>>39464

It'd need to be more of a Napoleon approach, if anything. Give him his own island to pretend he's in charge of, call it the true successor to the Soviet Union or whatever to make him happy.

>>39464
If you sent Putin to Argentina he'd have the Argies back on the Falklands in no time. Then Truss will emulate Thatcher, poorly, by trying to channel Thatcher and failing miserably.

The man is nothing if not a master troll.

>>39468

The question is if a system that is so Putin-centric will just let somebody come up to take his place. He will have made sure that nobody can threaten his power from within. But I guess that doesn't protect him from the entire system turning against him at some point.

The problem for the Russian people will likely be that whoever comes after Putin, Russia will probably not improve greatly from what it is now, which is a failed state.

>>39470

I mean that's the thing really. There will come a point where the war is clearly lost, and he's sat there leaning his head in one hand, and he goes "Mudak. Launch the nukes. Cyka blyat." and whatever general he gives the order to will presumably just go "Uh... Nyet, comrade. It's over." He goes "Arrest this man!" and the other guy goes "Nyet, I don't think I will." Then that's it. His power instantly evaporates.

Power is only power as long as people play along, that's the funny thing. Faced with the prospect of life or death people's priorities drastically change and the structures of hierarchy vanish like the mirages they are. I always think about those millionaire apocalypse prepper fantasies where they build a big bunker in New Zealand and they hire private security and blah blah blah... It would last about ten minutes after the actual apocalypse before the private security lot shot the millionaires they worked for in the head and took the place over for themselves.

However this ends, it's probably the end of Putin. We just have to worry about whoever fills the void without him. They almost certainly won't be any better.

>>39471

Those generals have skin in the game. They're corrupt and complicit in crimes against humanity. Unless they can count a successful coup and seize power for themselves, they're going down with the ship - either the next lot will put them up against the wall, or the ICC will have them.

Putin has very carefully filled positions of power with people who are compliant, unimaginative and lack initiative. He has fostered a culture of paranoia and rivalry in which he and his closest aides are the only bridge of communication between opposing factions. That's a large part of the reason why the Russian invasion has been such a shitshow, but it also secures Putin's position. It's not enough for people to lose faith in him, they need to coalesce around a replacement regime before they move against him.

>>39449
>"Some people believe that increased gender equality only benefits women and do not see the benefits for society as a whole."

You'd think backing female autonomy would get women on side with fighting eskimo oppression or trans-exclusionary rhetoric or whatever the bogeyman of the day is for the right.

The only benefit I can see from their perspective of curtailing womens rights is to slowly shift the Overton window towards authoritarianism / state control over the individual. Part of me wants to believe that's just paranoia though.

>>39449
>Furthermore, young men are more likely to see women’s progress at their expense and the trend is most prominent in areas with high unemployment and less trust in institutions, according to the findings.
This is true though. Young women are doing better than young men on everything.

>>39451
Not at giving blowjobs.

>>39449

This study is quite clearly ideologically biased, that doesn't make for good science.

Either way stuff like this is quite typical of the broader liberal inability to grapple with the reasons their political project is rapidly failing to maintain dominance. Instead of engaging with the evidence and understanding why they are losing support, they always make up some bogeyman to shift the blame, for misleading people away from the self evident truth and righteousness of feminism, LGBTQIA++, racecraft, etc.

What a shame.

>>39452

I think otherlad meant that young women are doing better as in are better off, living in more favourable circumstances, not "are better" as in more skilled in everything.

>Kids climb over fence to enjoy closed West Park splash area

https://www.hullPlease don't ban me.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/kids-climb-over-fence-enjoy-7459018

>>39099

>"Park facilities will re-open once the travellers have left."

Also, a classic:

This Morning is completely fucking mental. Holly Willoughby once interviewed a sex robot.

>>39100
Does the gilfy cripple have an OF?

Woman hospitalised for three days after dog poos on her face while sleeping

A woman is recovering from a horrendous ordeal after her daughter's dog accidentally did a poo on her face while she was asleep - and left her hospitalised. Amanda Gommo, 51, was taking an afternoon nap with chihuahua Belle when the pup became ill and had violent diarrhoea.

The mum-of-three was asleep with her mouth open, top and tailing with Belle, when the messy accident occurred, and some got in her mouth. She ran to the bathroom to be sick but later ended up in hospital with a gastrointestinal infection - passed on from her pooch.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/woman-hospitalised-three-days-after-28081036

>>39359

What to do first when your dog shits in your mouth:

[x] Post a selfie on social media

>>39317

But you see this is where it circles right back around to rigidly defining what a woman is by gender norms and expectations of behaviour and appearance etc. You know, the very things fisherfolk were supposedly fighting to liberate themselves from, but now clutch their pearls so tightly over. And they say the horseshoe theory isn't real.

