Comment by areoform
8 days ago
> Taxes are rising (with tax take falling)
> just mentioning increased immigration
One of these seems like the solution to the other.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income
Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.
I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.
Just my 2¢.
IMO, the wheels fell off decades before I was born.
The peak of the empire was around WW1, where the victory was immediately followed by Irish home rule, and Churchill(!) putting the UK military into austerity to save money, which is how it came to be that evacuating from Dunkirk involved a lot of civilian ships, amongst other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule
WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory. Not that Westminster collectively realised the nation's weakness until the Suez Crisis and the Wind of Change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(speech)
I'm not sure the people of the UK have yet fully internalised this decline, given the things said and written during the Brexit process. Perhaps social media really did make it all worse, but it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson may or may not have taken an arrow to the eyeball.
That happened a long time ago, the realization was the 70s.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.
Brexit may have been the emotional response, but like most it didn't help.
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Not sure why this was downvoted, maybe the use of "foreigners" is a bit loaded, but this is basically it.
Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.
We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
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> it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson
This. The UK was a band of feudal kingdoms that somehow managed to create an overseas empire. The empire is now gone, and the feudal kingdom is struggling to transform itself into a modern nation.
Everywhere was a band of feudal kingdoms. What’s so special about the U.K.?
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The Netherlands is politically dysfunctional and the people are egotistical assholes but at least the economy is ticking.
Without money society is just doomed.
> The Netherlands is politically dysfunctional and the people are egotistical assholes
Could you elaborate? From over here the Netherlands seems almost a paradise of modern society.
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The uk is a lot of things, but theocratic really isn’t one of them. If you’re referring to the House of Lords then you don’t really understand our government. The general population is as atheist as anywhere outside of Scandi countries.
> The general population is as atheist as anywhere outside of Scandi countries.
I appreciate the proximity of the two sentences made it unclear, but the general population isn't what I'm critical of in this case. I briefly had an Iranian project manager, that nation is almost as high as you can get on the theocracy scale (IIRC it would be beaten by Afghanistan), but he absolutely was not and had tattoos of video game characters.
Also, I should say that the use of "theocracy" in the modern sense is somewhat looser than the historical, and therefore ask if we're actually disagreeing? Certainly I don't mean in the sense of the deification of the Pharaohs.
Re the rest:
Given my focus is the rulers and not the people, I think the Lords Spiritual remain relevant (the attempt to replace the HoL with an elected one being promised by the HoC in 1911, still waiting).
Likewise that the head of state is also the head of the national church and there being a religious requirement for being crowned monarch, and that there is no desire to reform away the monarchy as an institution, likewise the Establishment nature of the CoE, making this the only non-meta conversation I've ever had where I can legitimately use the longest (recognised, non-systematic) word in the English language by saying that the UK political system is one of antidisestablishmentarianism.
I don't think I'd count the coins, even though this is about the ruling classes who are much more likely than anyone else to speak Latin and thus recognise the abbreviation printed on them. "FID DEF" has an ironic history, but so does the much easier to read "In God We Trust" and I'm not (yet) going to describe the USA in this way.
Aside from all of that, there's also the requirement of schools that:
…
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/collective-worshi...
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As for WW2, Roosevelt worked hard to make sure Britain couldn't reconstitute its empire, and to work toward global self-determination.
The more I study that time period, the more I realize how incredibly effed up every decision that those leaders made. They were desperate, I get it, but damn. And then most of the Nazi scum escaped and did their shadowy best to influence world history for many more decades!
> Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe
I only have to look as far as my own wallet to see the effects. I'm being taxed to the eyeballs while there is a glass ceiling preventing me taking any more pay home without a major jump which just isn't coming due to stupid tax rules keeping the working class from bumping into the middle class.
I see mine and my family's living standards drop only to be told by the news that I'm a likely target for more tax hikes, and there's just no room to tax me more while my bills have also gone up significantly, and something will have to give. If it gets to the point where I can't pay my bills despite being a "high earner" I'll have to start considering whether I leave with my family, and where to.
I'm not exactly the milky bar kid, but I imagine beyond my friends and family, I imagine the consensus would be very much the same, yet there goes two "successful" professionals and the children we were raising probably to be high earning professionals too.
