David Algonquin
@surplustakes
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Median millennial lifestyle after 1 year of National Progressive government
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The US CDC is going to recommend that 'essential workers' are vaccinated before the over-65s, despite their *own modelling* showing this will result in more deaths.
Why? They say it is unethical to prioritise the elderly because they are not racially diverse enough. THREAD.
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If you've enjoyed the political effects of having an outsized generation of old people, you're gonna love having an outsized generation of *childless* old people
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The 26,715 Nigerians given health and social care visas in the last year (mostly carers) brought 45,203 dependents with them
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Are there any high-status careers left? Finance blew up 15 years ago, tech is still lame, journalism and academia don't have the cash anymore. Surgeon maybe?
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"This acid attack really highlights the issue of men talking over me in meetings"
"Every day women will face misogyny and microaggressions... We have to do better,"
Caroline Nokes, Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, tells
@KirstyWark
more needs to be done to change the culture on abusive behaviour towards women.
#Newsnight
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One reason why humour is increasingly frowned-upon in the workplace is that it is an unfakeable and near-effortless way for the intelligent to display their mastery over concepts and language, which disrupts nominal status hierarchies
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A lot of this stuff is older generations genuinely not realising that their financial intuitions are out of date.
Holidays, entertainment and clothes have all got significantly cheaper in real terms while deposits for house purchases have of course spiralled
Kirstie Allsopp is quite right. I just cancelled Netflix and bought a house for £5.99.
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Very amusing interview on Radio 4 just now where a Chatham House type says yes Bukele has solved El Salvador's terrible murder/gangs problem - but "at the cost" of locking up 75k gang members. He does note that the El Salvadoran people seem to approve "which is a shame"
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1) UK smashes net migration records
2) UK immediately suffers historic rental sector housing crisis in employment hotspots and university towns
Centrists: this is the one thing we didn't want to happen
31.5% increase in Glagsow Uni students over five years.
You may or may not be surprised to hear that according to the University "the majority of its growth was in international postgraduate students"
This is what 467k student visas p.a. inevitably looks like on the ground.
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I find it... almost uncanny how routinely gorgeous things in the past were: here, the tram, the bridge, the streetlamp, even the uniforms, all are functional, all are elegant and beautifully-wrought
A Newcastle Corporation tram crossing the High Level Bridge in 1923.
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A very British reaction to a skyscraper that is shorter than the Chrysler Building (1930)
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Yes, my main memory of History GCSE in the 00s was that you would be given some text labelled "written by a supporter of the government" and then to get a A you needed to write something like "this source may be biased as the author would have wanted to support the government"
Imv, perhaps the worst development in history teaching over the last fifty years has been the idea that pupils should learn history *from sources* –often by ‘inferring’ information or piecing it together for themselves.
Here’s (quite literally) a textbook example.
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Etiquette aside, the Palace "where are you from?" fracas is quite an instructive example of three key elements of (sorry to those who find the term cringe) "wokeness" as practised by our institutions...
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Future British living standards being shredded must be one of those high-pitched sounds that you can't hear if over 40
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This is absolutely deranged. UK government refuses planning permission for a data centre despite recognising an "urgent need" for it partly because it thinks *being right next to the M25* has negligible impact on green belt amenity value
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The levels of racial segregation seen in many English towns and cities - as per the 2021 Census - are extraordinary, worrying and have gone almost entirely unremarked
Meanwhile we Brits love to think of ourselves as far superior to the Americans and French on this issue
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I always had a sense as a child that knowledge was being actively hidden from me, occasionally you'd catch a few minutes Jonathan Meades on television, or find a discarded 80s chemistry textbook that actually explained chemistry
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"Britain can be the Next Silicon Valley!"
'Minister, should we build a new hyperscale data centre next to the capital's orbital motorway?'
"Good lord no."
This is absolutely deranged. UK government refuses planning permission for a data centre despite recognising an "urgent need" for it partly because it thinks *being right next to the M25* has negligible impact on green belt amenity value
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For almost anyone in Britain, googling old pictures of your home town is a massive massive blackpill
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1) Government massively increases low-skilled migration
2) Fastest population growth in 60 years
3) Economy shrinks
4) ???
GDP is estimated to have fallen by 0.1% in Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2023, revised down from the previous estimate of no growth.
Meanwhile GDP is now estimated to have shown no growth in Q2, revised down from the previous estimate of +0.2% growth.