I can't decide if it just means they're thick or if I should be charitable enough to call it cynicism.

>>39316

I guess I'm very obviously from a different time. When I was at the beginning of secondary school in the late 80s, our English teacher was rumoured to have a gay sexual relationship with our music teacher. It was kind of an open secret both among faculty and us pupils, something we sort of knew but never talked about it, but some very conservative concerned parents then demanded to know what the deal was, because they feared it would set a bad example for us kids. Even then, you couldn't fire somebody just for being gay, but the school had to half-heartedly promise to ensure that we wouldn't be in harm's way. We thought that was a bit excessive, because both of them were quite popular and likeable teachers as such, but there you go.

I'm not insinuating that having a teacher in drag with giant plastic tits is going to scar schoolkids for life. It probably will, but you can't say that these days. But seriously, you have to draw the line somewhere. Especially in our time now, we try to shield kids from anything sexual well past what is actually developmentally sound, and yet, nobody thinks anything of their kids being taught by, again, a guy in drag with giant plastic tits.

>>39318
That's a very interesting point. But I think you'd have heard more complaints if Lolo Ferrari decided to become a primary school teacher.

>>39317
Your mum is an insulting caricature of a woman.

>>39317>>39316
This sums it up really. It looks like Just a weird fetish thing rather than actual interest being female presenting.
And it's exactly the sort of thing that works against the folk that just want to live in their chosen identity nice and quietly in harmony.

>>39155

>but I had similar experiences when I was a smoker; health issues that obviously had nothing to do with smoking were still seen through the prism of me being a "less deserving" patient.

It was sort of a grey area when I was still smoking a pack of Lucky Strikes a day. I used to get laryngitis every winter the last few years that I smoked. Laryngitis can be excruciatingly painful, like you're swallowing razorblades. My GP knew I was a smoker but kept telling me it was just something that happened to people in winter, like others might get a sinus infection. He would just give me prescriptions for extra-strength pain numbing lozenges and that was it. But then when I went to an ENT specialist, one of the first things she asked me was if I was a smoker, and when I said yes, she told me that laryngitis happens something like three or four times more often to committed smokers, and that I needed to quit ASAP to prevent it from becoming a chronic illness at some point down the line, especially because it kept recurring every winter in my case. And apparently, chronic laryngitis can even be a precursor to throat cancer.

It was one big reason why I quit that spring. Not just because I didn't want to get cancer in the future, but also because somebody put it to me bluntly for the first time that I was hurting myself with my habit. It made me realise that I didn't want to go on like that. It's been ten years now since I quit, and I haven't had a single puff since. Short of never having started in the first place, quitting smoking was one of the best decisions I've ever made for myself.

>>39156

>I'm not sure exactly what I'd replace it with if I was in charge, but I definitely feel the way our system of GPs works is unfit for purpose.

I think the core problem is the GP's role as gatekeeper rather than gateway. Of course someone is going to become jaded if they're implicitly tasked with blocking people from accessing care. For political reasons, they're also implicitly tasked with concealing the deficiencies of secondary care.

It's extraordinary that the answers to basic questions like "what services are available for my condition?" or "what are the eligibility criteria for that service?" are intentionally hidden from patients in most cases. It's a ruse that benefits management, because patients who are confused about what help is actually available tend to be easier to fob off than patients who are angry that no help is available, or that help is so severely rationed as to be effectively non-existent.

If you need treatment X but your GP knows that the waiting list is basically indefinite, there's real pressure on them to not tell you that. They won't mention X, they'll act like you just need watchful waiting, they'll vaguely suggest that you might get referred for X at some indeterminate point in time, but they won't ever come clean and say "look mate, you need X but we can't give it to you, either you go private or you're shit out of luck".

General practice has a really important role to play in helping patients who don't need secondary care or who don't know what care they need, but that role has been fundamentally and perhaps irrevocably corrupted. We've accepted the idea that lies of omission are not only acceptable but the basic currency of the NHS. We constantly talk about "managing patients in primary care", but we really mean "fobbing off patients because we don't have enough specialists".

> Our hospitals do a very good job of providing highly cost effective care

I used to agree with you, but I've just seen too many completely avoidable fuck-ups to maintain that belief. It is not cost-effective to have ambulances spend most of their shift queueing to drop off patients. It is not cost-effective to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on rehabilitation and social care for stroke patients that could have been completely avoided if they had received prompt thrombolysis.

