>>89737

Oh, for those halcyon days of being bored of Brexit instead of being bored of a global pandemic.

The transition agreement ends at the end of the year, the government say that they won't countenance an extension, but it's all fine. Everything is fine. Remain indoors.

>>89736
I don't yearn for it, everything was bleak as fuck back then and there was looking like no end to the misery. At least the 'rona has shaken everything up. I'm bored of it myself by now, of course, but the future post pandemic is going to have some interesting times.

It's funny, it's a sentiment I've seen posted here before, and I've sometimes echoed myself. What we need is a good plague, clear out the cobwebs and shake up the order. Now we've got it, and it's been both worse than we'd ever have imagined and yet more disappointing.

>>89736
Ah you bastard. Why did you have to remind me how close Bernie came to winning the nomination.

Bored of Brexit now bored of flu hysteria...

>>89741
bored of cranking my hog

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>89731
Before the virus came along, I thought he was a shoo in for the election because Americans, stupid etc. Now I'm quite sure that at the current rate of "progress", he is absolutely toast.

>>89731
What do you mean how does it work? You put a bet on it just like anything else. Go to a bookie's website.

How time flies.

Happy anniversary, lads.

>>89691

Do either of you lads have any data or sources on this? I would like to know the exact obligations and enforcement mechanisms.

>>89591
Moral of the story: The British public love bigots.

>>97679
What's that got to do with student finance?

I don't earn enough to pay income tax, so mine is easy to calculate: for every £1 I earn I get £1.

>>89596

If you were on the higher rate you'd have 9p taken off for your loan, so the difference for you would be 10p. Is your problem that a low rate payer (with student loan) would effectively pay the same as a high rate payer (without loan)?

The tax system isn't that complex to wrap your head around and as I understand it's like that because of how it's been done historically (to combine NI and income tax would make sense but is practically a minefield). Certainly, it's not complex enough for the misguided belief 'I won't take a raise because I'll pay more in tax'.

>>89598
It was a bit of guesswork; student loans have been going for about 22 years so they won't be applicable to most over the age of 40 and people tend to have their highest earnings later in their careers, as well as that most people who are higher rate taxpayers and have a plan 1 student loan will have either paid it off or be very close to.

I know people who think the moment they reach the higher rate tax band all of their income above the personal allowance is taxed at 40%, meaning you lose money at first, which I've never understood.

>>89598
>'I won't take a raise because I'll pay more in tax'.
It's rare, but it's certainly possible to lose out on a raise. When the UEL and the HR threshold have been in different places, it's been possible to find yourself in a position where you pay less tax if you get a bigger raise.

I once lost out on a raise twice in the same year. Working in the NHS, I hit my anniversary and gained a point, but it took me over a pension threshold and so I ended up taking home less. A couple of months later, we got the annual 1% raise, but at the same time lost the contracting-out discount for NI. As a result, my gross salary was around £2k higher, but my take-home was around £50 a month less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EDtys1sIq0

>>89570
this meme doesnt fit with this well tbh

>>89570
this meme doesnt fit with this well tbh

(A good day to you Sir!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4NmtSrqtvI

It sounds like you're doing it right. Unless you're more directly involved or senior, your extra efforts are likely wasted beyond a point. As in, the first 10% extra you do is worth more than the next 10% extra that you do. Just arriving on time, meeting deadlines and exceeding them a little pays dividends.

>I've read quite a few things that suggest businesses in this country are far too short-termist and value a quick profit over longer term sustainability.

Well, you have to remember too that decision makers are bound by their own interests. We often have inefficient systems that could be easily improved, but not many managers would want to stand up and rock the boat, let alone risk ruin. Making a decision today that would significantly improve the company over a 20 year timeframe would probably look terrible on your record in the short term.

I've read and heard stuff about the short-term approach that is common here too. There seems to be a tendency to look at the figures at the end of the year and judge things by that. For example, minimum wage has gone up quite sharply in recent years. This has leant itself to companies cutting benefits and reducing staff numbers. For supermarkets I think this worked well, but for shops where innovations (self-checkouts) are harder, it's just stretched out a workforce.

While we may seem phlegmatic, it takes different forms elsewhere. In Italy it's incredibly hard to fire someone, so as soon as you get your contract you can do the bare minimum. If I remember, the Manx get priority for any job over others, meaning that they can be equally unproductive.

>I've read quite a few things that suggest businesses in this country are far too short-termist and value a quick profit over longer term sustainability.

