> it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow? Considering there is data that partially contradicts your belief that it wasn't about immigration, maybe your assessment about their level of understanding of the issues involved is also incorrect.
> Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow?
politicians sometimes lie…?
the £350 million a day bus springs to mind as one example. the amazing trade deals which will unleash our new economy were another.
like, those things sound great. people wanted those promises to become real and believed the people who were saying those things could implement them.
turns out implementation is sometimes a lot harder than waving your hands and making a bunch of promises.
edit —
especially when the advertised numbers are factually wrong, and people know they are wrong — i.e. they lied.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
That isn't a big enough reason to assume everyone's been fooled. Or at least, the people who disagree with you have been fooled. That's possible, but it's also possible you've been fooled. So bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.
i’m going to post the quote above again, with more context from another quote, because you’ve avoided quoting the bit which actually demonstrates that this is a big enough reason to assume that enough people were fooled.
> On 27 May, the UK Statistics Authority chair Andrew Dilnot made a stronger statement against Vote Leave, stating that the continued use of the figure was "misleading and undermine[d] trust in official statistics".
misleading is politics speak for “lying with statistics”.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
two years later, after the claim was repeatedly denounced as being misleading and false multiple times, 42% of people surveyed still thought it was true.
that’s a significant representative proportion of the population, given 52% of people voted to leave.
it’s no wonder that 7 years later “brexit remorse” among leave voters is sitting pretty at around 60% or so (cba to source this, i think it was a yougov poll reported in the independent).
Most people are quite aware that politicians lie. It is a common trope in movies, tv and media generally. Politicians are quite disliked in the UK generally. So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
So? People frequently cherry pick information to justify their decisions after they have already made them. I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.
People seem to forget that a good portion of the Media and Parliament (including the Prime Minister at the time who won with a majority) were in favour of Remain. What is often ignored is that if you look at UKIP voter percentage before the referendum. It had risen from 3.1% to 12.6%. That was rising well before the bus campaign was a thing.
The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine. I also don't believe Dominic Cummings on how effective it was btw.
But in any event this will probably be my last comment on anything political on here because you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.
i find your comment weird. hopefully my reply clarifies why i find it weird. probably not. i’ve drunk too much coffee today.
> I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.
64% Con/65% Lab leave supporters versus 32% Con/20% Lab remain supporters. so, 65%-ish (hand wavy representative stat) of leave supporters believed the claim, which was misleading / false.
65% x 52% = 34% of all leave voters (very back of a napkin maths here). that’s a sizeable chunk of people who believed the lie. enough people to possibly swing the vote, given there was only 2% in it. that’s enough to swing it if there was no bus claim.
> The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine.
i completely agree.
but the bus is a great example of how people get lied to by politicians, who then potentially get their 34% of people convinced. which was the point i was trying to make. politicians lying has a significant impact on the outcome. it’s not solely responsible, but it has an impact. they bear some responsibility for the shit show we currently have now.
interestingly, the ipsos mori / KCL study confirms this somewhat
> you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.
1) commenting about the voting on comments is something we try to avoid doing here. have a read of the site guidelines to understand why (you’re a new user so i don’t know if you’ve seen them before or not)
2) people on HN generally speaking tend to be pedantic nerds like me who are probably somewhat on the spectrum somewhere and when they see a claim will call people out on it when it is wrong.
> Leave voters are least likely to answer correctly (16%) and most likely to wrongly think that European immigrants contribute less than they take out (42%).
> Leave voters are most likely to hold these incorrect beliefs: European immigration has increased crime; decreased quality of healthcare services; increases unemployment among low-skilled workers.
^ ipsos mori/KCL study
there’s your problem. you’re aligned politically with people who are, to put it plainly, more wrong about this subject than they are right. so when you try and defend your position on here, you are going to get significant pushback on claims because, frankly, a lot of the claims made by other people who voted the way you did are either wrong or misleading when they make their claims.
3) i wasn’t on the site in 2016 (did HN exist then? who knows). imagine what it would have been like back then!
4) i hope you stick around. compared to some commentators, you’re doing a bang up job with actually reading studies (which meant i’ve gone and read the study and learned something now! thanks!).
> So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.
bonus round. most people don’t believe politicians. they do, however, vote based on who the sun newspaper tells them to vote for (well, until recently).
There is in the section entitled "Preferences for different types of migrant: origin, similarity, skill level". (There doesn't seem to be a way to directly reference it in a document).