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>>39158

>I used to agree with you, but I've just seen too many completely avoidable fuck-ups to maintain that belief. It is not cost-effective to have ambulances spend most of their shift queueing to drop off patients. It is not cost-effective to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on rehabilitation and social care for stroke patients that could have been completely avoided if they had received prompt thrombolysis.

I think the thing with that is that it's not really the hospital's fault in most of those cases. It's a symptom of the rest of the system almost completely breaking down, or just not having existed to begin with.

They perform perfectly adequately in the roles a hospital should perform, they just have no choice but to do a lot of other shit hospitals shouldn't have to do, because if they don't do it, it would be a tacit admission the system is fucked and people would be dying purely and simply because nobody gave them the care they needed.

I mean, how many people turn up at A&E knowing that they really shouldn't be there, but couldn't get a GP appointment and 111 (i.e Capita, by the way. A company that struggles to organise telesales campaigns, and yet receives something like 1 in 5 of all government outsourcing cpontracts) told them to.

Have any of you lads managed to get your employers to provide proper FFP2/3 masks if they expect you to go back to working on site in the middle of an airborne disease pandemic? Mine's is pressuring everyone to go back in full time even though everything worked fine under the previous "only come on site when you actually need to do stuff on site" policy.

If I was working with anything else that had the same risk of putting me out of action for several weeks plus a nontrivial chance of causing chronic health issues H&S would be constantly on my back about reducing exposure and making sure I was using the right PPE, but apparently the attitude to COVID is "please increase your risk of exposure for no good reason, btw there's a box of shitty paper masks in a cupboard somewhere if you're scared of catching a cold lol".

>>39262

Mate I work in a fucking hospital and the masks were whatever we could get our hands on, you've got to be kidding if you think you're getting anything better to sit in the office.

Anyway it's over. There's bigger things to be worried about. If you still care about covid then I sympathise, but absolutely nobody is going to take you seriously.

Yes this is absolutely going to bite us in the arse when there's a massive winter wave that kills all the pensioners who are still in shock over Are Liz sat in their flat with the heating turned off, but that's the reality of the situation.

I realise that's an X-Ray and is probably on the mirror website too but can you not.

>>39242
What's wrong with it?

>>39201

I mean the thing is, if you were to tell me that the entire So Called Islamic State was manufactured by Western intelligence agencies in the first place, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised. Well, surprised that it actually worked, maybe, but you get my point. So I have no doubt it's totally possible they entrapped people into going over there, much like the paedo hunters entrap people to go meet fake kiddies in car parks.

I guess the difference here though is that with the paedo hunters, there is no kid, the whole staging was an elaborate fiction; so it's a philosophical debate as to whether that means you've actually prevented any crime at all. Whereas with joining ISIS, sure, they were roped into it, but they still went and actually did it. If that lad who cut people's heads off on Twitter was set up by MI5, he still actually cut actual people's actual heads off.

The other issue is what do you do with offenders like this. I buy the argument she should be tried and punished here, not have her citizenship revoked, but even still. You can't ever let a Shamima Begum back out into society, as much for her own good as anyone else's. She'll never be able to reintegrate properly, and they'd always have to keep their eye on her to make sure she's not recruiting new home-grown extremists, and she'll just get all kinds of abuse if people clock who she is. So she ends up just being a massive expense to the taxpayer. I think the reason people are drawn to the idea of effectively exiling her instead, is that it's just the most pragmatic option short of the death penalty.

>>39203
>I mean the thing is, if you were to tell me that the entire So Called Islamic State was manufactured by Western intelligence agencies in the first place, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.
That might be difficult to argue, since there are roots all over the place, and they were very explicit about their disdain for Western agencies.

Original flavour al-Qaeda, on the other hand, was initially fabricated through the groupthink between FBI agents desperate to find a organisation they could prosecute under RICO and a fraudster and fabulist desperate to get out of a very long prison sentence. When Osama found out about this, he would adopt the identity for what was previously just him giving money to random daft militant wogs. If the FBI wanted a global terror network, he was more than happy to provide one.

>>39204
>they were very explicit about their disdain for Western agencies

So were "Al-Qaeda".

>>39212
Which one? The invented one or the real one?

>>39213

What's the difference?

>>39184

The Soviet Union fell largely because the U.S. was outspending the Russians many times over in the early 80s nuclear arms race. It was something that the Soviets just had no way of keeping up with. Add to that the debacle in Afghanistan, where the Soviets spent ten years accomplishing absolutely nothing and again only hemorrhaging military budgets, and you had a Soviet Union which had next to no funding to modernise its entire system. Which would have been badly needed, because the Communist Bloc and its satellite states were still greatly relying on heavy industries in a continuation of Stalin's doctrines, but had no money for innovation that would have ensured the competitiveness of Soviet products on the global market.

