Off Topic Politics Thread

[San Tejón]

On child care costs, I recently saw a quote from a junior doctor, who has 4 children, saying that her monthly child care costs were £4000, but her monthly salary is only £3000.
I’ve always wondered (if it isn’t already happening in some places) why hospitals don’t incorporate a crèche/childcare facility into the building, with costs being set at a level that is affordable to their staff and subsidise the pay of the child care staff.
Similarly I wonder if schools could do this too, with schools local to each other banding together.
With the need for so many parents to work, in order to survive, it would be good if a government could come up with a proper plan to help them to do this, so parents don’t need to consider giving up work as a direct result of high child care costs.

 

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I think the super rich are exactly the issue as you both say. I also have no problem with aspirational wealth - as long as is doesn't contribute to the problem. I know a doctor whose method of securing his future wealth is that he is buying up houses whenever he can. He now has 8. It is possible to be on only decent money and still make everyone else's lives a bit ****ter.

The law protects the wealthy against the poor. Nobody needs 8 houses. If you capped rents fairly - fewer people would prey on the poor this way.

It is weak governance to allow foreign investors to buy up your housing stock. We should be mobilising an army of housebuilders and shredding the value of real estate. Ordinary people don't give a crap about markets. They want somewhere to live.

We have a top down society. What we need is a bottom up society. Start with basic provision and allow people to grow and be successful from there. Everyone in this country should be able to find somewhere to live that does not consume more than 15% of their income.

 

[Osvaldorama]

You act as if the current period of capitalistic excess is in some way the creator of the world's wealth. It isn't. In fact, you yourself have ranted often about the creation and debasement of wealth by governments. Wealth is an illusion. Or in fact a shared delusion. This person who does very little but owns much deserves to swap his accumulated tokens of wealth for everything. This other person who works hard and own nothing deserves to swap his accumulated tokens of wealth for rent in a rundown shared house with 8 similar people. And he should be thankful for it.

Before this glorious age of capitalistic excess this poor bastard would have lived in a small shack in a village working the field. Yet, he did know what his time was worth. He did know where his labour went. He did see a direct correlation between his wealth and what he did. If you go back far enough, before we tied the lies of wealth into the actuality of wealth, before the strong tied the theology of inherited power into their position in society, almost all of society was agrarian and almost everyone was equal.

The deification of the rich was an essential part of growth beyond tribal cultures and into modern cities and nations and corporations. I am not going to argue that all progress is bad - but the process of attaining progress has relied upon the unleveling of society. If we have now got better technology, better access to food, better lifestyles, then why do we need to continue this lie that wealth is earned? It was a lie when the barons imposed levies on their fiefdoms and it is still a lie today. God didn't give you that wealth. Mummy and Daddy didn't give you that wealth. History gave you that wealth - and history is a bitch.

What percentage of people escape poverty through endeavour? We now live in a society where 20-24% of people in the UK - one of the great syphons of the world's wealth - now lives in internationally recognised standards of poverty. That isn't progress. That isn't the great reward for laissez fair politics. That is the ongoing abuse of the poor at the hands of the rich. Throw them a ****ing iphone and watch them be quiet. In India almost everyone has a ****ing mobile phone but barely anyone has access to sanitation - like toilets.

Laissez faire politics is the mindset of those who have. But it is also the mindset of those who are foolish enough to believe that those who have really want you to join them. They don't.

Yea because you are making the classic mistake of blaming the system for the corruption of the system.

You and your ilk want to throw the baby out with the bath water

 

[StJabbo1]

All I know is ChatGPT is excellent today.

Just had a Prod issue (hence just finishing work) and ChatCPT managed to format and create my 'fix' to the terraform to deploy a new database in AWS. 179 lines of code that i didn't have to spend hours reformatting and checking. Took me 20 mins.

Debugging and creating scripts seems to be one of its strengths, so long as it is fed good inputs. Where it struggles is with anything human-adjacent. To wit, here is the recipe it just generated for me that included the following ingredients: three tomatoes, a bag of carrots, celery, leftover chicken, and a 2003 Vauxhall Astra:



It did require a bit of prompting to get there: it initially did not want to cook the Vauxhall, but then I told it that if we did not cook it, it would go bad.

