge fund, likely earning several million per year.

His benchmark for "ordinary people" are his parents, who were a GP and a pharmacist; it simply doesn't occur to him that for most people in this country, those jobs are far beyond what they could reasonably aspire to and carry salaries vastly in excess of what they could hope to earn. By the standards of his peers, his parents were "poor" - they could still afford to send him to one of the most expensive schools in the world, but they had to figure out how to afford it. That's his intuitive understanding of "making hard decisions" about your personal finances.

He knows what the average person earns and what it costs them to pay their bills, but it's entirely abstract, it's just numbers on a page to him. He can't actually relate it to anything concrete, because he has never personally known anyone who has ever worried about paying the bills. The bloke on the other side of that servery counter might as well be an alien. Rishi has no reference point for what it's like to be homeless, but he has no reference point for what it's like to earn an average salary either.

Our daily lives are as remote to him as the lives of people living in sub-Saharan Africa are to people like us. I don't have the first idea what life might be like for a Nigerian living on $2 a day and I don't really know how different it would be to live on $5 or $10 a day. From my perspective, they're all just unimaginably poor. That's what we look like to Rishi Sunak - he can't really tell us apart, because he can't begin to comprehend what life is like for us.

>>71612
>>71616
I'd rather put my faith in the ofspring of a family that's proven, over time, to be competent at creating and maintaining wealth in multiple forms not only financial, than that of John Smith who's struggled to understand and/or fix the system for themselves let alone an entire nation of peoples.

>>71617
Posting as someone who's worked in financial advice for over a decade, some of the absolute worst clients tend to be the family members of someone who has built a successful business from scratch. The Wives are almost always awful but the majority of children who get parachuted into a plum job in the company are incredibly arrogant and incompetent but they act like they're entirely self-made rather than having everything handed to them on a plate.

I guess that's why they often say wealth is commonly squandered within three generations. You can do everything right in terms of investment and tax planning but it goes much beyond that. You've got to ensure you choose a partner with the right values (one of my colleagues went to public school and he absolutely will not date a woman who isn't either a doctor, accountant, lawyer or on a similar level) and keep your kids on the straight and narrow so they don't end up doing some airy fairy degree and have no career drive because you've indulged them too much.

>>71617

I do trust Sunak with the economy, but I don't trust him with social policy. I don't think he understands (or could be made to understand) just how important the £20 Universal Credit uplift was for struggling families. I don't think he understands how terrifying a benefits sanction is when you've got literally nothing in the bank.

The Tories have a reputation as the "nasty party" and while I think there's an element of truth to that, it's somewhat overstated. At cabinet level, they are mostly the oblivious party. So many senior Tories lack a frame of reference to understand the impact of their policies that they are collectively clueless. There's no-one sat around the cabinet table who has the experience to say "no, don't do that, because this is what it'll do to people".

I have absolutely no problem with having ex-bankers in senior positions because they have obvious transferable skills, but a ruling party that is dominated by out-of-touch poshos has obvious and devastating consequences.

>>71617
Serf mindset.

>>71617
Given that those are not the only two people in the country it seems odd to be defending someone with a track record of being aggressively exploitative and greedy. There's no reason to put an unrehabilitated thief in charge of your money simply because they're a good thief.

>>71619

The trouble is that while they're not all Edwardian time travellers like Rees-Mogg, every Tory who's not actively "nasty" is invariably having their strings pulled by people who are very nasty indeed.

The thing that makes them nasty, even evil, in my eyes, is that while it's true they are often more oblivious and inept than outright malicious, at least on some primitive level, they are well aware that what they do and the interests they serve are opposed to the best interests of the common British citizen. They know what they stand for is not good for the ordinary person. What's evil about it is that they know it, but will always hide behind the shield of rhetoric, they will always justify their role with an appeal to the old fashioned, hard working, traditionalist conservative ideology, alleviating themselves from personal culpability.

it wasn't me, it was the market what done it, and I'm only an out of depth public schoolboy to begin with, how was I supposed to know? surely you can't be too harsh on us, guv. have a bit of heart.

>The number of people living in temporary accommodation in England has hit a 25-year high, according to the latest official figures.

>Almost 105,000 households were in temporary accommodation, including more than 131,000 children, on 31 March this year. This figure is 10% up on the same day last year, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities data shows.

>This latest figure for temporary accommodation surpasses a previous high of 101,300 reached in 2004, and is the highest since records began in 1998. The figures also show almost 14,000 households were in hotels or bed and breakfasts in the three months to March.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66296333

How do more people end up homeless when the number of houses isn't going down?