Also, the Soviet method of quelling dissent in its republics and its satellite states was on numerous occasions to send in troops and/or ratchet up political repression. Which was also no longer a possibility under its strapped finances. The peaceful revolutions in 1989 in the satellite states didn't just happen without Soviet military intervention because the Soviet Union suddenly would have taken a more benign view on them. Although you shouldn't put that idea past a man as moderate in character as Gorbachev. But really, they just couldn't afford to send troops into half a dozen satellite states all at once. It probably only would have accelerated the Soviet Union's downfall, which the Soviets must have known. The Soviets did try to intervene with their military in Lithuania in 1990 when the country pushed for independence, but it didn't turn out too well for the Soviets.

Is the world better off without the Soviet Union? If you ask many people in the former Communist Bloc, then probably yes. If you look at how other socialist or communist states have fared since then, they tend to have to keep up political repression and stagnation, while allowing their citizens just enough freedoms to keep them from revolting entirely, but they are not really free citizens as we in the West would understand it. Just look at China and the way it spies on its entire population. Countries like North Korea, on the other hand, have just simply put all of their efforts into repression, indoctrination and self isolation.

On the international level, it's probably problematic that after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was able to brand itself as the only remaining superpower which had "won" the Cold War and was therefore God's chosen country to lead the world to bigger and greater things. Which comes with its own problems to this day in terms of the Americans' desire for global domination. A potent nuclear rival to NATO and the U.S. keeping close watch on the countries in its own sphere of influence could have kept the Americans more in check. But it would have come at the expense of making the risk of global nuclear war once again more likely. As we are seeing today, where Russia and the West are facing off against each other in a way not known since the mid-80s.

>>39187

Hence "albeit a reformed one".

The state Russia has devolved into (and therefore the way we are currently facing off with them right now, because those things are directly connected) was pretty much the worst possible outcome. A sham democracy that's basically a dictatorship in all but name, just like the other global baddies.

The later years of the Soviet Union, while not without their problems (much like modern day China, or, frankly, America or Europe. Let's not pretend we live in complete freedom in a not at all dysfunctional democratic utopia either) could have continued moving in a more liberal direction if it hadn't collapsed first. I think the sentiment was there, at least.

It's not impossible to imagine a more open, modernised Soviet Union, while retaining the institutional strength to stop a bloke like Putin taking over and transforming the place into a complete oligarchy. A gradual "decolonisation" of the satellite states like Britain transitioning to the Commonwealth.

>>39188

Russia has been described as a failed state in recent years, which is probably very true.

You also have to factor in that Russia has no democratic tradition. They had 70 years of communism, and before that, the Tsars ruled for centuries with varying degrees of an iron fist.

One of the reasons the Weimar Republic failed was that Germany, too, had had no democratic tradition. Yes, in some ways, Germany was democratic since 1871 when the German Empire was founded, but the Reichstag and its publicly elected members had no actual parliamentary powers as we know them today. On paper, it was a constitutional monarchy much like ours, but the Kaiser's power and that of the aristocracy close to him were near-absolute. Effectively, no laws could be passed by the Reichstag without the approval of the aristocracy, who could decide on a whim.

Having lost the monarchy as such after WWI probably didn't set up the Weimar Republic for failure in and of itself, but crucially, many citizens, including publicly elected officials, rejected the new parliamentary democracy with its deposed aristocratic class, because to them, it was a humiliating step down from Germany's former glory. Which in practice meant that many of the old cliques maintained their channels and networks, united by their disdain for the new democratic state. Add to that the fact that Germany was one of the hardest hit countries internationally by the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, because the country was rebuilt extensively after WWI with the help of American banks, who then suddenly had to call in their loans from Germany companies. And so you suddenly had impoverished millions in a faltering young democracy, who felt like they had nothing to gain from the latter.

I think you see where I am going with this. Russia after the fall of communism had a fragile democracy where many of the old cliques were still dominant, including people like Putin. And many ordinary Russians who aren't part of the new money elite have complained for years that under communism, at least they had a steady job and always enough food on the table. It was kind of a shit life where you had few freedoms, but at least one where your most basic needs were met.

This has not been a good foundation for what is still a fledgling democracy with respect to the centuries that came before it. And similar to post-WWI Germany, it has been a breeding ground for totalitarianism and the dismantling of democratic structures and institutions. Putin didn't suddenly usurp power in what was until then a poster child of a newly democratic Eastern European country. He is the result of decades of democratic rot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE

I can't believe this exists. Two of my favourite men from cold countries, together in one place.

