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Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

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Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#341
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest hit is not in goods trade but in financial flows. With the UK part of the EU, major financial institutions could base in London to serve the entire EU. Once the UK exits the EU, they can't, at least not without a lot of extra costs and paperwork. London, one of the 3 financial capitals of the globe, will lose its status in favor (probably) of a more diverse mix of European cities. This will have downstrea…

I don't think many UK citizens see big financial flows as being to their advantage. For 90%+ of them, I think that assessment is correct. Globalization has been dealt a serious blow here, and if you're pro-equality, that should be a good thing. Take an obvious and very direct example. Cleaning staff. Not having to compete with EU illegal immigrants will improve their labor conditions. Building workers and Polish gues…

> Cleaning staff. Not having to compete with EU illegal immigrants will improve their labor conditions

If now there are "illegal", how will change when the UK leaves?

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We buy more from the EU than we sell. We are the EUs biggest market. We buy 1,000,000 cars from Germany. It is massively in the EU's interests to do a deal with us quickly.

Politics is not always rational. It is also in the interest of the survival of the EU to deal with the UK in a heavy-handed manner. If a precedent is set that shows leaving the union is all upsides with no downsides, why would other countries remain? IMO, France has the greatest risk of leaving next, and without France, the whole EU might collapse. The kid gloves are definitely going to come off in the negotiations:…

> I have an inkling that's why the 'Leave' campaign is delaying the invocation of article 50.

Seriously. Do you even know what you're talking about? Only our elected government (who were on the remain side), can invoke article 50, and it's up to them to decide when.

Hopefully the whole EU does collapse.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#343
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's unlikely for EU nations to significantly damage trading relationships with the UK. Germany, for example, exports a huge volume of cars to the UK and it comprises a significant portion of German GDP. Yes, there's volatility around exactly how such a trade deal will get worked out, but it's unrealistic to lump "access to European markets" into one big ball and assume that Brexit means that whole topic will be…

> But it's unlikely for EU nations to significantly damage trading relationships with the UK Well, they can have the same deal that Norway or Switzerland have with the EU. The problem is that to have that deal they have to agree to be part of Shengen Area

1. Switzerland is not part of the EEA, they have their own agreements with EU.

2. It is quite possible to opt out of EU regulations while part of the EEA. But the Norwegian government do not have the balls to do so.

3. Norway had an older agreement with Denmark and Sweden about passport-free travel. It was not Shengen compatible. So either Norway had to join Shengen, or Norwegians had to get used to getting passports to visit said nations.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for the grandmother country to break out on its own. I've never had a high opinion of the EU. Mostly because of their ridiculous laws about the internet. I'm happy about this and I hope it works out well.

There is a good chance that Theresa May becomes the next MP, and if she does, British internet will be much worse than anything you can find inside the EU - she already tried cracking down on open internet multiple times. If anything, EU would have protected UK from such stupid ideas.

> There is a good chance that Theresa May becomes the next MP

No, there isn't. Seriously, where are you getting your information from? Are you from the UK?

There isn't a chance in hell Theresa May would even get shortlisted.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#345
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics is not always rational. It is also in the interest of the survival of the EU to deal with the UK in a heavy-handed manner. If a precedent is set that shows leaving the union is all upsides with no downsides, why would other countries remain? IMO, France has the greatest risk of leaving next, and without France, the whole EU might collapse. The kid gloves are definitely going to come off in the negotiations:…

People keep saying this, but punishing the UK for leaving could easily give further fuel to the French leave campaign. And of course an exited Britain could extend an olive branch to France.

> People keep saying this, but punishing the UK for leaving could easily give further fuel to the French leave campaign.

Giving the same deal that they have right now is what will give further fuel to leave. Why should I stay when I can have a better deal leaving?

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#346
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's unlikely for EU nations to significantly damage trading relationships with the UK. Germany, for example, exports a huge volume of cars to the UK and it comprises a significant portion of German GDP. Yes, there's volatility around exactly how such a trade deal will get worked out, but it's unrealistic to lump "access to European markets" into one big ball and assume that Brexit means that whole topic will be…

The biggest hit is not in goods trade but in financial flows. With the UK part of the EU, major financial institutions could base in London to serve the entire EU. Once the UK exits the EU, they can't, at least not without a lot of extra costs and paperwork. London, one of the 3 financial capitals of the globe, will lose its status in favor (probably) of a more diverse mix of European cities. This will have downstrea…

That's a good thing. Large financial flows correlate with increased severity and frequency of financial crises:

https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/public...