>>72118

>There were an estimated 28.2 million households in the UK in 2022, an increase of 6.1% (1.6 million) since 2012

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/bulletins/familiesandhouseholds/2022

The main driver of the rise in homelessness has been the freeze on local housing allowance. The maximum amount that can be paid in housing benefit hasn't increased in three years, despite the sharp increase in rents. This has left a lot of families in temporary accommodation because their benefits will not cover the rent on any available property in their area, but the local authority is still legally obliged to find them accommodation.

https://www.nrla.org.uk/news/LHA-rates-cover-just-eighteen-percent-cheapest-rents

>>72119
Is that why rental is going mental?

>>72120
Far better answers to that question are in the article you copied the graph from.

You just wanted to post the rhyme, didn't you?

>>72121
Always.

>A beggar who was on course to make around £21,000 a year from locals in a historic cathedral city has been banned from asking people for money in the street.

>James Chambers, 30, was raking in up to £420 a week by persistently begging for cash outside a McDonald’s in Lincoln city centre. A court heard he would receive a mix of food, goods and money from kind-hearted passers-by, which equated to almost £1,700 each month tax-free. But Chambers, of no fixed abode, has now been banned from begging in the city centre after being hauled before a court.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/lincoln-beggar-banned-b2418768.html

I'm sure they're going to provide him with all the support he needs to get back on his feet, rather than just punishing him.

>>72148

>Chambers must also “not approach any person and ask for money or goods” within the city of Lincoln boundary.

I'm sure he's got enough money for a train ticket out of Lincoln.

>>72148
Earning minimum wage, some of which was paid in sandwiches, by sitting in the street all day should be allowed. I fail to see how it's any more or less pointless and shit than most office jobs.

>>72150
You'd need a salary of about £25k gross to earn £21k net. Your typical 9 to 5 minimum wage worker is on less than £19k gross, so our little tramp here would be in about the 40th percentile for net income.

>>72148
Why is it a crime? Will society just get angry because someone got free money?

>>72152
>Chambers was convicted of 13 begging offences and one public order offence dating back to February at Lincoln Magistrates’ Court on September 15. He was also given a 12-month conditional discharge alongside his three-year CBO, which could land him in jail for up to five years if he were to breach it.

Begging has been a crime since the 1824 vagrancy act.

>>72153
Yes, but why?

>>72154
Deserving poor, innit.

>>72152
I suspect he was being an arsehole.

>>72156
He's a tramp, that's a given.

>McDonald's security guard soaks homeless man's sleeping bag

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67674981

>>72239
I don't mean to sound like an internet tough guy, but I think I'd turn into the Doom Slayer if I saw that happening in front of me.

>>72240
More likely you'd impotently cry like the woman in the video linked below that story where the coppers had all the worldly possessions of a dozen tramps tossed into the back of a bin lorry.

He's a big black security guard. No way is a .gs poster beating up the son of aki.

>>72242

If he's so big and hard then what the fuck is he playing at using a mean and underhanded strategy like soaking a blokes bedding, in the middle of winter when it'll never dry and he'll be dangerously cold as a result, instead of just shifting the guy by hand?

I'm not going to pretend I would try and physically intervene myself but that guy is a cunt, top class cunt, deserving of zero respect. just absolutely cowardly behaviour.

>>72243
Because it's more convenient, duh.

>>72241
I don't understand why you went with such a specific example.

>>72242
He chucks 16 year olds out of Maccys for a living, he's not Tyson Fury.

>>72245
>HE'S NOT TYSON FURY.

And neither is someone who says they'd turn into the doom slayer.

>Police who took kebab break before arena bomb disciplined

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx032lvg479o

>>72364

>>72364
Two hours and nine minutes!

>It said it had found “no persuasive evidence” to suggest longer breaks had been taken at other events
As for your accusation about my support for your bid for Beeston mayoral office,

>Researchers are conducting the UK’s first major scientific trials to establish whether giving homeless people cash is a more effective way of reducing poverty than traditional forms of help.

>Poverty campaigners have long believed that cash transfers are the most cost-effective way of helping people, but most studies have examined schemes in developing countries.