>>39167

>I don't know enough about macroeconomics to offer an authoritative view, but my understanding is that raising everyone's wages just pushes inflation even higher, so it's ultimately self-defeating.

The thing is, I don't actually buy that argument. And I don't just mean that in the usual delusional lefty principled kind of way, I mean it doesn't add up, and it drastically oversimplifies the matter. It's just the standard line of argument Conservatives always bring out about paying anyone better.

Compare it to raising the minimum wage, for example. The argument has always been basically the same there too- I've watched with interest as several states in the US have gone through that debate. And you know what? The evidence actually points the opposite way. Increasing people's wages increases their spending power, which makes businesses better off, in a greater margin than it impacts their overheads. Everyone prospers because there's more money circulating. It might inflate values slightly, but not enough to be self defeating. The thing about economics is that it's not about how much money we have, or how much money a business makes, it's about money circulating. Money being spent. Money changing hands. The more transactions are taking place, the better everyone does- The actual numbers are all pretty arbitrary. It's like the difference between speed and velocity, if that makes sense.

And the thing is in this particular circumstance, raising people's wages wouldn't even actually be raising them. We're just coming out of a decade of real terms wage stagnation. We wouldn't be just handing people money for nothing- Wed be putting their wages back where they already should be.

And I mean, beyond that, you do have to notice it's only the paupers this argument gets brought out against isn't it. Nobody bats an eyelid when the execs and the banks hand themselves six figure payrises on the back of fuck all. Somehow that doesn't cause inflation does it, eh?

Anyway I think you get my point.

I'll tell you whose side I'm on: I was on the side of MY bloody strikes thread that I made a couple of months ago. But fine. No, it's fine, really. It's totally okay. I told you it's fine.

Anyway, my big concern is that these strikes will be really successful, and people in those jobs will get massive raises, and the rest of us won't. If all wages everywhere went up by, say, 10%, then we'd all be groovy. If inflation goes higher and a few people have a much smaller real-terms wage drop, well, these things happen in economic crises. Sometimes you just have to deal with it. But I work for a small company and I don't want to leave. I like working there, mostly. They can afford raises now because we're doing well, and we're not getting them. There is plenty of discussion at work that we should all join a union, but as it stands, nobody has, I don't think, and I don't see how that would help us when there are less than ten of us. Anyway, this is just blogposting now. My point is that not everyone will go on strike. If all the strikers get big raises, good for them, but that will make things even worse for the people who don't strike. Nurses and care workers, and people on benefits, and doctors, and the fire brigade, are just going to be even more fucked. We either need a general strike (that would also cause a recession, which in turn would stop inflation, so it is unequivocally a great idea) or we need to literally rob the rich in any way possible to get our bloody money back. The money can't come from the government, or that would mean more inflation. Instead, it has to be redistributed fairly and equally. And violently, if it comes to that. Strikes are really the last thing to try before actual revolution.


>>39171
> It's like the difference between speed and velocity, if that makes sense.
Not to me it doesn't. Are you thinking of the difference between weight and mass? I remember learning at school that those are different, but I don't think they ever told me that speed and velocity are different.

>>39172

In physics terms, velocity is a vector of acceleration over time, speed is distance over time.

>>39171

>The thing about economics is that it's not about how much money we have, or how much money a business makes, it's about money circulating. Money being spent. Money changing hands. The more transactions are taking place, the better everyone does- The actual numbers are all pretty arbitrary. It's like the difference between speed and velocity, if that makes sense.

We do use the term "velocity of money" in economics and I'd encourage you to look it up.

The thing you're overlooking is the most fundamental concept in economics - supply and demand. Increasing the supply of money without increasing the supply of goods will inevitably lower the value of money relative to goods. Gas prices are going up right now because there isn't enough gas. House prices are insane because there aren't enough houses. Money is just a society-level IOU and the only value it has is the goods it can be exchanged for. Giving everyone (or close to everyone) more money achieves nothing except undermining confidence in money, because you haven't changed the underlying quantity of goods in the economy.

Of course, none of that should be read as an argument against redistribution, just an argument against the fallacy that we can make people better off without making anyone else worse off just by pumping money into the economy.

>Compare it to raising the minimum wage, for example. The argument has always been basically the same there too

Nobody is particularly concerned about minimum wage increases being inflationary within normal ranges - it'd only be a concern if you implemented massive and sudden increases that are occasionally bandied about. People do worry about the effect on employment; that's a very controversial debate, but we do have reasonably good evidence that increasing the minimum wage tends to increase unemployment, particularly youth unemployment.