> Country of origin is not the only factor that people take into account when considering preferences on immigration. In the European Social Survey 2014, British respondents reported how many immigrants should be allowed based on a question that specified both the country of origin (Poland or India) and the skill level (professional or unskilled labourer). The results revealed that when migrants are professionals, opposition is low, and when migrants are unskilled, opposition is high (Figure 5). Research has shown that people’s general preference for high-skilled over low-skilled migrants is mainly driven by perceptions of their higher economic contribution
> The preference among the British public for highly skilled migrants aligns with previous research indicating that, when questioned about the criteria for incoming migrants, skills are considered more important than other factors such as race/ethnicity and religion.
My view is there needs to be a version of Godwin's law related to client of supposed 'racism', i.e. the one who claims ${issue} is caused by/related to 'racism' thereby loses the argument unless he comes with solid proof.
I see no proof, spurious claims of 'racism' do not count as such so it actually was about immigration.
It's disingenuous to pretend Brexit wasn't at least partially motivated by in-group preference. Almost as disingenuous as implying that there's anything wrong with having said preference. I don't open up my house to people I don't know regardless of their potential to contribute to it economically. Why is this treated as immoral when the same reasoning is applied to the immigration system?
I am not pretending anything. I've showed some actual evidence to back to back up my view point.
Moreover, time after time the British public are surveyed about their views on immigration and ethnic background is not something that is important to a large portion of the people taking part.
Are there some people that do care? Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
> Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
You have to read the analysis below as well as look at the charts. From the articles I linked
> As a further way of characterising countries, we include a second measure based on the percentage of people saying that immigration ‘makes the country a worse place to live’ On this measure, the UK maintains a similar rank position as one of the more positive countries in the sample, and similar to Switzerland at 18%.
> These two measures can be thought of as capturing opinions on future migration flows and current population stocks. In most of these 13 countries, it appears that people are more negative towards the idea of continuing flows than about the immigrants already present. Finland, for example, is a country where 42% of the public would prefer few/no immigrants of another race coming to live there, whilst, at the same time, just 19% think immigrants make the country a worse place to live.
It is still much better than many other countries in Europe.
> This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
Ok sure. I probably shouldn't have said minority. Yeah of course the distribution isn't going to be equal. However people pretend it was all about racism when it clearly wasn't.
We didn't leave the EHCR. So there is an argument that we don't have full control of our laws. IANAL and won't pretend to know the specifics.
> Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more).
Not just Conservative voters. Almost 1 in 5 Labour and Lib Dem voters want to see it reduced.
Generally 52% of the UK want to see it immigration reduced in some capacity according to the migration observatory. This was roughly the Vote Leave percentage.
The ECHR is an international agreement like many, many others. It has special status in UK law only because we chose to: that was the purpose of the Human Rights Act. You can also take complaints of breach to the European Court of Human Rights, but they have no enforcement powers (in particular, Russia often decided not to bother complying, and we've avoided enforcing their ruling on prisoner voting rights with their tacit consent).
It used to be the case that we were also tied into the ECHR (and playing nice with the rulings of the ECtHR) because it's required by EU law even though it's not an EU instrument and the ECtHR isn't an EU court. But as we've left that's no longer an issue.
Finally, I'd just say that there's little objectionable about the Convention, and for the most part it tracks very closely with existing British common law (not surprisingly, as it was a Churchill-supported project in the first place and intended to export what was great about the British tradition of liberty as much as to bind us into Europe). There are a few edge cases where politicians and certain newspapers get into enormous flaps about individual cases, but it's really not that constraining a convention: most of the clauses have get-outs for crime, morality and public order and the margin of appreciation is generally quite broad. It's not perfect any more than, say, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, but the complaints are mostly grandstanding.
I know. I felt like it needed to be pointed out that even on parties that are seen to be more centre-left/left that there is good portion of voters that are opposition to immigration.
This is because I don't think it is as much of a right/left issue like it is frequently framed.
> I heard in England they don't have proper insulation in most homes.
Almost every house and apartment I've lived in had had some sort of insulation and double/triple glazing fitted on the windows. So I found this quite hard to believe so I looked it up.
Official stats from 12 years ago say that ~70% of properties do have cavity wall and loft insulation as of 2013.
> Building to passive house standards can completely transform an energy bill.
They are plenty of regulations on how new houses are built on how energy efficient they are. However we cannot build enough housing for a number of numerous reasons to meet current demand.