I don't do social media, but I do keep on top of the news from all outlets, I try to look beyond the biases and form an opinion on a combination of sources.
I left in 2010 and the consensus is very much the same among my friends, or at least some of them anyway.
I’m no longer eligible to have an opinion UK or local conversations. “how would you know”, “the city’s changed a lot since you left”, “why are people who chose to leave so interested in X”, statements specific to ex-pats.
For those from outside the UK, ex-pat (expatriate) as a singular term is almost always derogatory regardless of context or publisher.
I believe the issue people have with the term ex-pat is that it sounds like a fart-sniffing variation of "migrant" (or the derivatives "emigrant" or "immigrant").
It's kind of wild how people can't accept that anyone would want to leave the UK, plenty of people come here, they're leaving other places, so this must be the best place in the world.
If you don't like it you must be foreign; I'm not, I was born and raised in England to British parents. Nowhere did I say I was even planning to leave, I merely suggested that if things got worse I might have to consider it, and I was jumped on for that.
Things ARE getting worse, but I'm not at that point yet, maybe we'll have a miraculous turn around and our public services will improve and our economy will grow, I'm not even asking for it to be sunny for 3 months of the year, but if they don't, am I just supposed to sit here on a sinking ship with my children next to me?
And let's be real, it's not even about me at this point, it's about what is and what will be for my children, I've worked hard to give them a better life than I had as a kid, and I'll be damned if I don't do it.
> earn a penny more
That is not how marginal tax rates work. Each income band is taxed at the rate for that band. It’s why it’s called “marginal” - because the rate change happens at the margin between brackets.
You are taxed 0% on your first £12571. You are taxed 20% on your next £37669, or, £7359.80 on £50270 of income. If you then earned one more pound, or £50271, you would owe £0.40 (40%) on that one additional pound only, for a total of £7361.20. There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.
> There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less
If you go from £99,999 to £100,000 and have pre-school aged children, you lose £2000 in tax-free childcare per child. If you have 2 children, that extra penny cost you £4000, 3 children, £6000, you take home less, fact.
Combined with the 60% marginal rate, you now have to get to £110,000 just earn the same you did at £99,999 and then there's the side point that a couple can earn £99,999 each, or £198,999.98 and still benefit from it while any single parent who hits £100,000 loses it completely, so a single parent high earner loses out vs a couple. I'm not a single parent but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.
EDIT: and that person who hit £100,000 has the extra burden of having to file a tax return from now on simply because they hit an arbitrary number, and despite being on PAYE, though perhaps some people love doing tax returns, so not necessarily a negative point.
https://www.gov.uk/tax-free-childcare
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> There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.
there are several
there's one at around 50k (where child benefit is removed) and another at 100k (where childcare vouchers are removed)
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Don't quote me but I don't think this is quite true if you take tax credits and other "benefits" into account - especially when it comes to child support.
That is only true of income tax. Not all taxes are marginal, and several have thresholds that behave exactly as the OP described.
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> taxed to the eyeballs
Emotional phrases aside, what is your total NI + income tax deduction percentage, and what percentage do you think you should be paying?
The problem isn't the percentage, it's that there are tax traps where earning a single penny more end up in you taking home thousands less, then you hit a marginal tax bands of 60%+, and suddenly you have to earn tens of thousands more just to break even.
They're well known an documented, but I'm sure you know that already.
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I just need to say that this is such a great question. Everyone is going to apply their own idea of "to the eyeballs" unless and until it is defined.
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What does "not exactly the milky bar kid" mean? That you're not white or set for life?
> One of these seems like the solution to the other.
If the per capita spending is exceeding per capita taxation, increased immigration does not solve the problem. More people requires more spending.
> The UK has always been an empire in decline
I find this fatalistic attitude to be very unhelpful in determining good policy decisions. If you start with the assumption that the empire is in decline then it doesn’t seem as bad to add policies that contribute to decline, as long as you get some short-term win out of it.
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> I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
There have been a number of public scandals regarding immigrant crimes, along with subsequent anti-immigrant riots started via social media and people being sent to jail for internet posts. Social media seems to be more of accelerant for social unrest than than the cause. For me (an outsider) observing the situation, it seems to be mainly caused by immigration.
