You don't even need lobbies. Anyone who owns a house isn't bothered by this, unless they are particularly fair-minded. It only affects people who don't own their own home, which is a much smaller voting group.
I think you misread it. The context was, _not low_ (ie. high) for the average person. For someone with a higher than average wealth however, £5k isn't all that much, especially if it could potentially protect the value of their assets
Of course, but I think a country can't survive long term if it's focused on raising the property prices of those with already expansive houses especially given the demographic slowdown/collapse. Or am I crazy?
I'd wager that for the sort of person who has the desire to care deeply about stopping windmills being built (perhaps feeling a need to 'conserve' the old way of doing things), instead of say, worrying about putting food on the table - this is pocket change.
You're surely joking. The IMF isn't bailing out the UK, and there aren't 3 day week debates because of the failing power supply. What's led to the death of the Conservative party is them doing exactly the opposite what a lot of Conservative voters want: bigger economy, and slower immigration.
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). The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
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.
> The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
Wealth and income are not zero-sum. Generally, people produce more than they consume (or we'd all be living in caves). Reducing people reduces output, growth, and wealth.
Legal immigrants from the EU were not the only source of migrants to the UK. Many come from elsewhere, legally and otherwise. Guess what: we have Brexit but we still have immigrants - impossible?! </sarcasm>
Plus it was never about immigration, it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
> 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.
The UK economy is already pretty small per-capita compared to other first-world countries. I'm certainly not one to argue for growth, but what is it about UK's conservatism that demands degrowth? It strikes me as antithetical to the liberalisation that I would think would form the right flank of the spectrum.
From my perspective, even economic concerns are driven by fear of immigration: it's just the same old "immigrants are taking my jobs but also somehow not growing the economy so I am now economically displaced" trope.
Britons do not, actually, wish to carpet their entire island w/ semidetached housing, so each and every immigrant occupying a flat is one less that a native could be living in.
When a polluting industry poisons the air and the water and people go to the hospital because they are coughing or they have dysentery, who will pay to cleanup the mess? If you frame the discussion as about “price” it is a non-starter.
I would argue it is better to talk about workers and their families. As in let us not shit in the river so our children don’t get sick and can go to school. Let us not poison the air so workers can do their jobs and not go to hospital.
1. You're welcome to argue that, but you haven't here. You've just stated it.
2. You shouldn't supplant one topic with another. High energy prices kill people, because energy drives the cost of everything, and people can direct less value into things that keep them healthy if they're spending a greater proportion of their income on survival. You can say "also air should be clean", fine, but not "Don't think about prices! Look over here instead!"
2. You can have your cake and eat it, if you drop the requirement to buy electricity at the price of the most expensive component in the mix. Spain did just that and they're currently experiencing an industrial revival thanks to comparatively low energy prices.
The context is "You want to raise the price of energy to make wind etc competitive?"
Adding a separate topic seems like a distraction. Everyone knows about negative externalities. I don't think we need to rehearse the same points to obscure the specific one I'm asking about.
No, you just need fossil fuel energy to be relatively more expensive, not for energy to be more expensive overall. It's happened already but we're currently being held hostage by the coal burners while they scramble to extract the last bit of rent they can.
There is no way to make fossil fuel more expensive without making energy more expensive overall, because fossil fuel is included in the category of "energy overall." The effect of making fossil fuels more expensive is that energy prices will rise. The point of the GP ("Not really. We need polluting energy sources to be charged for their pollution, ie stop using the atmosphere and land as a free sewer, which in turn will put renewables on an equal footing.") is that the goal is not to raise the cost of energy as a whole (even though this is the inevitable outcome of higher fossil fuel prices), but instead to price in the negative externalities generated by fossil fuels.
Put another way, in a world where fossil fuels are no longer consumed, there isn't any reason to limit energy consumption for its sake, since the whole point was to encourage adoption of cleaner technologies. There is a case to be made that this isn't true, since even the "clean" technologies have an environmental impact, but that is tangential to the discussion.
I love the idea of Durable Objects, and have thoughts about it in the health space (although having a single provider of them is probably a bad thing) but cross-cutting questions such as this seem to be quite difficult to achieve.
From the chat logs example in your article: how do you cope with a requirement such as "I as a user want to see all my latest thread activity in one place, across all my chat rooms?"
> In this case I think you can let them become inconsistent in the face of, e.g., write errors.
For devs using CF Durable Objects, people frequently use CF Queues or CF Workflows to ensure that everything is eventually consistent without significant overhead.
It's a similar pattern to what large cos already do at scale with keeping data up to date across multiple partitions with Cassandra/DynamoDB.
> From the chat logs example in your article: how do you cope with a requirement such as "I as a user want to see all my latest thread activity in one place, across all my chat rooms?"
I'm pretty sure the US had drones before Ukraine occurred. The US does invest in drones. Maybe they will more, but we're probably a little way away from them assuming the role of tanks any time soon.
"Drone" gets used to cover a lot of things; full aircraft sized Reaper/Predator drones down to toy-sized quadcopters. It's the latter which Ukraine has been developing, including a unique solution to ECM: the fiber-optic drone.
Small drones do not assume the role of tanks. Drones assume the role of WW1 aircraft: artillery spotters and very light bombing capability. They have this role there because both sides have SAM superiority over the other's airforce.
Drones solve the problem that combat aircraft are too expensive and too easy to shoot down.
There's things like the Anduril Bolt. They cost like 100x as much as devices the Ukranians are building from cardboard. Another major innovation is TOW style fiber optic control which is immune to electronic countermeasures. There's definitely a lot to learn, but sadly necessity is the mother of invention and not since WW2 has manufacturing cost really been a serious concern for US defense production. Seems like we'll need a really big war to make that essential, and then there's an open question whether we'd actually be able to do it given that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
> Seems like we'll need a really big war to make that essential, and then there's an open question whether we'd actually be able to do it given that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
I'm not sure if I'd be rooting for this eventuality.
You can fix some of this by having competent and independent inspection, which this seems to be. The rest - perhaps you can't litigate, but you can publicise, with details, and perhaps something a consumer rights watchdog or public body would pick up.
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