Off Topic BREXIT

Not trading with us would hit the rest of the EU very hard, which makes it unlikely to happen, plus some of the key players from the EU have said that there is no chance that they'll restrict trade. Most of the "predictions" of doom haven't stood up to scrutiny.

The same was predicted for Norway during their two referendums, and was found to be very wrong there after the vote.

 

When you have hundreds of billions of monies from oil, stored up in the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund you can stand alone outside the EU alright.

 

As Norway had never been a part of the EU, and their latest referendum was 22 years ago, I really don't see how it is a valid comparison in any way. The fact that Norway have a completely different economy to us (based almost entirely on non-renewable energy) is also a good reason why our situations are fairly incomparable.

There is a reson why an absolutely overwhelming majority of reputable economists predict that the UK would be worse off out of the EU.

 

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Eh? I neither voted for the conservatives nor do I believe them to be facist. My point was that there are some things more important than the economy.

 

The same economists that made the same prediction for Norway (which turned out to be total bollocks), and got expensively bailed out from their **** ups over the financial crisis.

 

As I said, 22 years ago so the situation was very different and probably much more unpredictable. It was generally over-speculative lenders who made those mistakes which lead to the crash rather than economic professors and analysts.

 

Not especially.

A trawl of the web found quite a few of the "experts" floundering when their claims were looked at in detail, and rewording some of the original claims.

 

Even if they can't always predict the future with 100% accuracy I'd say that given they are generally incredibly intelligent people who have dedicated their lives to studying the subject, they have a much better chance of an accurate prediction than you or I.

 

This is even more true in England than it is in the US, unfortunately. After WWII, the powers-that-be in England recognized that they needed the best and brightest of the young generation in positions (in science and engineering, in particular) where they could maximize the speed of England's recovery from near-destruction (in Hull, in particular).
They brought in the grammar schools in which the brightest students (NOT the richest), selected via the 11+, competed with their equally bright peers for the best careers.
It worked very well, with bright kids from working-class backgrounds taking many of the best jobs from the "upper classes" who, until then, had automatically inherited those jobs despite their general inability to perform them effectively. The same is still true of England's "top" politicians, predominantly from the Eton-and-Harrow brigade of incompetent chinless wonders.
Once their mission was complete, one generation later, the grammar school system was abruptly (and without consultation of the hoi-polloi) cast aside in favour of "comprehensive" education, specifically designed to dumb-down the general population, which it has achieved in spectacular fashion.
So now, the best (most expensive) education resources, and therefore the best (paying) jobs, are safely back in the hands of the chinless powers-that-be. And, as George Carlin so accurately spelled out above, very few of the plebs are even aware of it.

 

This photo made me laugh, although the instruction is not required by anyone on here!

 

You'd think so, but, apart from a fair number not coping under scrutiny....https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock


Tetlock conducted a set of small scale forecasting tournaments between 1984 and 2003. The forecasters were 284 experts from a variety of fields, including government officials, professors, journalists, and others, with many opinions, from Marxists to free-marketeers.

The tournaments solicited roughly 28,000 predictions about the future and found the forecasters were often only slightly more accurate than chance, and usually worse than basic extrapolation algorithms, especially on longer–range forecasts three to five years out.

 

have you old people always been conservative or does it come with age?
heh

 

No o!

 

If the answer is extra layers of autocrats, bureaucrats and politicians, it must have been a really stupid question.

 

Reputable economists?

As rare as honest politicians I suspect.

Where were they in 07/08?

edit...

Just noticed the follow up:-

It's computers that do the predicting

The economists just feed the data into the model which will produce the results their clients require.

 

And that explains a lot ...

 

Really.i don't believe we will ever get another chance.

 

They won't bother selling to us? Yes, we wouldn't see any more BMW,s VWs, Mercs, Fiats, Peugeots, Citroens as they wouldn't sell them to us. The EU sells more to us than we sell to them. The leading German business organisation, the BDI, similar to our CBI but with far more clout says it would fight any attempt to impose tariffs as Europe sells far more to us than we do to them so if we reply in kind it would affect them to their detriment.

Patty calling someone thick! Never has there been such a lack of self awareness or lack of irony.

 

I think they fear that border will become the next place for mass immigrant camps, eventually moving to the NI ports; as with Calais. This would make it a British problem, rather than a French one. That's my take on it, although there are other possibilities.

 

A mate posted this:

If it happens tomorrow, Brexit really would be the final piss on the face from the British baby boomers to every other generation to come.

They have:
Received the lions share of the benefit from the largest asset revaluation and therefore wealth transfer in history (property);
Received the lavish spending of the newly formed welfare state before governments caught up to its cost;
Had a working life that spanned across the period of the fastest western hemispherical economic growth in history;
Distributed one-off incomes such as North Sea oil to themselves rather than build up national surplusses;
Retired before the state pension age has been increased with their life expectency; and then
Legislated that they should receive guaranteed defined benefit pensions, i.e. placed full economic risk on other generations throughout their 20-30 year retirement
And in spite of all that, left public finances in a far weaker situation than they started it.

It is probably fitting that they now seek to carry us kicking and screaming out of the EU, out of the single market, out of the resulting international trade agreements that generate wealth for the country to pay for the obligations to themselves that they have created and we (everyone else) still honour, all because of some vague concept of "sovereignity" and a distaste for immigrants that flies in the face of a five minute economic analysis.

I would urge you to remind any baby boomers that you know that their blessings have been their childrens curse. The pot is not even empty, it's full of IOUs with their kids names on them to pay for second houses whilst their kids are renting flats in zone 5. We can only refill our pot by generating wealth. Our best method of generating wealth is international trade. Do not disturb it.