**** in **** out same old story since cave painting and quill pens.

 

[Schad]

Everyone in this country should be able to find somewhere to live that does not consume more than 15% of their income.

Doing some quick math: the median wage (pre-tax) for non-unionized employees where I am is about $3400 CAD/month. Average rent for a 1-bedroom is about $1700. So we're currently at 50% of pre-tax earnings.

 

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Yea because you are making the classic mistake of blaming the system for the corruption of the system.

You and your ilk want to throw the baby out with the bath water

The system is designed to be corrupt. You want to boil the baby alive in the bathwater and make some money out of the consequent glue.

 

[Saintjoey]

On child care costs, I recently saw a quote from a junior doctor, who has 4 children, saying that her monthly child care costs were £4000, but her monthly salary is only £3000.
I’ve always wondered (if it isn’t already happening in some places) why hospitals don’t incorporate a crèche/childcare facility into the building, with costs being set at a level that is affordable to their staff and subsidise the pay of the child care staff.
Similarly I wonder if schools could do this too, with schools local to each other banding together.
With the need for so many parents to work, in order to survive, it would be good if a government could come up with a proper plan to help them to do this, so parents don’t need to consider giving up work as a direct result of high child care costs.

some definitely do have ofsted registered nurseries but I’ve got no idea if the cost is offset/reduced in any way. Agree it’s a very logical idea and they could find a way of providing some form of tax cuts to registered healthcare professionals who use these nurseries quite easily.

 

[Osvaldorama]

I think the super rich are exactly the issue as you both say. I also have no problem with aspirational wealth - as long as is doesn't contribute to the problem. I know a doctor whose method of securing his future wealth is that he is buying up houses whenever he can. He now has 8. It is possible to be on only decent money and still make everyone else's lives a bit ****ter.

The law protects the wealthy against the poor. Nobody needs 8 houses. If you capped rents fairly - fewer people would prey on the poor this way.

It is weak governance to allow foreign investors to buy up your housing stock. We should be mobilising an army of housebuilders and shredding the value of real estate. Ordinary people don't give a crap about markets. They want somewhere to live.

We have a top down society. What we need is a bottom up society. Start with basic provision and allow people to grow and be successful from there. Everyone in this country should be able to find somewhere to live that does not consume more than 15% of their income.

This is such a low IQ take. By bottom up society, are you proposing socialism? The form of governance that has contributed to hundreds of millions of deaths and never worked anywhere?

Think about things from a more rational perspective and you will understand that hierarchies are a fundamental part of nature and therefore unavoidable in any system that is selected.

There is no way to stop wealth flowing up the heirarchy. All we can do is create a more equal system that adequately rewards those that succeed in it.
It is better to understand the reality of this than pretend it isn’t so. Only then can we hope to slow down the inequality. than to call for a complete change of the system.

All of the problems you mention come back to the easy creation of money. If the money was sound, markets would be more rational and the wealth gap would get smaller. Instead we see easily created money causing a feedback loop where the rich get richer.

 

[......loading......]

This is such a low IQ take. By bottom up society, are you proposing socialism? The form of governance that has contributed to hundreds of millions of deaths and never worked anywhere?

Think about things from a more rational perspective and you will understand that hierarchies are a fundamental part of nature and therefore unavoidable in any system that is selected.

There is no way to stop wealth flowing up the heirarchy. All we can do is create a more equal system that adequately rewards those that succeed in it.
It is better to understand the reality of this than pretend it isn’t so. Only then can we hope to slow down the inequality. than to call for a complete change of the system.

All of the problems you mention come back to the easy creation of money. If the money was sound, markets would be more rational and the wealth gap would get smaller. Instead we see easily created money causing a feedback loop where the rich get richer.

Why do you do this every time? Why do you think my reasoned points are innately beneath yours? It degrades the value of your response. Show me my replies are waffle with your eloquent responses. Don't use pathetic slight of hand techniques like "low IQ take" - anyone said that in a debating class and I would cut them dead and remove their right to speak.

All the things you have said that are nonsense I can disprove fairly easily, but your first words are so irritating that I am going to be you about it and just say they are stupid and move on.

 

[Schad]

All of the problems you mention come back to the easy creation of money. If the money was sound, markets would be more rational and the wealth gap would get smaller.