➡️
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You'll be paying taxes your whole life to pay for pensions and healthcare of the 100s of thousands of minimum wage care workers we are importing at the moment from India and Africa, plus their families
It's totally fair to argue for much lower migration, but you have to be frank about the costs.
Either private costs or taxes will have to skyrocket, and I'm not willing to pay lots more tax for boomers' care.
If they want to tax pensions and wealth, or pay private then sure!
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"Birmingham wtf" is going to become a semi-regular theme of British politics over the next few years
Bonkers fact of the day: a higher share of workers are graduates in mega rural Powys (over 35%) than in the Birmingham Metro area (just 30%).
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1) Deliberately train far too few doctors
2) Set a very high academic bar and lavishly subsidise their training
3) Heavily inventivise them to emigrate via your nationalised monopoly's pay terms
4) Import staff from poor countries with far lower levels of education and skills
NEW: we need to talk about NHS staff retention.
At a time when Britain’s healthcare system is acutely short of workers, *1 in 7* UK-trained doctors are practising overseas. No other developed country is like this, which immediately tells you there’s a problem.
Let’s dig deeper:
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Silicon Valley, Oxford and Cambridge shown at the same magnification
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This true? Seems like a pretty good option for less academic men if so... What percentage of people would fail to become a bricklayer if they tried? Why can't we teach a chunk of 14-16yo boys to do this to a decent level?
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Hmm what could it possibly mean that schools built 50 years ago are now in such a terrible condition that apparently we must rebuild them wholesale, while Victorian/Edwardian state schools still look solid & beautiful after 100+ years of the tender mercies of municipal government
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This is sort of the point: the young have to choose between i) moving somewhere (OK, London) where you can succeed in a big way but will be v badly housed by any developed country standard ii) narrowing down your ambitions, staying in the provinces and owning a family home by 28
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Perhaps petrol stations could be forced to erect large illuminated signs displaying their prices to passing drivers
Many have called for a Pumpwatch.
We are listening and making it easier for drivers to find the cheapest price at the pump.
We are forcing fuel retailers to provide live price information - increasing competition and bringing down prices.
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90s tech guys: Libidinous, great dress sense, completely unaccountable to their employers yet also indispensable to them
00s tech guys: played by Jesse Eisenberg
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Pretty stunning admission from former universities minister Jo Johnson that 25% of Indian and Bangladeshi students in UK drop out, many without even paying.
That would equate to c. 50k drop-outs in the last year alone.
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You awake in a damp cell, what feels like a rough concrete floor, sounds of scuttling. How long have you been out?
"TYLER COWEN, OVERRATED OR UNDERRATED"
You clench your jaw. Quietly, defiantly: "Correctly rated."
You realise you've said it before.
They shock you again.
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40 years ago: 23-year-olds universally considered adults, many married with children
Now: 23-year-olds are de facto wards of the state and should live in subsidised monitored cupboards
Two things govt should immediately do for young people:
1. Build student halls-type housing for subsidised rent for yp in their early 20s in areas where lots of jobs - modern version of 1970s London hostels.
2. Big expansion of degree apprenticeships.
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The 90s-brained over-50s of right and left who run politics and the media still have a Richard Curtis mental image of Britain, and are completely unprepared for the country that their policies are creating
In a place such as Birmingham, which has high deprivation and many different cultures and languages, spreading accurate health messages is difficult. Translating leaflets is not enough - many people can’t read even in their own language. 2/x
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If you're not a dual earner striver magic circle slash mckinsey slash investment banking slash Amazon couple preferably with family money you gotta be thinking London exit strategies if you want living space superior to a Victorian mill worker
This is what a £1,000,000 (1 million pounds) house is just so we’re all up to date
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How was this built? We just don't know.
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Why always worse?
(note also condition of buildings in the background)
It's been a landmark in Weston-super-Mare since 1935 🌸
But the group looking after the floral clock say they needed to make it easier to look after.