I mean isn't this just the broader over arching ideology that we all toil under? Late stage/neo-liberlal/however you want to define it capitalism.

>>89531
I mean in comparison to other similar nations.

>>89536

Well yeah then we're pretty bad. Maybe not quite as bad as the yanks but that's not saying much.

Also for the record I agree with your perspective on productivity.

>Is one of the main reasons that productivity is relatively low in this country because workers know that their employers will treat them like shit and take them for granted?

Yep, of course. Because this;

>employers generally try and see how much work they can get away with piling on people for as little cost as possible

is evident to anyone with half a clue.

But then you have to ask why that's the case. Is there something particular to British culture that means it's worse here than other comparable countries. Probably yeah, there are probably all sorts of things that contribute to it. The states being the global hegemon and our unique relationship to them and their culture is I'd imagine a large factor.

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>89531
On the one hand, yes. But on the other it's a recurring theme in British history. It's not uncommon that when the pound goes down in value British businesses just increase their prices abroad and suck up the extra profits rather than taking advantage of the fact their products are now cheaper abroad and expanding into new markets.

>>89464

Fair play, he's definitely over the limit. Three cans would put nearly any adult male over, mainly because they lowered it a few years back.

>>89465

Right then, I'll report the weaselly prick.

>>89466

He's drunk and I just saw him take a piss in the back garden. If he gets in his car I'm calling 999. What a fucking skank.

>>89467
Surely there is number for less urgent calls? Just call your local rozzer HQ and report him and his license plate. Dispatch will send a car out looking for him.

>>89468

>Surely there is number for less urgent calls?

101.

I've adopted a sort of syncretistic Discordian-Pyrrhonist-Gnosticism but I don't like talking about it much as I worry it sounds like I'm just taking the piss out of other people's beliefs when it's not really. It's compatible with ideas like
>but doesn't Godel's theorem also hold true if you accept that the results of something "god-like" could also be explained as entropy or chaos

>>89437
I've never looked into what our Quakers believe but I have a lot of respect for them from my interactions with them. Brave, peaceful people.

>>89438

As someone who's a year deep into studies on Historical Jesus and the origins of biblical monotheism in ancient Israel I can only say Poo Poo. But you do you, lad.

It's become fashionable to be agnostic these days, I feel, and atheism has become associated with those edgy, neckbeard fedora types. It's a tragedy if you ask me, because you have otherwise rational people excusing all sorts of nonsense brain-worms just because they don't want to look like a teenager from 4chan.

As far as I want to be able to give people the freedom to believe in what they want, I really truly can't reconcile how an otherwise intelligent person can practice faith, at least in the traditional, Jeduo-Christian/Iglooist way. It seems to me all too obvious that these religions in particular have, historically, been responsible for altogether more evil than good. Their very roots in culture exist as an early form of social control and manipulation, before we'd invented mass propaganda and the modern police state. Indeed that's the only reason they have become unnecessary.

I think it's a relic of our past we'd really be better off without. There are better philosophical approaches to dealing with the quandary of the unfathomable.

>>89427

People who beleive something anyway prove something they believe anyway, yet fail to convince anyone else. Is the best way of summing up Godel's ontological theorem. it is circular reasoning plain and simple.

>>89420

>I was a militant Christopher Hitchens style atheist

I really hate the equivocation of atheism with this brand of it, it seems like an oversimplified Americanism. And I think the prevailing truth suffers from political tit for tat for it being treated like it is a counter point to Christianity when it isn't and shouldn't behave like it is.

>>89328

That's not what my lad Stephen Bush said in the e-mail this morning - and I always listen to Stephen Bush.

(He is better at thinking than me, so I just let him think for me now.)

>Rishi Sunak will announce the biggest expansion in government borrowing in British political history as he approves a slew of infrastructure projects in his budget today, as he takes advantage of the era of low interest rates.

>And they're getting lower: the Bank of England has cut rates to 0.25 per cent in a boost to help the economy see its way through a covid-19 induced economic shock.

>Those two stories illustrate the benefit and the cost of the era of low low interest rates: on the one hand, governments can borrow more than they could in the past. The way that the British government structures its debt means that it may have even great wriggle room than many other states. But the downside is that when you hit an economic downturn, pretty much all the heavy lifting has to be done by fiscal policy, that is, through tax-and-spend.

>That reality is one reason why Sunak may be wise to avoid too much borrowing outside of infrastructure spending and measures to respond to the crisis - and that for all the talk of ending austerity, and the reality of increased spending for police, the NHS and education, the story for large parts of the public realm today will be the continuation of spending restraint rather than its end.