The Low Pay Commission who set the rate of the minimum wage explicitly consider the impact of wage rates on employment, which is why there's a much lower rate for young people. Despite that, we've seen a significant increase in youth unemployment since the introduction of the NMW despite the overall labour market being quite buoyant. Many of our European peers with stronger labour rights also have higher rates of unemployment - hiring unskilled or inexperienced workers is less attractive when they cost more and they're harder to sack.

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>>39174

>Of course, none of that should be read as an argument against redistribution, just an argument against the fallacy that we can make people better off without making anyone else worse off just by pumping money into the economy.

Aye, but therein lies the rub, doesn't it. Nobody's asking for money to be pumped in to the economy for free. It's bordering upon dishonest misrepresentation to talk about it that way. They're asking companies that are making very healthy profits to make very slightly less profits and instead put some of it in their staff's pockets.

It's a different line when it comes to public services, but compared to the wider economy or the benefits system, it's still a drop in the ocean to pay them properly. Especially when you can commit £21bn out of nowhere to bribe pensioners to vote for you.

As fir the supply/demand etc etc stuff. The common argument about a "wage price spiral"- I don't but that in today's economy. It may have been true in the 70s and the great depression or whenever else. But we live in a globalised world now. Inflation in this country isn't as directly affected by wages in this country, because the things pushing inflation are imported anyway- A pack of pasta costs twice what it did in 2020, for instance, and that comes from Italy. Raising the wages of British workers won't impact on that.

I think part of the reason this country is in the mess it's in is because we've been stagnant for so long, and there's never been a jolt of stimulus to get the economy going. The government have been miserly Scrooge figures for over a decade, they begrudgingly did a bit of socialism-for-businesses during the pandemic, but they've let the ordinary people- ie consumers- become increasingly hard up. They've effectively starved the economy.

>>39142

Where we've really cheated the working class out of their ability to participate is that everything indeed needs a degree nowadays. Some 30 or 40 years ago, you could go relatively far up the career ladder even if you left school at 16. A friend's dad was a factory floor manager, who had come from humble beginnings in that he left school after his GCSEs and worked his way up from being a lowly assembly line worker. And by the looks of it, his salary was well enough to provide for a family. Nowadays, you have to be a production engineer with a B.Eng. at least, which is not a bad thing as such, but it means you'll have some 23 year old who's never picked up a wrench in his life running a factory floor. And probably for a lot less money too.

The problem isn't that you fast track people into positions like that, it's that university degrees in and of themselves are still unattainable for a lot of people in that kind of work environment, and by requiring a degree, you are excluding them from reaching those positions as a result of years of hard manual work, like in the old days.

That isn't to say that a working-class chap can't simply be encouraged to take his A levels and study engineering. But if you've ever spent time with a few people from that social strata, you'll realise that their educational deficit is structural. It spans several generations, where nobody ever had access to higher education.

I once met somebody who was an office assistant, and he was the wunderkind of his family, because he was the first person in generations to leave school with proper GCSEs and get a respectable nine-to-five job. All the rest of his family were dolefolk who got by hustling and shoplifting. There's no point telling somebody like that, hey, get a degree, and everything will be fine.

>>39143

This really doesn't get talked about enough.

Workplace progression is non-existent nowadays unless you have the requisite qualifications in the first place. A degree doesn't start you off any higher on the food chain- It merely permits you the ability to move up. If you don't have one you'll be stuck at the bottom no matter how experienced and knowledgeable you are. It's the worst of both worlds really.

And the thing is people will turn around and say "oh well it's never too late to go to uni!" "oh you can get grants and student loans as an adult!" and shite like that when that totally misses the point. You shouldn't have to fuck about doing 5 years as a part time student on top of working just to earn the right to progress in your field. It's a waste of time for everyone involved when that person could just be getting stuck in.

90% of jobs flat out don't need a degree, even at the higher levels. Even a lot of scientific and technical stuff can be just as well, if not better, learned on the job as it can taught in a lecture hall. it's become an arbitrary gatekeeping method that doesn't actually benefit anyone, not employers, not employees, nobody except the uni. Who, obviously, make loads of money.

And I wonder if that's got something to do with it.

>>39144

>You shouldn't have to fuck about doing 5 years as a part time student on top of working just to earn the right to progress in your field. It's a waste of time for everyone involved when that person could just be getting stuck in.

And that's not even addressing that a substantial percentage of those students fail. Because they have to work for their living.

You hear a lot of people say that mature or working students who already have an established career are more focused than some 18 year old who's really just at uni to party and get laid. And I guess that is true, having met people like that when I was a student. And from being that exact 18 year old myself. But the flip side is that a lot of working students just end up not managing to juggle a career that's temporarily on the back burner, studying for gruelling exams, and somehow paying their bills to boot. Which may even include their half of a mortgage and a financed family car.

