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I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

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Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#141

Post by arrowsmith »

chgs wrote: post #140
rhubarbtree wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re looking at the wrong numbers. Wealth, not income. Wealth inequality is through the roof. Poverty is through the roof. More people using food banks than ever. More people on zero hours and low paid contracts. If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving, then you have no idea about the reality of living in the UK. Visiting some of the towns in this book would be a starting point.

The problem in the U.K. is the availability of housing.

If only our problems could be reduced to a single "the".

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#143

Post by chgs »

arrowsmith wrote: post #59
parpfish wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put. A few decades of compounding inequality transforms what used to be good natured ribbing amongst chums into bullying.

What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has been trending downwards since the global financial crisis. 14 years of Conservative government made this country more equal, not less, because they flattened the income distribution by making everybody poorer. The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.

The major change to income levels has been the massive increase in minimum wage. This removes the incentive to work hard and get skills because they aren’t valued, especially outside of London.

The other major change is the continual divergence of wealth.

If you are a 20 year old living near London you can get a crap paying junior job and live rent free for 5 years with parents while you save a 100k deposit (which using things like LISAs).

By the time you’re in your early 30s you have a decent paying job, have met a partner with a similar income, and can buy a house and repeat the cycle.

If you don’t you get the same job but have to pay rent to someone else’s parents, and you never get that deposit, so you’re trapped in the rent cycle.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#144

Post by zeristor »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #21
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #2

Yes, it’s a problem that something like that is insulting to publish.

Not necessarily. I think the interesting idea the article dances around is changing attitudes and sensibilities. In many ways, I think media of the 90s and even 2000s had a different balance of optimism and cynicism. Critical commentary was an edgy (or in this case humorous) counterpoint. 1999 saw dark edgy and dystopian films like the matrix, fight club that felt like a warning, criticism of a future to be avoided.…

Or could it be about “Othering” these destitute places, and realising far more of us are engulfed in humdrum of life collapsing.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#145

Post by zeristor »

stuaxo wrote: post #106
jimnotgym wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.

Unfortunately it's become embedded in the system with the houses themselves becoming vastly over inflated.

A Ponzi scheme.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#146

Post by mmaunder »

harimau777 wrote: post #35
mmaunder wrote: post #31

Great article with links to others, like this one: https://arena.org.au/stay-in-your-lane-the-oxymoron-of-authe... With quotes (re cultural appropriation) like “the ultimate endpoint of keeping our mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction… All that’s left is memoir” We’ve been suffering under the yoke of the intellectualization of deliberalization, censorship and oppression of ideas…

Personally I see it the other way around: the youth's increasing intolerance of politically incorrect ideas is caused by the increasing power of the "jack booted militia" on the right. It's not surprising that people try to suppress intolerant ideas when there is a very real risk of them being adopted by those in power.

> the youth's increasing intolerance of politically incorrect ideas is caused …

So, wrongthink. This is my point. And it’s incredible how the history of passing legislation to censor being ultimately used by the opposition just keeps on repeating.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#147

Post by tempaway4738438 »

karlgkk wrote: post #81
svat wrote: post #15

Loved the fact that this post didn't go where I expected it to (or at least, didn't remain there). That a book like this probably wouldn't be published today, or would be less popular today, is a point that has been made many times by many people, about many different books, TV shows, jokes, etc. But the author actually moves on from there; the observation is that even in his own opinion , the same joke isn't funny t…

Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago Sensibilities change. The sense of what is and isn’t punching down changes. Even the appetite for punching down changes. People who whine about “PC” always pretend like it’s the death of comedy or speech or whatever, and yet… there are younger people b…

Read the article, its much more interesting and reflective that that

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#148

Post by dmurray »

teamonkey wrote: post #121
jl6 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/ What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal taste by social media.

Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but… https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/ “for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.” “If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200…

> by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP

Those things are measured in different units, which automatically throws doubt on the ability of the source to be statistically rigorous in any other way.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#149

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

cjrp wrote: post #134
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #8

I remember a Web site, in the early oughts, called “sheppeyscum.com”. That URL now redirects to one that makes Sheppey look good. The original one did not. It was all about insulting the Isle of Sheppey (Western UK). I think an ex-Shep wrote it. Looks like all traces are gone. I understand that death threats were involved.

If it’s the Sheppey I’m thinking of, it’s in Kent (SE England)

You are correct.

Got my right and left mixed up.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#150

Post by debesyla »

lodovic wrote: post #86
amiga386 wrote: post #18

> There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years I will, it's ChavTowns. https://web.archive.org/web/20061013053524/http://www.chavto... Still running as https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/ Also the owner is giving up on it as of the start of this year -- mainly because nobody visits the site; churnalists just freeboot it and they rank higher on goo…

Now that's an interesting trend. It's no longer feasible to have an independent web site, because nobody will visit it because you don't have the page rank. Journalists that do find your site copy your data and may add a link (that noone vists). Their pagerank is much higher, so they get all search engine links and all the ads, for your content.

We have this situation in lithuanian web for a two decades now.

Once the big news networks (DELFI.lt, 15min.lt, lrytas.lt, alfa.lt and few others) bought out the largest blogs and connected them to their own domains, there isn't much of an independent web left. Owners of the websites back then gladly sold out (and I would have done it too), because it seemed like a great idea to sell your work back in the 2008-ish for real profit, an unique chance (imagine monetising your content when you have only 3 mil. theoretical consumers! There isn't much lithuanian speakers) and especially during the economic crisis.

Then the other blogs were attached to the networks by the generous offers of "let us publish and we will give backlinks, maybe" + "we will just copy it because we know that you won't bother taking us to court, it's too small of a country, you know".

So now whatever you google, you get mostly these results: 7 big network sites and subsites, 2 auto-translated AI slop generated by someone in other side of the planet, 0.9 of business pages and 0.1 something actually personal.

No wonder that almost all content creators moved to social networks by the 2015-ish. They still are there.

I wonder what will change this. A web apocalypse? Mass demand of in-person, non-online "content"? I wonder...

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