This is their plan ➡️
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Far from being A Job Brits Just Won't Do, the proportion of the care workforce that is British was stable at c. 85% until early 2022, when the Tories introduced their policy of replacing natives with marginally cheaper workers from India and Africa
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Wealthy: Heavily mortgaged 35yo millennial paying upwards of £2k in interest a month for a £500k mediocre commuter belt 3-bed (net worth: £50k)
Not wealthy: their 55yo neighbour who owns outright (net worth: £500k)
Political solution on council tax surely has to be that revaluation happens but any changes flowing from it, or new tax bands only take effect when the property is next sold
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I see the Tories have now managed to radicalise [checks notes] The Economist
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The NHS productivity picture is now so bad that I think we can no longer ignore the possibility that sourcing a rapidly increasing proportion of our clinical workforce from much poorer countries to save on training costs may not have been a free lunch
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We are living in the ruins of a more advanced civilisation
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Reminder that many young people don't think that net migration being well over double the level of new house building has any effect on affordability because they don't believe that supply & demand apply to housing
Wow I didn't realise that immigrants set rent prices I thought it was landlords thanks for linking these two unrelated graphs
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Doubling Oxford and Cambridge populations and lab space via new town extensions would have immaterial political blowback at national level for either party and would result in innumerable good news stories by the end of a parliament.
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More generally, this manifested as a weird reluctance of history teachers to tell you anything that had happened in history
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These elements are downstream of the privileging of anti-discrimination over all other values and moral considerations, a reductive approach endorsed by the education system and all UK institutions.
This will continue to yield perverse results in the coming years.
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National Grid CEO is gently alluding to the fact that UK planning system has point blank refused to allow the necessary transmission lines to connect wind farms with energy users, resulting in higher costs for consumers, a higher probability of blackouts & higher CO2 emissions
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Migration has added 1.1 million people to the population in the last 2 years
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Incidentally, this report has many classic bureaucratic hallmarks:
- the spurious symmetry of three equally weighted categories, each with sub-categories
- the erratic marking thereof
- the artificial separation of "Ethics" and "Science"
- the opaque and questionable modelling
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Again the media fail to grasp reality of diversity in the UK - they should have been filming a mile or so east of here where there would have been no white people to interview or walk about in the background
Leicester is the one least white places in the UK so I went to ask them about immigration
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"Bread prices are not natural forces. They cannot swell or spike on their own. If they rise, it's because kulaks are hoarding grain-"
Rents are not natural forces. They cannot swell or spike on their own. If they rise, it’s because landlords and lettings agents have put them up. This week’s newsletter
@theipaper
is all about the enormous problem of historically high private rents…
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We need fake international students to prop up our fake universities, which we need to prop up our our fake second-tier city economies. This is why we are a high-growth, high-productivity country
#Universities
are essential to prevent economic and
#population
#decline
in second-tier
#cities
.
Without universities the risk of descending into lengthy development traps is very real.
@mmadafonseca
on the role of universities for
#development
at
#GeoInno2024
.
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Pretty annoying the UK government cancelled that interconnector to France cos it might have affected the view of Grade II listed cottage in Portsmouth (I am not joking).
Capacity would've been ~5% of UK electricity demand. Sounds like it might have been useful in the future!
One of them is that UK power stations are burning far more gas than usual, turning that into electricity which they then export to the continent. Suddenly the UK, which has mostly been a big importer of electricity, has become a big exporter, sending record amounts to Europe(!)
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Irish identity of course has many attractive elements but above all is absolutely perfect for narcissists today, as it is the only identity available to white people that comes pre-packaged with a socially-approved air of victimhood
I think British people don’t understand how many white Americans have a strong Irish ethic identity, even if that identity often gets reduced to kitsch—and how deep the resentment of British tyranny against our ancestors is among that group.
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Would be illegal in Britain right? (steps to front door, windows extend too close to floors)
People often don't believe that we can build as well today as we used to, but these new townhomes in Brooklyn beg to differ!
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Oh my god it's real. The deliveroo grad visa route to citizenship via a minimum wage carer visa... it's real
Our analysis also shows which jobs people who moved from the Graduate Route to the Skilled Worker Route are doing.
Over 60% of people who switched in the year to June 2023 became care or senior care workers. This is far higher than the share of visas going to people who applied…
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2) Intention does not matter
Asking people where they are from has only been widely understood as potentially offensive for 10 years or so - the fact that an 83yo might have missed the memo on this is thought to be irrelevant
I‘ve known Lady (Susan) Hussey since I was 18. She is a decent woman and certainly not a racist. She often asked my mother where she was from because she had a Central European accent. I am sometimes mistaken for non British because of my colouring. I’m never offended.
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Delusional. Every single western country has effectively limitless demand for immigration to it from the "Global South". The average global income is less than a quarter of UK GDP per capita & you get free healthcare here. Meanwhile, Europeans are leaving Britain on net, and fast
Net migration on this scale is hard to reconcile with declinist narratives about the UK.
Britain has profound problems but that this many people want to live here means something (the UK had net *emigration* during other periods of supposed decline).