>>39143

>The problem isn't that you fast track people into positions like that

I think that's very much the problem when combined with the massive expansion of white collar work.

In Ye Olden Days, the vast majority of workers were blue collar. They could end up being promoted to a quite senior technical or supervisory role, they might end up attending meetings with the most senior management, but they never became management. It was arbitrary and unfair, but everyone knew that the men in bowler hats were born into a fundamentally station in life than the men in flat caps. Nobody born outside of that sphere held any illusions that they could ever transcend their place in the class hierarchy.

In the modern workforce, we still have the born-to-rule pricks at the top and we still have the permanently disenfranchised at the bottom, but we've got a vast middle class of people who are allowed to imagine that they have limitless prospects for upward mobility. They don't, of course, outside of a token few who are allowed a seat at the top table pour encourager les autres, but the prospect is just real enough that they feel no solidarity.

Back in the 70s, a supervisor who genuinely sided with management was tantamount to a scab. They had the duty to relay orders from the officers, they had a duty to ensure that those orders were carried out satisfactorily, but they had no duty to respect those orders or the men who made them. The only way to become a supervisor was to work your way up from the bottom, which naturally bred solidarity - some supervisors might have been snivelling sycophants, but they were never naive about the reality of life on the shop floor.

A middle manager is something fundamentally different to a supervisor, despite basically doing the same work. They've come in straight through a graduate programme, they've never worked on the shop floor, they've never been assimilated into the culture of workers but have been directly indoctrinated into the culture of management. They don't belong to the same class as the people above them in the hierarchy, they will never be equal to them, but they don't know it.

To someone from a previous generation, a 21st century job advert reads more like indoctrination into a cult. It's not enough to just turn up and do your shift, you're expected to be passionate, you're expected to share a corporate vision. It doesn't matter whether you actually believe that bullshit, because the mere act of pretending will corrode your soul.

>>39147

>It's not enough to just turn up and do your shift, you're expected to be passionate, you're expected to share a corporate vision.

That kind of nonsense has always boiled my piss. No, I'm not going to share your vision, and whether I'll show even an inkling of being passionate about my work will depend on whether the money you pay me is enough to make me forget about all the cunts I will have to deal with every day when I go home at night.

You're probably right that the working class are being shit on just so that the middle class can fulfill their delusional aspirations of social mobility. If you're upper class and come from a lineage of people who have always had say over others, then you needn't worry about any kind of downward social mobility. You'll always be part of that strata unless you utterly and completely fuck things up. But the middle class know that only a few cancelled paychecks stand between them and a sudden move downward on the social ladder.

George Carlin once said, The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class.

>>39074

"Jews did it" is not much of an argument.

>>39075
If it's good enough for Ronaldo.

>>39074

Bit much.

This thread sucks.

>>39082

Make your own thread then.

>>39006
>We shouldn't listen to silly arguments like "we're a foreign corporation and pay most of our taxes in the country where we're headquartered" or "we don't actually make very much profit in the UK because it's a competitive market for coffee chains and our costs of doing business are very high".

Spot on. They're empty arguments that have very little basis in reality. The "costs of doing business" thing in particular is bollocks because we know that they deliberately overcharge themselves for certain transactions run through international subsidiaries.

>>39010

>The "costs of doing business" thing in particular is bollocks because we know that they deliberately overcharge themselves for certain transactions run through international subsidiaries.

That would be fraud. If HMRC suspect that you're doing that, they can just overrule your prices and base your taxable profits on their own assessment of arms-length prices without having to prove wrongdoing. If they can prove that you're doing it, you're looking at criminal sanctions. Transfer pricing isn't some sort of financial black art, it's a thoroughly documented part of international taxation with clearly defined rules.

In the case of Starbucks, they sell their coffee beans out of Switzerland, because that's the international centre of the coffee trade. They charge the same prices to franchisees, owned stores and co-branding customers. They charge royalties on the use of their intellectual property at industry-standard rates. The Swiss business that sells their beans isn't abnormally profitable and neither is the Dutch business that manages their IP. The accusations against them are all innuendo, because repeated inquiries have confirmed that they aren't doing anything wrong - no subterfuge, no shady practices, just textbook accounting.

>>39025
>no subterfuge, no shady practices, just textbook accounting.
Just because there's a legal loophole doesn't mean it's not a shady practice.

>>39025
When people talk about closing tax loopholes, this is what they mean. If a crime was committed, obviously we could try and arrest them. The scandal is that this obviously suspicious practice is entirely legal.

>>39025
I hope Howard Schultz sees this, m9.

The fact remains - they're selling shit to themselves at a profit, eroding their margins in the places they make the money and generating artificial profits in places where they have a brass plate on the wall.

