461–470 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They would have been better off losing. Crazy when you think about it. Better if they had let the Nazis won and ruled the UK? WTF?
That was never going to happen. And the Nazis didn't exist in 1914.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue. It is one of things that europeans can learn from Americans. My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse because all they care is preserving their wealth and the working class don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
In Germany, you can typically finance the first 1-3 years of your start-up through government gifts like "EXIST". That's why you don't need early seed investors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a Brit, when I was raising the seed round for my startup, UK and European VCs would consistently try to haggle you down on price while the American VC's were exclusively focussed on trying to figure out whether this could be a billion dollar business or not ( Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns an…
It's because post GFC the USA stimulated and the EU went all in on austerity. It is fairly clear what was the best option.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
but still has worse growth than the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier Mostly the US is an outlier. Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but UK food is very cheap, compared to almost anywhere in western europe and nowadays with the states too.
The depressing thing is that it'd rise a lot more if supermarkets weren't using their weight to squeeze farmers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and rich UK people to invest in new UK companies. It's the same problem with many of our companies being sold to foreign investors: profits are taken outside the country (as we did to other countries in the 19th century and earlier) so our labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.
> labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer. in reality, the UK isn't poorer than before. It is about the same - no growth. It is only poorer when compared to the US's growth. One's labour, when being paid market rates, does not make one's country poorer. And those profits from said labour was paid for by the acquitition of the capital - money was invested. So in essense, the "poorness" that the U…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The good news is that a relatively small amount of aggressive planning reform (namely, firing everyone involved and never calling it "planning" ever again) will fix most of the (fixable...) worst aspects of modern Britain. We banned building stuff in 1947, we can undo it.
The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be. We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places. What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and c…
If we made cars like we make houses there'd be a long queue outside every car dealer as people returned them to get their money back
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier? I would say the UK, Europe, and Japan all have similar wages (although Japan has worse benefits and on the whole a larger expectation of workers so it's not like for like.)
> Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier Mostly the US is an outlier. Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.
That's not true - UK food is _very_ cheap, and overall living costs are quite a lot less than the UK. Property is the real killer in the UK (and eating out I suppose).
Here's a story I tell from time to time. When I was at uni, we had an internship as part of the course. The course was a joint course between Engineering and Econ/Management, so you could choose from a very wide variety of industries to satisfy the thesis requirement. The business school would coordinate the internships. So I went interviewing in the engineering firms to the west of the country. Aerospace, materials,…
At this point someone please explain to me how finance doesn't exist to extract wealth from the rest of us.
The problem with labourers who work in these secondary markets however, is the same as the guards who watch the gate: they can extract large tolls for being in the right place at the right time.
People in finance are rich because they're well-placed to skim highly productive traffic. However, it is -- in the vast majority of cases -- only skimming. The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.
Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point someone please explain to me how finance doesn't exist to extract wealth from the rest of us.
It's called capitalism because we use capital to allocate value creation. So obviously finance extracts wealth, that's their job in a capitalist system.
The banks profit margins would suggest that they are not really facing the fierce winds of competition.
God, this place is such a sh*thole (literally if you count the sewage in the water). It's depressing. Every week, X is going downhill, Y is failing, we're out of money. I am so hopeless about my country's future. I feel that this is our century of humiliation.
Exactly. It's not merely the Fabian state, being ruled by lawyers, by socialist agitators, it is the vast swathes of proles who cheer every time they crush success or do wealth appropriations. It feels like you are always just two steps away from being rounded up in a pogrom for merely having savings. The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings. It's horrid.
If you have a little padding no-one will be coming for you.
Everyone in power is desparately trying dance around tax reform. When you tax productive work much more heavily than unproductive work (looking at our etf holdings grow and crowding out home/business owners with buy-to-lets), you are going to get stagnation.