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How the U.K. broke its own economy

theatlantic.com

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Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#351

Post by [deleted] »

switch007 wrote: post #334
walthamstow wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you think the north and Scotland would be better off together. The south east would only get richer under such a scenario. Taxes-too-high is a common refrain but income tax + national insurance takes 26% of my 95th-percentile income. Is that so bad?

You forgot employers NI (for the unfamiliar - the employER has to pay 15% from April - not a typo - of part of your salary in taxes to the government and this is hidden from your payroll taxes as an employee) What's the % if you include those deductions? In my case my tax rate is 29% but employers NI is 13% so 42%, going up to 44/45% in April

[deleted]

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#352

Post by [deleted] »

chrisbriard wrote: post #322
Manuel_D wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity. Intermittent sources don't just experie…

[dead]

[deleted]

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#353

Post by imtringued »

monkeycantype wrote: post #314
gosub100 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I think there's an entire political party that capitalizes on suffering, offering to jump in and rescue the poor victims. Like racketeering: create the problem and sell you the solution "if you just vote for us, we'll fix the devastating problems caused by $BADGUYS". but an absence of problems means you lose your voter base.

An interesting thing about this comment is I have no idea which side of politics you are criticising.

At least in Germany it's clear that it would be the AfD. In the US, you could say republicans, but I'm getting the impression that democrats are prone to this too.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#354

Post by TheFuzzball »

darth_avocado wrote: post #286
marliechiller wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.

Brexit was absolutely about Economic conditions. Anti immigration sentiment was one big factor that everyone talks about, but in reality the sentiment itself was a symptom on display for the underlying condition of people having their living standards drop. The second big factor people kept bringing up was that EU was making decisions for UK, which people thought needed to be reversed. Austerity measures, which EU ad…

Absolutely agree.

When my boomer dad complains about the Pakistani family he went to sell something to having 2 BMWs it's definitely racist.

But the racism is inflamed by poor economic conditions, and the rationale is "how come these people that aren't even from here have a better life than me?"

Sadly, people seeking power know this and use the racism to get power and don't fix the underlying cause, which was never immigration — it was wealth inequality.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#355

Post by jajko »

drawfloat wrote: post #310
nikkwong wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.

We’d had a decade of zero growth and 30 years of industrial decline in the North. The country was not doing well, that’s the primary reason it was inevitable putting a big button marked “do not press, posh boy David Cameron says he doesn’t want you to but has no other solutions. Ignore the people saying it will fix the country” would result in the button being pressed. The economy was doing well for some parts of the…

Well now its not doing that well anywhere, bravo. Thats the problem with populists - they easily find some real issue and point to it, blaming all even completely unrelated woes on it. So far so good.

But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Like trump stop blaming immigrants or its (former) allies for all US woes.

The cure? Nothing easy, intelligent moral population for democratic elections. Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good (ie refusing 6 weeks mandatory minimal paid vacation per year for workers). That's the population bar for true democracy.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#356

Post by ascorbic »

milesrout wrote: post #254
walthamstow wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that the natural landscape of Britain is forest. The enclosed fields people think are natural countryside are in fact an entirely human creation.

The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain. Are moors not natural landscapes because they were formed hundreds or thousands of years ago? Is it natural when animals do something but not when humans do it? Or is it natural when hunter gatherers do something but not when agriculturalists do it? Or is it natural when non-industrial people do it, but not when industrialists do it? And why does you…

> The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain

It's quite simple: there is none. Moors are created by farming and logging. All woodland has either been planted and managed by humans, or self-seeded on land cleared by humans. Aside from a handful of tiny patches (which are questionable) there is no primeval forest in Britain.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#357

Post by tsimionescu »

jodrellblank wrote: post #299
lenkite wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't these also massive mass bird slayers ? The last I read, over half a million birds were killed (official under-estimate) by wind turbines in UK alone every year

Humans in the UK killed and ate over 111,000,000 birds just in January 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/poultry-and-poultry...

They also raised about 110,000,000 birds that otherwise would never have been born. This is completely irrelevant to wind turbines or any other power generation tech - the impact on wild birds is what is of concern, because, by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#359

Post by [deleted] »

switch007 wrote: post #334
walthamstow wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you think the north and Scotland would be better off together. The south east would only get richer under such a scenario. Taxes-too-high is a common refrain but income tax + national insurance takes 26% of my 95th-percentile income. Is that so bad?

You forgot employers NI (for the unfamiliar - the employER has to pay 15% from April - not a typo - of part of your salary in taxes to the government and this is hidden from your payroll taxes as an employee) What's the % if you include those deductions? In my case my tax rate is 29% but employers NI is 13% so 42%, going up to 44/45% in April

[deleted]

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#360

Post by tsimionescu »

manquer wrote: post #218
cam_l wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are going to freak out when you find out how many birds are killed by buildings generally. But you might want to sit down before i tell you how many are killed by cats.

And all of those numbers pale in comparison in how we cruelly we treat birds used in the food supply chain (eggs, chicken etc). The recent kurzsesagt video is a great intro to the topic ( https://youtu.be/5sVfTPaxRwk )

This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Wild bird populations are potentially at risk, and extinction of a population has massive ecological consequences. Commercially raised chickens and the horrors they are exposed to are completely unrelated to that.
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