131–140 of 238 posts
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In the Americas. Being a petronation on the edge of America’s backyard evidently works fine. America won’t try to coup that part of the world. (As far as I know.)
Canada and Denmark (Greenland) would have a word with you.
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It’s hard to be a petronation in the Americas.
Norway is probably the best managed petrostate. The key appears to be directing revenues into foreign investment and use the gains to pay for social programs over long periods of time, rather than dumping money into your economy.
Which was a policy suggested by an Iraqi (Farouk al-Kasim) to the Norwegian government. [0]
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
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There are more to worker's rights than the minimum wage, and saying that "The UK has only had a minimum wage act since 1998." as if its evidence for poor worker's rights in 2023 (or at least worse than the the US's) doesn't really make sense, firstly because that was 25 years ago and plenty can change in that time, and secondly because we are comparing worker's rights in 2023, not 1998.
So you don’t think that having a shorter history of certain workers rights is also a proxy for current workers rights? That you can just wave a magic legal wand and go from zero to workers paradise in 25, 50, 100 years?
For what it's worth, Sweden and Denmark do not have minimum wages even today. So no, it's not a hugely useful proxy, otherwise according to you the US may have better worker's rights than Denmark (trivially false).
Is there something weird going on with that Buc-Ees example? If I search for [buc-ees food service manager salary] on Google then Glassdoor snippets say things like "The estimated total pay for a Food Service Manager at Buc-ee's is $47,378 per year." and "The highest-paying job at Buc-ee's is a General Manager with a salary of $69,776 per year." which are far off the numbers in the poster which claims a General Manag…
* Annual energy use per person in the US is 77,000 kWh; in the UK it’s 30,000 kWh. * Annual electricity generation per person is 12,700 kWh; in the UK it’s 4,800 kWh. Consuming/generating less energy is a good thing, no? If we presume energy is the limiting factor, then the other bullet points suddenly look a little different. For example, productivity: US $0.96/MWh²; UK $1.65/MWh².
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That doesn't make any sense. The point is not whether or not we should dismiss nonsense, it's that often it's the "stopped reading at X" type comments that are the real nonsense
People don’t have time or won’t make the time. They use heuristics (“nonsense”) to sort out the (in their opinion) chaff. With the deluge of content that is available it is simply their prerogative.
They have time to make said comments. It's not that they don't have the time, but perhaps that they want their opinion to heard and their implicit supposed authority to be recognised with the minimum amount of effort.
>With the deluge of content that is available it is simply their prerogative.
It's their prerogative regardless of the amount of content available. That's irrelevant.
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This seems like a deeply off-the-wall take. Why would the UKs living standards increase? Because the world continues to get richer. Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? That's a heck of a claim. Has any country that was among the richest in the world regressed to developing nation status? This is supposed to happen on the basis of being marginally disadvantaged in trade negotiations? Get real. This…
Argentina. India. It doesn’t take a lot for a country to go down the tubes.
> But there is one problem. There is virtually no recognition of how bad things are among British elites Not just elites - ordinary british people too. I've been saying for 10 years that britain is falling behing the rest fo Europe. I give real examples from my life, "In Czech republic I/anyone has access to Proton therapy and housing is better built, but in Britain protin therapy is missing (was first built last yea…
When comparing with places like Czech Republic, people often forget that most of this area in "Eastern Europe" (this isn't Eastern Europe really) was very well-industralized until the mid-20th century when things went very wrong. So it is true, places like the Czech Republic have done well versus the UK...they have good policies in place, they are doing sensible things. For some reason though, the comparison is never…
Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part of the EU means they will mostly be squeezed in trade negotiations. And the UK does not have any industry going for it, so sooner or later the living standards would catch up with the rest of the developing world at the middle.
London. London sans the UK is Singapore. This article is valid for UK-sans-London, but we shouldn't pretend that London is suddenly Warsaw
Growing up I assumed the UK was pretty rich. But then when you look at the stats, the UK is about as wealthy as Mississippi, one of the poorest states. Learning that people with college degrees in the UK make 25k GBP, and that is considered good, sure isn't that bad when GBP was worth 2x USD. But people are living in London for those salaries. The big expensive cities in the US, like NYC pay you much more to compensa…
£25k/year isn't good, most social science grads from lower-ranked unis will make more than this. The only exceptions tend to be jobs that select heavily from groups with inherited wealth (journalism, PR, politics, etc.). There are plumbers in the UK who don't work full-time and make £300k/year (Pimlico Plumbers, notoriously, pay massive salaries because they do a lot of on-call work in central London). It doesn't cos…