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UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#321

Post by kergonath »

rayiner wrote: post #285
davewritescode wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was there any alternative to 6B people in the developing world offering to sell their labor and environment for less than the 1B people in the developed world? Arbitrage opportunities cannot go on forever without being outcompeted The alternative is to make sure that you provide a mechanism to bring the best and brightest to your country instead of coddling the least productive at home. It’s not popular politically…

> The alternative is to make sure that you provide a mechanism to bring the best and brightest to your country instead of coddling the least productive at home. Importing other countries’ elites seems like a bad thing for the proles both at home, and the country losing their best and brightest. Seems like a better alternative would be to do the exact opposite: force elites to stay in their home country and make it be…

> Seems like a better alternative would be to do the exact opposite: force elites to stay in their home country and make it better.

Absolutely not! We need people in position to make decisions to see the world and understand it, not be insular nationalists because they know no other country. We need more people high up in government who are familiar with the mainstream ideas and cultural quirks of other countries, and we need more contact between cultures. Having people go to other countries is vital.

You also want enough of them to come back home, ideally (though not all of them, expats are still useful from a soft power point of view), but keeping them and preventing them from going abroad in the first place is really bad and counter-productive.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#322

Post by gw98 »

kaashif wrote: post #292
gw98 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you traded our bananas republic for a gun toting corporatocracy with low employment protection and comedy healthcare and no food standards. I'm not sure who's worse off.

I moved from the UK to the US. Increased risk, increased reward. And if I'm fired, laid off, or deported, worst case I just go back to the UK having already earned hundreds of thousands of dollars more than I would have in the UK.

You can make the money in the UK if you know what you're doing.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#323

Post by gw98 »

extasia wrote: post #244
gw98 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you traded our bananas republic for a gun toting corporatocracy with low employment protection and comedy healthcare and no food standards. I'm not sure who's worse off.

I don't love the US system but our NHS isn't anything to shout about, I got quoted a 4 year waiting period just to see an ADHD specialist.

Conversely one of my children has a complex medical condition which would have bankrupted me several times over in the US. And the service has been second to none.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#324

Post by asdadsdad »

recuter wrote: post #90
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #3

I’m quite curious how this will end in the UK. Regardless of how much Brexit has to do with this, I think the lack of actual Brexit opportunities and the contribution it has to core inflation is at one point going to change the political landscape.

Proposed Scottish independence is 12 months away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_second_Scottish_indep... > In July 2022, the Scottish Greens announced that, if a referendum were blocked, they would fight the next general election as a referendum instead General elections are 25 months away. Labour is up 30 points in the polls or something like that. Brexit probably didn't help the UK economy but the economic…

Italy without the food, the cars, the fashion, the charming language and the weather? =)

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#325

Post by yufeng66 »

jphsnsir wrote: post #286
kaashif wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's happening all over the western world. It's not really happening in the US. The US economy remains strong and may not even go into a significant recession in the next year. The US dollar remains the world reserve currency and allows unparalleled monetary and fiscal policy freedom. No-one is losing confidence in the dollar the same way they did in the pound. Inflation is coming down in the US and it's in a fanta…

True, but how long will the rest of the world accept the USD as universal currency. When they don't the US can't keep printing, so the US will do everything to keep its current position. The 'switch' will be the problem of our generation.

I have been in finance industry for more than 20 years. People have been talking about replacing USD as reserve currency for as long as I can remember. The problem is nothing else is better. EUR? JPY? GBP? CNY? Gold? All of them have more issues compared to USD.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#326

Post by ProZsolt »

_benedict wrote: post #218
HDThoreaun wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are effectively no non-American corporations competing with FAANGs on salary. Not at any real scale.

FAANG in London are competing with finance, and there are plenty of non-American firms in finance paying high salaries.

FAANG in London pay way less than finance

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#327

Post by davewritescode »

rayiner wrote: post #285
davewritescode wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was there any alternative to 6B people in the developing world offering to sell their labor and environment for less than the 1B people in the developed world? Arbitrage opportunities cannot go on forever without being outcompeted The alternative is to make sure that you provide a mechanism to bring the best and brightest to your country instead of coddling the least productive at home. It’s not popular politically…

> The alternative is to make sure that you provide a mechanism to bring the best and brightest to your country instead of coddling the least productive at home. Importing other countries’ elites seems like a bad thing for the proles both at home, and the country losing their best and brightest. Seems like a better alternative would be to do the exact opposite: force elites to stay in their home country and make it be…

If you're strictly rooting for the United States to keep it's lead on the rest of the world (which I unapologetically am) then you do your best to to attract the best and brightest wherever they are.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#328

Post by scoofy »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #174

The UK is declining, and people are starting to notice it. People are blaming the government, and clamouring for more support and money, but unfortunately I suspect it’s not that simple. The elephant in the room, in my opinion, is that we simply don’t have the money to maintain the standard of living we once enjoyed. Almost all political conversations here are contingent on this fact, but this underlying problem is r…

I think it's housing, but then again I think everything in the post-globalization west is housing.

I got a graduate degree in Edinburgh, and the one thing I kept noticing about the entire country is how difficult and expensive it is to acquire housing. People literally ooh'd and ahh'd when they learned that a friend had inherited a small home in Norwich, saying she was effectively set for life. It's like California's NIMBY-fuel housing apocalypse, but on steroids due to the greenbelts.

The problem with a housing crisis, is that it's zero-sum wealth consolidation slow-motion event that takes place over a multi-generational period. A country's personal disposable income would generally pumped back into the economy constructively by/via entrepreneurs, but in a rent-seeking housing environment, that disposable income is lost to consolidated entities, who generally pump the excess rents back into further housing consolidation, or in international markets.

The reason it sneaks up on you is that once the housing freeze happens, you slowly fill in the excess housing capacity exponentially, until almost overnight, rents skyrocket. Suddenly, the nation becomes dramatically poorer within a decade or so.

The only good news to this theory is that it's trivially fixable with massive housing construction plans, the bad news is that it will be politically unlikely for people to suddenly vote to allow "ugly" new construction in the most historic and important cities in the country.

Just imagine how much capital Londoners could put to work if they had housing taken care of. As of 2017 they have been spending 50% of their income on rent: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42179119

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#329

Post by _benedict »

ProZsolt wrote: post #326
_benedict wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG in London are competing with finance, and there are plenty of non-American firms in finance paying high salaries.

FAANG in London pay way less than finance

That would only seem to confirm my point. There are plenty of non-US firms competing with FAANG comp in London.

Re: UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging

#330

Post by tim333 »

diordiderot wrote: post #242
HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #174

The UK is declining, and people are starting to notice it. People are blaming the government, and clamouring for more support and money, but unfortunately I suspect it’s not that simple. The elephant in the room, in my opinion, is that we simply don’t have the money to maintain the standard of living we once enjoyed. Almost all political conversations here are contingent on this fact, but this underlying problem is r…

Maybe because all economic surplus is absorbed by landlords [1] government contracts go to Tory party donors with no relevant experience, and public services are run by contractors and "consultants" who cost 10x of what maintaining in house talent would. 1. https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...

A phenomena I noticed is a lot of young hard working types came in from Europe to work / set up businesses here. On the whole they rented not really being settled here and the Brits who tend to own property made a fair bit of money without working through property income and appreciation. Now thanks to Brexit the young hard working Europeans have partly gone, while the older Brits who were used to not really having to work are not really taking up the slack. I'm not quite sure where it all ends up.
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