£104 less in NI next tax year. Wahey!

If the Tories under Johnson continue like this then Labour are absolutely fucked for the foreseeable future.

It's good to see them investing again, and you can certainly see this as a bit of a vindication to Labour's "we won the argument" mantra.

I can't help but feel like it's a bit late though. It's all well and good pledging money for infrastructure when most of it will just go into fixing the damage ten years of neglect has caused.

>>89332

They absolutely are fucked, but not because the Tories have nicked their politics. It's because Labour will do what they always do and piss about trying to position themselves as opposed to all of it, instead of standing up and saying "See? They've admitted we were right all along!" and driving that point home.

>>89332
So that's your council tax rise sorted then.

>>89589
A curious claim. Which Stuart-era age of austerity were you thinking of?

>>89255
I'm unsure of this claim. The roots of English in Germanic and Romance follow gendered language with the masculine plural as dominant e.g. Ragazzi means both group of male children and children generally in Italian.

While English developed gender neutrality, with limited exception, 'they' needlessly loses specificity (or brings confusion) which must be made up in context. This goes against the point of good communication in conveying information in as concise a way as possible.* Therefore these common folk in the 14-18th century were wrong. This is not to say that you should never use 'they' if not doing so would be rude of course.

*The whole sentence is awful:
>They sound like the kind of person who has made doing things out of spite because they are hurt into a lifestyle choice.
>She sounds like the kind of person who has made doing things out of spite a lifestyle choice.

>>89259
I believe Shakespeare himself used singular they in a couple of his plays. Chaucer certainly used it. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

>>89262

Was it contextually appropriate, like the character not knowing the gender of the person to which they were referring at the time?

>>89206
'Salted' is not 'Plain'.

>>89264
Yes it is.

>>88613

That exists it is called basic first aid training you probably had some.

(A good day to you Sir!)

So... now we've left what might happen to the NHS?

>>89021
They've already realised they're going to have to lower the salary floor on skilled worker visas to boost immigration.

>>89022

It's almost like they don't want to ease the pressure on wages and upskill British workers at all, and everyone who voted Tory and Brexit because that's what they wanted to happen has been conned.

You wait though, this will be their downfall. Immigration is the political time bomb of our age. When people realise they've been had and that Brexit alone wasn't enough to stop it, that's when they're going to start turning to genuinely nationalist politics.

>>88580
Reminds me of the famous "Now I'm not racist but" thread we posted from FB many years ago. It was back in the days where you could still scrape FB posts without much of an account, and I remember compiling a list of all the people who posted it... probably not the done thing now.

I've never been one to care where things get posted but how is this /pol/?

>>88859
"HE SAYS IT LIKE IT IS!" is the cornerstone of modern politics.

I dunno, people keep posting /v/ threads on /iq/ instead so everything has gone all topsy-turvy.

>>88855
This is as /v/ as it gets. He put the screen actors guild on blast, but otherwise it was just really witty.

Was it funny? No, but I agreed the fuck out of it.

>>88871

I don't think it was meant to be funny, it felt quite fucking vitriolic to be quite honest with you.

Regardless, OP probably posted it in /pol/ here because it was all over /pol/ on the other place for the last few days and he felt like fitting in.

>>88674
The graph doesn't show that at all. Where did you learn to infer causality, The Room?

If you have to dump a load of charts, open up Paint and stick them into one image or something, you big git.

>>88679
Classic trifle fan detected.

>>88680
Not him, but don't you fucking dare diss trifle.

>>88684

Trifle is awesome. It's the lasagne of desserts

>>88718
He was chief cashier at the Bank for ages (his signature is still on a lot of bank notes), and then Deputy. I think that more than qualifies him to be governor.

The FCA didn't do a fantastic job over RBS, but then their hands are slightly tied by the fact its a zombie bank. I disagree with the Woodford criticism.

There aren't many better people out there - Mark Carney has been a genuinely great governor and is well respected in the City - Bailey will probably keep a lower profile, but again, no bad thing in a central banker.

A much better, more interesting question might be - how do I get a job at the Bank of England when they don't pay anything near the market rate.

>>88719
>The FCA didn't do a fantastic job over RBS, but then their hands are slightly tied by the fact its a zombie bank.

Nicky Morgan had to threaten him with contempt over his refusal to publish their report on RBS unredacted.

The FCA were also asleep at the wheel over final salary transfers, which led to the mess over British Steel, and ignored warnings about mini bonds which included specific ones over the now collapsed London Capital & Finance.