>The new study, funded by the government and carried out by King’s College London (KCL) and the homelessness charity Greater Change, will recruit 360 people in England and Wales. Half will continue to get help from frontline charities. The other half will get additional help from Greater Change, whose support workers will discuss their financial problems then pay for items such as rent deposits, outstanding debts, work equipment, white goods, furniture or new clothes. They do not make direct transfers to avoid benefits being stopped due to a cash influx.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/24/homeless-people-to-be-given-cash-in-first-major-uk-trial-to-reduce-poverty

>>72561

So they're going to test whether giving homeless people cash works by... not actually giving them cash?

>>72562
getting their benefits stopped does seem a downside of handing over a pile of cash, so I can sort of see the point. Of course, not having such a dickwitted benefits system, so people can earn a bit (legitimately) without a harsh downside, would be better, but hat's quite a change.
When we do eventually roll out UBI, how are we going to fuck it up?

>>72562
Sounds like it. Don't have to be a boffin to work out that paying rent for someone means they'll have a house to live in.

>>72563
>WHEN WE DO EVENTUALLY ROLL OUT UBI, HOW ARE WE GOING TO FUCK IT UP?
I don't think it will ever fix things, because it's human nature to want to have more than the people around you. If you bring in a system where everyone gets free money so they don't have to work, and getting a job to supplement that income is entirely optional, I still expect everyone to pick that option. So we'll still have plenty of people working in jobs they hate, and people won't be any freer, and prices will go up to take advantage of everyone's higher incomes, and the unemployed will be as fucked as ever. There might be a slight decrease in social inequality, but I don't expect that to be permanent.

I've always supported the idea of, and have probably even posted previously in this thread about, giving homeless people a one-off massive cash payment. Some homeless people are good people who are down on their luck, and they can use that money to find a home and a job. Other homeless people are crackheads and scumbags, and they'll piss it all away on heroin and die over the weekend. The homeless people who are worth helping will get the help, and the ones who aren't worth helping will no longer be a problem unless they die clogging a drain or on a zebra crossing or something. Either way, they'll never need another penny from taxpayers and everything will be sorted.

I'm not read up on economics or owt but I think that prices tend to reflect the money in peoples pockets. If everyone's given monies a week, how long until prices adjust to cancel it out?

Think about it logically;
•More money, more spending power. You buy more bread than you could previously afford. More bloat, less hungry.
•Bakery makes extra cash, can bid for more flour to meet the increased demand.
•To pay for cost of expanded baking (more staff to make more loaves, more power to the oven, etc), price of bread increases.

Am I missing something, here?

>>72567
I don't think you're missing things - except maybe the most blatant case, that housing costs will always rise to take every penny they can, if there's anything other than blatant oversupply. Has there been a recent time when people haven't stretched themselves thin to get a big mortgage / nice place to rent? (people in general, not your specific anecdotal relative who either lives in a shoe, or has a trillion quid so doesn't care - as they're irrelevant to house prices).
What I favour about a UBI is the fact (hope) that it's guaranteed, and is marginally livable, but you're free to do all the usual stuff to get a pleasant life, without risking it being yanked away.
Sure, landlords will farm the UBI-only crowd, that seems inevitable, and in a sane world that landlord would be the council (or something), since who'd want to enrich slumlords?

>>72567

In a competitive market, the price of commodities tends to converge to a point just above the cost of production. Technology tends to reduce the cost of production over time, so most things get cheaper in real terms. In 1953, the average household spent about 32% of their income on food; in 2020 that figure was 8.4% and even after the cost-of-living crisis it's only about 12%, despite the fact that we eat vastly better and more varied food today. The same applies to most of the things we buy. The cost of a coat has fallen about sixfold relative to incomes, the cost of a television has fallen twentyfold and so on.

Housing is the key exception to that general trend, because it isn't a competitive market. Planning regulations severely restrict the supply of available building land, so it's a permanent seller's market. If we had a shortage of shoes and the price went through the roof, someone would open a shoe factory, sell slightly cheaper shoes and make a killing until someone else had the same idea. That isn't an option for houses, because the government won't let you.

>>72566
The way people compete for status always gets out my inner social engineer: why not just ban a chunk of mass produced consumer tat?
People will still want status goods to show off, but now instead of buying a cunty car you'll have to get a shirt sewn by some prestigious seamstress, or learn to sew yourself and make something impressive.

It's not unheard of, historically. The Japanese used to have a bunch of rules saying your clothes can't be too fancy unless you were nobility, so what merchants would do is buy plain clothes made excellently. The status element wasn't removed, but it changed form. Ideally, we'd work out something similar to push people to compete on skills rather than bank balance - halve your working hours and put that time into 5-a-side. You can't show off by buying tat anymore, but you can still show off by doing something else!