161–170 of 238 posts
Britain isn’t a developing country, it’s a regressing one. Public services and government that used to work well now don’t, and opportunities that everyday folk used to have they now don’t. It’s still a nice place if you’re in a good career, but the long term prospects don’t look good.
I travelled the world and learned a long time ago that the world, as viewed through macroeconomic lenses, is pure delusion. GDP does not correlate with actual quality of life by any stretch of the imagination. The definition of "developed" versus "developing" is purely arbitrary. Life is highly context-dependent, i.e. there are plenty of places and people in developed countries who are much worse off than some places…
How are you including war crimes in this calculus? I'd rather be mugged than have a fascist rocket kill my entire family.
Wonderful city otherwise though, coffee and chocolate shops across historical center especially.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we should be more like these countries either...that we should be friendly to business, that we should limit immigration...strange, isn't it? I've run a startup in UK and my family has a company in CZ, Britain is so much more friendly to business from my experience. > there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" [by brexit] What is the basis for your opinion? I hav…
Because you have never worked for a large business. It is almost impossible to build anything anywhere, there are massive amounts of regulations if you do get started, interventions from multiple levels of government, it is genuinely mad. Look at mortgages, you have the government telling private banks to bail out mortgage-holders...do you think this would happen in Czechia? Just think about is happening: bank execut…
I am working for a large mutinational right now
> It is almost impossible to build anything anywhere
ye the british planning system for real estate is insane.
But if you want to build motorcycles, certify them as roadworthy and sell them, it's really easy.
> you have the government telling private banks to bail out mortgage-holders...
Let me ask you a question, if those. mortgage holder go under en masse, and yhe housing market starts collapsing, will the banks be calling the government?
> The rules with VAT are unrelated to Brexit,
You are charged VAT on all imports. When we qyit customs union, podt from my family became imports. This has nothing to do with China.
> You don't understand how any of this stuff works
eh..
Pointing out the salary of a car wash manager at an Alabama Buc-ees is cherry picking to the extreme. There are exactly 3 of those jobs in Alabama. It's not like it's a common job. The actual median income in Alabama is 27K almost 50% less than UK median income.
UK median household income £29.4K https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom
There are no US states as poor as the UK, Alabama included.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2 decades of EU largesse and cross-Europe migrant remittances will do that. Does the UK have a similar windfall coming? But don't other countries have more than two decades of reimttances yet are still stuck at 10x lower gdps than poland? Could it simply be that good policy and hard work are the reasons why poland is developing?
Good policy and hard work go a lot further when there's steady funding and guaranteed market access to support that. I'm not attributing all of Poland's advances to the EU, just mentioning that Poland's trajectory was upwards due in part to these factors. Factors that the UK does not currently have in its favour.
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…
> Learning that people with college degrees in the UK make 25k GBP, They mostly don't; if you annualize the UK median weekly earnings with a degree from 2016-2017, you get GBP 30,524. (Unfortunately, this isn’t a regularly-published breakdown.) https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... > In the US I know people with GEDs working Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Diesel Mechanics, etc. making $100k-150…
For college educated people, the median wage in the US (in 2022) is around $71,000/£54,000 [2] compared to (in 2019) £34,000 in the UK [3]
Note that almost all Americans get health insurance from either their employer or via Medicaid with around 8% of Americans lacking any sort of insurance [4], but even then in most cases they would most likely be covered by subsidized prices [5], so it would be a wash comparing with the NHS or using that as a justification when even Australia, Canada, and NZ have much higher salaries compared to the UK despite having a similar healthcare system.
Big picture, it appears that if you are skilled or semi-skilled, you can earn significantly more in the US than the UK.
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/2022/may/construction2.htm
[1] - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
[2] - https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/educa...
[3] - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/graduates-continue-to-ben...
[4] - https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-th...
[5] - https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/study-finds-hospitals-cash...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, but that comparison literally underpins the main point of the article (Britain becoming like Poland is bad). Been to Poland recently? It's... kinda nice! He says in 10 years Britain (currently nice) = Poland (up and coming?) = Bangladesh (not as nice)
> Been to Poland recently? It's... kinda nice! 2 decades of EU largesse and cross-Europe migrant remittances will do that. Does the UK have a similar windfall coming?
People focus on GDP a lot, but wealth is just as important - because wealth creates opportunities and innovation. When Poland transformed from communism to capitalism most people had savings for less than a month. Nobody was rich. You can't do a startup or a company if you start starving after 1 month without income. And don't get me started about trying to get a credit when your only asset is house you share with 6 other people in the middle of post-communist nowhere.
This changed in last 20 years, but we still got long way to go.
People in the west are blind to how wealthy they are, and how many opportunities it creates. I worked for a small family company in UK that did embedded devices for blind people. 2 students after university created it because a father of one of them got blind. It's still hard to do in Poland. In 90s it was impossible for 99.9% of the population.
Anyway - I also disagree with your characterization of Polish economic boom. The EU contribution to Poland started at about 2.5% of GDP and is currently around 1% yearly. It's nice to have, but it's not the determining factor. Polish export to EU is over 33% of GDP for comparison. It grew over 20 times since 2004.
It's not the donations that keep countries in EU, it's the trade.
I think one of the things that’s missing from these conversations is that whilst UK wages are far lower than the US, median wealth is actually way higher [1]. I would argue that this means that the UK is very much a country that is on a backslide, rather than a developing one. The other issue is that so much of our economy is limited to London. This would be less of a problem if we were a country like Greece where ba…
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.
AIUI, American citizens must eat broken glass once a year under the name "filling taxes".
Many nations in Europe require businesses to eat broken glass just to do basic business functions - Spain is astonishingly non-functional.
By contrast, most British citizens have very little red tape to contend with, and what form-filling does exist can be done easily online.
Creating a company takes an hour and has a very light annual burden.
The US was first to deploy large-scale electrification, and settled on 110 V @ 50 Hz. Everyone who wasn't buying their equipment from the US saw some flaws and went for 230 +- 10 V @ 60 Hz. First movers often end up committing to a suboptimal first draft version. The UK has a lot of these. The railways are notoriously expensive and inadequate because they're over a century old, and we're designed for a different soci…
The sheer lack of respect that Brits have for techncial and scientific education is insane. It seems everyone in the UK is trying to target some sort of Finance or Consulting adjacent role or some sort of Government role.
Almost every decisionmaker that I interacted with there appears to be some kind of an Econ, Classics, or Law grad, while similar roles in the US or Canada would have someone with a STEM degree or military service experience.