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People suggesting conversion to housing don't understand the deep floor-plates of modern office space and that - while it is fine to seat office workers well away from any natural light or outside views for c. ten hours at a time - this would be unacceptable for human beings
Oh, no.
The largest office building in St. Louis has sold for $3.5 million, per WSJ.
In 2006, it sold for $205 million.
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Of 1.2m arrivals, 5% were on a "skilled worker" visa (i.e. not in health and social care).
The rest:
-Dependents
-Doctors/nurses from poor countries (due to long-term UK undertraining)
-Carers on ~minimum wage
-Students, many on dodgy masters
-Refugees and small boats arrivals
🎙 Coffee House Shots | Should Sunak reduce immigration?
🗣 Should the government cut the number of work visas, to immediately reduce this figure, or should it accept that high levels of immigration are needed to sustain the economy?
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Replacing the native healthcare workforce with migrant staff from poor countries still going well I see
The NHS productivity picture is now so bad that I think we can no longer ignore the possibility that sourcing a rapidly increasing proportion of our clinical workforce from much poorer countries to save on training costs may not have been a free lunch
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This is what it looks like when an economy euthanises itself
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Reminder that Penny Mordaunt pulled strings to have this major piece of the UK energy system cancelled under the flimsiest of pretexts to avoid temporarily inconveniencing her constituents
Pretty annoying the UK government cancelled that interconnector to France cos it might have affected the view of Grade II listed cottage in Portsmouth (I am not joking).
Capacity would've been ~5% of UK electricity demand. Sounds like it might have been useful in the future!
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How many art deco and/or gothic revival skyscrapers would it take to completely revive Britain's economic fortunes? 3? 5?
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The more you think about it, the crazier it is that there are endless streets of small 2 storey houses in the London suburbs that cost the thick end of £1m each, and are occupied by households with incomes £100k+ who are banned from adding a storey to their homes
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The SUMIF all fears
Opening a spreadsheet to discover someone has ruined my beautiful formulae
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💥Citizen! Do you have more bedrooms than allowed for under the National Bedroom Standard? Please report to the LSE for immediate resettlement.
💥New! The cross-party consensus that the way to tackle the housing crisis is to build more homes isn’t working. Instead, we should be pursuing innovative policies that make efficient use of the existing housing stock.
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In 1987, this kind of living space was considered squalid and depressing enough that two unemployed & skint actors might live there
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Have said this before but: open goal for any British city to copy the buildings in this photo for their next 10 mid/high-rises and immediately become one of the most iconic cities in the world. Just so easy.
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"You don't understand. If net immigration falls below 600,000 per year, this country will explode."
@NJ_Timothy
@jamesjohnson252
Works the other way round too though - people who want numbers significantly reduced never want to acknowledge the problems that would cause the heath service, economy, HE etc...
Fine to talk about improving UK skills long term but that doesn't help right now.
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It truly is a mystery
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3) Transgressions are unforgiveable
Despite her immediate resignation and apology, Lady Hussey will now be tarred for life as a racist. And despite her departure, the Palace will now be considered to be "in crisis"
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The lower end of the UK university sector is such a con
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1) Lack of proportion
Despite clearly being a trivial incident, the racial element magnifies Lady H's remarks into an immediately sackable offence. And this is thought to discredit the entire institution up to and including the King despite said immediate sacking.
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Birmingham collapse reminded me of the crazy world of equal pay settlements for completely different jobs
Seems medieval to go back to the idea of the wages of different jobs having a "just" value that can be determined by an Expert.
Surely that's a widely held position amongst economists?
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One fun example of Brit preference for skills/people over investment/bricks&mortar is that London has five major subsided symphony orchestras but precisely zero decent concert halls for them to play in
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Britain has Eastern European levels of railway electrification.
(In Western Europe, only Ireland & Denmark(?) are worse)
UK gov talks a lot about heat pumps & EVs, but we haven't even reached for the low hanging fruit of decarbonisation
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Bureaucracy is too important to be left to the bureaucrats.
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Britain should aim to become an extremely bizarre and incomprehensible place, and almost entirely overgrown. Foliage everywhere.
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Fascination of intelligent women with romances between young men like Call Me By Your Name and Heartstopper reflects the sublimation of standard fantasies due to heterosexuality having been rendered increasingly Problematic. If you doubt this, consider...