It not that easy with their glued in batteries on some Macbook Pros. You have to essentially use alcohol to remove the glue to replace the battery. Absolute PITA. They could have used 4 screws and it would be easy to replace.
Apple has a high profit margin on their products so I expect better. This isn’t a cheap laptop from a supermarket.
Agreed but on the other side it makes the manufacturing more complex - another plastic part and screws as well as the time needed compared to just gluing in the battery.
I suspect this is a classic example of corporate beancounting at work, even if it just a dollar or two per machine, at Apple's volume of millions of machines that's nothing to sneeze at.
To fix it, we need laws that require a certain repairability score for all devices sold. Then doing the "right thing" would be a KPI that competes with pure financial incentives.
> Agreed but on the other side it makes the manufacturing more complex - another plastic part and screws as well as the time needed compared to just gluing in the battery.
>
> I suspect this is a classic example of corporate beancounting at work, even if it just a dollar or two per machine, at Apple's volume of millions of machines that's nothing to sneeze at.
They make a high margin on each device and other manufacturers can manage it fine at similar price points. I believe it was deliberate, they back tracked after being highly criticised for it.
> To fix it, we need laws that require a certain repairability score for all devices sold. Then doing the "right thing" would be a KPI that competes with pure financial incentives.
If people are concerned about repairability they should seek out manufacturers that offer products where they have a good track record.
Laptops, tablets and phones are seen as partly consumable by the majority of people and they replace them every few years. I am not saying that it is right, I am just saying that is the reality. Also not every problem can be legislated away and if you make something a KPI it will be gamed.
Contrary to popular belief the Dell and Thinkpads are really reliable as long as you buy their business laptops. The consumer laptops are often not great, but the business ones are rock solid, easy to repair and built like bricks.
You can also repair them yourself, so most people just wait until business update their inventory and you can get a cheap Dell/Thinkpad from ebay for a few hundred. I have a T480s, 24GB of Ram and a 8th Gen i7 processor that I picked up for £300. Granted the laptop is old now, but it runs all my dev software well.
Generally most of the Linux's have rough edges on the desktop experience. I am using Debian 13 (Current Testing) and while it is pretty decent these days there are lots of annoyances. I still dual boot for gaming and at work I use Windows.
Thanks. It's Youtube keep crashing on Ubuntu 22.04 every 10 minutes and I don't know why. I turned off hardware acceleration and did a few other tweaks, but judging the look of reddit posts I found, there is no solution. That's why I also keep a Windows laptop.
Any older business class laptop really. I have an two older Laptops. One is a Dell 6410.
The former has Debian on it with Gnome and I've stuck 8Gb of ram on the machine, slapped in an SSD.
The machine is 14 years old and it can reasonably handle browsing, mail, Youtube, Discord and VSCode. Gnome actually performs better than XFCE or any of the light-weight DE as long as I am using Wayland.
OpenBSD and Linux work well on it. OpenBSD as much as I like it has too many usability issues on Desktop IME, you might find it absolutely fine.
If you are using Linux make sure you are using Wayland. For decent Youtube performance turn off "Ambient Mode" in the Web UI, it wrecks the video playback performance. The box shadow effect with the video playing on top of it is too much for these old iGPUs to handle.
Totem won't work properly in Gnome due to it not having a OpenGL 3.X compatible GPU. VLC will work fine. So just remove Totem and install VLC.
Wow, that was my first PC HDD. (I had a 10MB HDD in my Sirius 1 before that)
Bought at an Egghead somewhere the Computer Museum in Boston while on vacation from the UK -- about half the price of something similar in England at the time due to exchange rate.
I've found the vast majority of my issues with JavaScript is the modern tooling itself. I really like the new language improvements over the ES5 e.g. not having to worry about scope/hoisting issues, async/await, fetch is much simple to what came before.
The tooling on the other hand is often a Rube Goldberg machine transpilers, compilers etc. Some of the information is documented, some of it isn't and it can be a massive time sink to get everything working together and have your IDE / Editor correctly configured.
TypeScript can be nice, but I run into rough areas where you are actively fighting the type system.
Most of the people that seem to be influential seem to be either Paleo-cons, Rothbardians and people that are believers in the Austrian School of Economics.
I am not an ancap because there are some major problems with their philosophy, but your analysis is just incorrect.
It was partly about immigration. According to these surveys 43% of people that voted leave think immigration should be reduced.
https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE9?:...
> it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow? Considering there is data that partially contradicts your belief that it wasn't about immigration, maybe your assessment about their level of understanding of the issues involved is also incorrect.