I don't know why people are crying about the financial sector. They have fucked over ordinary people time and time and time again and for once they get the short end of the stick. They're extractive parasitic economic actors who drive up costs and don't produce anything of value.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#347
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest hit is not in goods trade but in financial flows. With the UK part of the EU, major financial institutions could base in London to serve the entire EU. Once the UK exits the EU, they can't, at least not without a lot of extra costs and paperwork. London, one of the 3 financial capitals of the globe, will lose its status in favor (probably) of a more diverse mix of European cities. This will have downstrea…

I don't think many UK citizens see big financial flows as being to their advantage. For 90%+ of them, I think that assessment is correct. Globalization has been dealt a serious blow here, and if you're pro-equality, that should be a good thing. Take an obvious and very direct example. Cleaning staff. Not having to compete with EU illegal immigrants will improve their labor conditions. Building workers and Polish gues…

Who were these EU illegal immigrants you're talking about? The people from Poland are legal.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a snarky side remark, what will the UK do in the future instead of continuing to import cars, regardless of terms? Rely on its domestic automotive industry? One of the more credible arguments for leaving the EU is so the UK can negotiate their own international trade deals, as they feel the EU has been slow in negotiation. Opening up free trade to the US and Japan would probably be a priority.

> Opening up free trade to the US and Japan would probably be a priority. And how the deal will be better than the deal between EU and USA/Japan?

Different priorities. For instance, the UK doesn't have an automotive industry to protect like Germany does. So they could get a trade deal that's more tailor-made to them.

Obviously it's a huge risk as well since they're a smaller economy.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original poster is referring to an incident that happened in Cologne around new years; supposedly there was a "mass raping" (as some newspapers put it) which was soon blamed on the large amount of "fresh" immigrants in Cologne. As it turned out the "fresh" immigrants had, almost, nothing to do with it and most of the perpetrators were people who had stayed in Germany for an extended period of time already. Althou…

Bullshit. On the order of 1000 women got assaulted. One person got sentenced thus far, to the best of my knowledge - and he is indeed a "fresh immigrant". You have absolutely no basis for your claims.

There were about 2k incidents in total all across Germany, and 5 reported rapes. That's 0.25%.

That's 5 too many rapes, and 2k assaults (groping etc) too many, I've been molested before and it's obviously unacceptable. But it's also a far cry from rape, usually, like in my case.

Yet the media at times reported on this as if there were thousands of women getting raped in the streets. Those were blatant lies.

Some viewers and some sections of the (social) media, particularly online, also interpreted these alleged mass rapes as some kind of savagery that only a foreigner could engage in. Uncivilised barbarism only a muslim refugee could engage in. Yet every single year at Octoberfest, about 10 women report getting raped, and cases of sexual assault by drunk partygoers is orders of magnitude larger. Even outside of large festivities, about 20 women in Germany are raped every day, again, minorities have no monopoly on these criminal acts. Hell, for a brief example of the same city, Cologne, only a few months ago a reporter was sexually assaulted by white Germans who groped her, kissed her and made sexual remarks.

That's the point the guy was trying to make. Obviously none of this is acceptable, but immigrants or foreigners have no monopoly on criminal, unacceptable acts. The one or the other group may be overrepresented in crime figures, the data shows that, too. But the same data shows in study after study that when you control for things like age (young people commit more crimes), socioeconomic status (poor, unemployed people commit more crimes), gender (obvious) etc etc, ethnicity plays no role in crime. i.e. there's nothing inherent about an ethnicity or religion that programs people to such savage acts.

And this is obvious, we don't say these things about jews for example. But we used to, that's where the comment on jews drinking blood of babies comes from, because that's the silly rhetoric we used to spread, which led to widespread prosecution against them. Today we see, particularly on less sophisticated but all too popular social media, mistaken narratives about immigrants or foreigners or muslims or various other minorities, coming here to rape our women. That's a narrative we should reject because it's not true. It wasn't too long ago we somehow had a story of a 13 year old girl getting gang-raped by arabs for 30 hours, in the daily mail. Obviously that's a shitty paper, but it's also very well read. Turns out it was a complete fabrication, but who remembers that? But it's that exact narrative that leads people to unreasonable fear (there's enough of actual issues to be scared for, no need for unreasonable fears on top), fear that inspires things like this leave vote.

So did more than 1k women get assaulted? Yes, undoubtedly. Were there mass rapes? No. Are rapes and assaults by Germans a daily phenomenon, just like it is in every other place on the planet where people's rights are never 100% fully respected? Yes.

In short, it was horrible, but sometimes also blown out of proportion with bs rhetoric and blatant lies we don't need to have.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#350
post #248
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's unlikely for EU nations to significantly damage trading relationships with the UK. Germany, for example, exports a huge volume of cars to the UK and it comprises a significant portion of German GDP. Yes, there's volatility around exactly how such a trade deal will get worked out, but it's unrealistic to lump "access to European markets" into one big ball and assume that Brexit means that whole topic will be…

> Germany, for example, exports a huge volume of cars to the UK and it comprises a significant portion of German GDP ... In reality, most significant European trading partners with UK just want to keep on trading with them mostly as they have been Even if one accepts that existing trade will be accommodated through direct agreements, that only protects existing industries. What does it mean for future industries and…

This sounds like a huge deal to me. Lets say you want to invest and built a presence in a new market. Until now if you wanted to go to Europe you could have picked UK as you main point of operation, now you have to decide, huge market with easy open trade or UK.
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