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It's never openly stated (for obvious reasons) but the implicit position of many people involved in this debate is that everyone in Afghanistan (population 40m, literacy rate 37%) should have the right to come and live in the UK (population 67m, literacy rate 99%)
The News Agents ask
@tomhunt1988
how an Afghani woman fleeing the Taliban could ever claim asylum in the UK if, as he says, people should stop in the “first safe country they reach”…
Listen on
@GlobalPlayer
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In both scenarios, vaccinating the over-65s is predicted to save the most lives.
In the disease-blocking scenario (which sounds more relevant to the Pfizer vaccine) more than twice as many deaths are saved by vaccinating the elderly first, compared to essential workers.
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The Tories could easily slash net migration before the next election if they act now
1) Immediately end the social care visa (est. Feb 2022) - this is 200k alone
2) Immediately end the "deliveroo" grad visa (est. July 2021)...
Betrayal! Slap in the face! It's easy to be outraged, but answering questions on immigration is hard
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This is part of a wider trend of UK courts extending their power over society, cancelling economic transactions freely entered into and usurping the functions of government via blatantly subjective "irrationality" judicial review rulings.
So apparently UK courts can decide that two unrelated jobs are “of equal value”.
And people in the “underpaid” job get to sue for years of lost wages.
And this has driven their 2nd biggest city bankrupt.
Am I getting something wrong or is this as crazy as it sounds?
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Brit decadence: building the Edinburgh Tram cost twice as much and took twice as long as expected
The *Edinburgh Tram Inquiry* is now 6 times over budget and has been running for longer than the tram took to build
Logically there should now be a Edinburgh Tram Inquiry Inquiry
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This is based on the slide pack below.
This takes for granted that healthcare workers will be first-in-line. The question is whether the next group should be other essential workers, the over-65s or adults with high-risk conditions.
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"I never thought physical shortages would constrain MY life" sobs woman who has voted for the Constraining People's Lives With Physical Shortages Party 30 years running
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My main fear with appealing to the British public to patriotically reduce their energy use is that it would work too well and we'd end up with thousands of grannies shivering themselves to death for the Queen
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An increasingly pertinent question this decade is going to be: "Where is everybody?"
Nice Victorian pub unable to stay open despite being surrounded by what can only be described as Cubes of student housing
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Men and women not being interchangeable widgets infuriating people again
Of course many men would find it more humiliating to be dependent on their wife or girlfriend due to their own failures, than it is to be one half of a skint couple
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Supporting annual net immigration being at 500k+ because We Could Just Triple Housebuilding is like supporting your couch potato friend upping his food intake to 5000 calories/day on the basis that he could - if he wanted - adopt the training regimen of an Olympic cyclist
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Difficult to imagine a worse policy idea than further streamlining the import of untold thousands of what will be mostly young men from Afghanistan, one of the world's most violent and uneducated countries, with completely different norms around e.g. the position of women
Excl by
@oliver_wright
and I:
Channel migrants from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Syria will have their claims fast-tracked under plans to clear the backlog.
It sounds like an amnesty but Home Office sources insist it won't go that far:
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Quite funny watching northern euros groping around for culturally acceptable ways to express concern about their societies getting much worse: "Imported ultra-violence could be bad... for... growth!"
Financial Times: Sweden’s long-term growth at risk from gang crime, warns central bank chief
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Only in Britain could you imply with a straight face that it is somehow profligate for new homes to have as many as 4 (four!) bedrooms
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Britons "to be driven literally insane" by the slight tightening of an unskilled visa route created in 2022
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The British dilemma: on the one hand you get yesterday - on the other the centres of British Islam like Bradford, Oldham, Birmingham, Luton & Tower Hamlets are presumably very prosperous and not economic basket-cases totally dependent on transfer payments or anything like that
In the streets of London today: “Intifada, Intifada, Intifada!”
A reminder that in the last Intifada (2000-2005), Palestinian terrorists blew up buses, restaurants, and clubs killing over 1,000 Israelis.
For these people, October 7th was not enough.
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So - with just Ethics to go - the over-65s are in the lead. Ethics is itself split into three sub-categories.
The key consideration (helpfully highlighted in red) seems to be that "Racial and ethnic minority groups [are] are under-represented among adults>=65"
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So the recommendation that essential workers are next in line after healthcare workers.
I believe that the CDC is making a final decision this Sunday (though states have the final call).
This is the same CDC that comprehensively botched the initial stages of the pandemic.
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Shouldn't be physically possible to be this 90s-brained 30 years on.
This is like boasting about Swinging London during the John Major years.
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