This is ahistorical nonsense. The Gilded Age, famed and named for its accumulation of wealth among the upper class, occurred at a time of 'sound money'. It also featured more market crashes than any other period in American history. The idea that this was a period of stability comes from a misrepresented fact: that inflation then was, on average, lower than today. And it was! But that's not because things were stable: it's because the economy veered wildly between high inflation (bad) and high deflation (worse). So if you just look at average inflation absent anything else it looks kinda okay, but if you look at the actual chart, it looks like this (blue line is the Gilded Age, more or less):

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That's really bad! High inflation followed by a lengthy period of deflation followed by rapidly increasing inflation. That's absolutely crippling for average people, and there's a reason why the Gilded Age was followed by the proles actually getting significant labour and financial reforms thereafter, because the rich clued in that people were asking ChatGPT for recipes involving two tomatoes, a bag of carrots, a stalk of celery, and the asshole down the street who has all the money.

 

[Osvaldorama]

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Funny how Google senior executives are scrambling to admit their mistake and change their software.


Meanwhile super genius Schad on the not606 forum knows that there isn’t a problem. LOL.

 

[San Tejón]

I think the super rich are exactly the issue as you both say. I also have no problem with aspirational wealth - as long as is doesn't contribute to the problem. I know a doctor whose method of securing his future wealth is that he is buying up houses whenever he can. He now has 8. It is possible to be on only decent money and still make everyone else's lives a bit ****ter.

The law protects the wealthy against the poor. Nobody needs 8 houses. If you capped rents fairly - fewer people would prey on the poor this way.

It is weak governance to allow foreign investors to buy up your housing stock. We should be mobilising an army of housebuilders and shredding the value of real estate. Ordinary people don't give a crap about markets. They want somewhere to live.

We have a top down society. What we need is a bottom up society. Start with basic provision and allow people to grow and be successful from there. Everyone in this country should be able to find somewhere to live that does not consume more than 15% of their income.

Land banking seems to be a thing now. An estimated 600,000 new homes could be built on land that has been bought with building permission approved, but there is no building taking place.
Taylor Wimpey, have admitted to having 75,000 building plots, but there doesn’t appear to be any pressure on them to build houses.
Perhaps planning permission needs to be more stringent, as in you start building by a set date and complete by another, with failure to comply meaning that the planning permission is removed, reducing the value of the banked land.
Building companies have too much power in these matters and the fewer houses they build the more expensive future houses will become, which is good for their bottom line.

https://www.propertyforum.com/property-in-the-uk/are-uk-housebuilders-stockpiling-land.html

 

[Schad]

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Funny how Google senior executives are scrambling to admit their mistake and change their software.


Meanwhile super genius Schad on the not606 forum knows that there isn’t a problem. LOL.

The problem with willfully misrepresenting what other people say on a forum is that it takes all of five seconds to go back two pages and see it. People keep trying to explain things to you, and you just keep reverting to insulting their intelligence. It's a bit sad.

 

[Osvaldorama]

The problem with willfully misrepresenting what other people say on a forum is that it takes all of five seconds to go back two pages and see it. People keep trying to explain things to you, and you just keep reverting to insulting their intelligence. It's a bit sad.

Just admit you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about and we can move on

 

[StJabbo1]

Just admit you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about and we can move on

I'm still looking for the English language version of the Dutch Wappie. Your posts over time qualify you perfectly, you fit the description to a tee.

 

[Schad]

There have been some actually interesting discussions over the past 24 hours, about the pitfalls of AI, about wealth distribution and public policy. It's a shame that you aren't willing to participate in those.

 

[It'sOnlyAGame]

I've been looking for an English version of wappie. In the Netherlands it describes a fool who is lost in their delusions, a weirdo, crackpot, a conspiracy theorist.

Writing your autobiography?

 

[StJabbo1]

Writing your autobiography?

Using the term to describe the noisy, deluded crackpot conspiraloons I come across online and occasionally in the flesh.

 

[San Tejón]

If anyone has missed this speech by Truss,in the USA, watch it and weep in the knowledge that she was the PM .

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[StJabbo1]

If anyone has missed this speech by Truss,in the USA, watch it and weep in the knowledge that she was the PM .

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Wappie.