>>38511
I can't believe one of my favourite TV channels is being taken off air, despite being home to some of the cleverest and most intellectually stimulating content in all of broadcast media. And they're also getting rid of BBC Four.

If BBC Four isn't a proper channel anymore, staying hotels will be much more dull. You'll have to watch the typical shite like Gogglebox, instead of a documentary about the history of vaginas in classical art you'd otherwise never have bothered with.

I wanted BBC 3 back for years so I'm very sorry. If I knew Meet the Khans, a show in which a barely literate man hurtles towards dementia like a spacecraft on reentry as his wife accepts self-respect really does have a price tag, would cost us the entirety of BBC 4, I would have reconsidered my position.

>>38514

Mate, you can get unlimited 5G for £16 a month.

>More teenagers are turning away from traditional media outlets and getting their news from social media, new research from Ofcom has shown.

>The number of people consuming news content on TikTok has increased from 800,000 in 2020 to 3.9 million in 2022. For the first time, Instagram is the most popular news source among younger people - used by 29% of teens in 2022 - with TikTok and YouTube close behind. But print, TV and radio news outlets still dominate in older age groups.

>The growth in news consumed via TikTok is being driven mainly by younger age groups - half of users consuming news on the platform are aged 16-24. The number of people consuming news via the video sharing platform is now similar to the number using the Sky News website and app, Ofcom said.

>TikTok users who took part in the study said they get more of their news from "other people they follow" (47%) than from news organisations' own accounts (24%).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-62238307

>ITV news, including regional ITV news bulletins was fourth, while the BBC's two main channels, one and two - historically the most popular news source among this age group - has been knocked down to fifth place, Ofcom said. The number of teenagers using these channels for news has dropped from nearly half (45%) five years ago to around a quarter (24%) now.

>However trust in social media news sources varies - half of YouTube and Twitter users think they provide trustworthy news stories. Despite its popularity, fewer than a third of teenagers (30%) trust TikTok's news content.

https://news.sky.com/story/teenagers-turning-to-instagram-tiktok-and-youtube-for-news-instead-of-traditional-channels-12655915

>>38950

I think the thing is more that when your perspective is rooted in class analysis, it's easier to take the blinkers off over the more emotional, feelings rooted stuff, that generally results in the "muslamics are rapists and fanny mutilators" versus "ooh this is mean and wacist" stalemate.

The issue most working class people individually have with immigrants is not that they're brown or that they're stealing jobs they otherwise wouldn't want or whatever. It's that they can't get doctor's appointments, their kids can't get houses, services and communities in general are overcrowded. Those tensions exacerbate the more emotional, rhetorical side of the debate, in part because those people aren't quite articulate enough to really voice their concerns in ways that the middle class cultural gatekeepers find acceptable.

If we'd have been able to have the conversation about if we ought to invest more in services to accomodate a growing population or else think about slowing down the inflow of migrants, and acknowledge that they are, whichever way you slice it, at least related; we would be in a much better place today.

Of course, we didn't have that conversation because neither side of the debate at the higher echelons of power actually wanted to frankly confront things that involve spending more money and keeping poor people's lives comfortable.

>>38950

>In fairness, class based politics doesn't really offer many direct answers on immigration.

You get a lot closer to having answers if you acknowledge that immigration doesn't benefit everyone. Immigration probably is positive-sum, but there are clear externalities and it's totally unfair to just dump those externalities on the people least able to bear them. Even if you don't morally object to that on a utilitarian basis, the political and societal risks should be fairly obvious.

IMO the emotive dichotomy described by >>38951 is really just a bourgeois smokescreen - it's convenient for the kind of people who describe themselves as anti-racist if the working class blame immigrants rather than blaming them.

It's convenient to caricature people as racist morons, rather than recognising that the kind of people who bear the negative externalities of immigration have also been denied the kind of education that would allow them to phrase their concerns in acceptable middle class language. It's convenient to divide-and-rule the council estates rather than addressing the underlying issues. The BNP weren't anti-establishment, they were allowed to flourish as a containment strategy. Someone who is trying to TEK ARE CUNTRY BACK from the immigrants isn't trying to take it back from the people who actually stole it. I think buy-to-let bastards quietly breathe a sigh of relief every time someone blames the housing crisis on immigration.

>>38946
I'm not trying to excuse the noncing. I'm calling you out for trying to excuse their racism.

>>38951
>their kids can't get houses
That's a middle-class problem. Class has nothing to do with it. Have you tried not being a class-obsessed reductionist? And when you take into account that it affects every social class, why is only one class racist and why is that excusable?

>>38954

Bait harder lad