Many of the areas most upset by immigration barely see any immigrants, whilst many of the most persistent spreaders of rumours about terrible things caused by immigration to the UK don't actually live there. Of course, it isn't just social media that obsesses over immigrants in the UK (and many other places), mainstream print media and politicians are pretty obsessed with them too.
Personally, I would rate the grooming gangs scandal as one of the worse things that happened to a western nation in decades. It literally made me sick to stomach when I read the details. I think the obsession is somewhat justified.
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The difference between social media and traditional media is, roughly speaking, the absence of a centralised editor that has the ability to gatekeep the nation’s discourse. If that’s not authoritarian I’m not sure what is!
Social media is a forum for people to complain about the problems they face, if you don’t like that the solution is not to censor the messenger but to fix the problems.
As someone who grew up in the UK I can tell you that the elitist mindset of the UK is a huge part of their problem: only the elite are capable sophisticated right-think, all others are wrong-thinking simpletons and must be silenced for their own safety. The BBC is a huge part of the problem as it is inevitably pro-government but trades off a strong image of neutrality, to the extent that it regularly misleads the public and they lap it up.
If editors are authoritarian for controlling what people see, then social media algorithms are super-authoritarian for the same reason. They also decide what people see, they also modify the cultural and political consciousness, just on a more granular level. An editor can try to push one group of people in one direction, but a social media algorithm can push multiple groups of people in multiple different directions.
IMHO, there's nothing authoritarian about either editors or social media. It only becomes authoritarian when they intentionally align with a central political authority.
Turns out most people are bad at editing the firehose of information coming at them to determine what's true and what's not.
I don't support censorship. But increasing the accuracy of the information most people are getting is a difficult problem to solve.
I always thought linking all the main things not working in the actual world to the alienation caused by too much digital consumption to be wrong/not really making sense. However, gradually, I am getting closer and closer to that conclusion... In your case, what brought you to the stance "Too much social media is what ails the whole world"? What do you think we could do to solve it?
Social Media used to be better when you actually had a connection to the other person. Nowadays it's mostly anonymous or parasocial. All social media sites have drifted to influencer content (TikTok, Meta, Youtube) or to moving the identity of the other person to the background (reddit, HN). The inbetween of early social media with smaller groups of people who know each other has gotten very rare
The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues
Bingo. In a nutshell: parasocial relationships doing psychological and financial damage; anonymous inflammatory content doing social damage.
And that’s without putting things like dating apps, advertisements and privacy violations in the mix.
Are you sure this isn't an Eternal September thing where the initial organizers were just an early-adopting minority, now overrun by a majority that actually has broad consensus on many issues? Also, do you actually have any evidence of bot effects? Would you be able to unleash a bunch of bots on Bluesky and make it seem to have a consensus on tariffs being a good policy?
If you go back in history you can find examples of people making the same claims about too much television. Prior to that, too much radio. Prior to that, too much newspaper consumption.
A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.
This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.
Did you ever consider that all the concerns regarding the negatives of new media might have some truth to them?
Technology is advancing much faster than humans can biologically evolve and very few people seem ready to seriously tinker with the human genome to keep pace.
Perhaps "the feeds" are just the inflection point where the information overload becomes obvious and baseline humans actually need a majority baseline human experience with all of the associated problems in order to prosper?
So, because some people in the past made (to you) incorrect arguments about something, that means anyone in the future making a remotely similar argument automatically has to be wrong? People in 2025 discussing social media have to be "wrong" because some subset of the population supposedly (to you) made a bad argument about radio 100 years ago?
All of that is broadcast / one direction. Social media is two-way. We've never had two-way mass communication. The rate of communication was an order of magnitude different also.
That doesn't make those claims invalid. Too much television is also a problem, and a lot of television content is junk. Tabloid newspapers are a scourge, as are opinion writers whose output often consists of fallacious propaganda designed to maximize confirmation bias.
They were right.
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As the other user said, people have been warning about new forms of media since the invention of writing. It has always been in vogue to be a nay sayer.
But social media is different. For most forms of media, TV, movies, books, radio etc. You had some degree of agency and choice over what you consumed. You couldn't set what a channel or station was playing, but you could change the channel.
You don't choose what you see on social media. You see what an algorithm thinks is most likely to keep you hooked / going.
Our brains only know what's real based on what's in front of it. You can acknowledge something is rage bait, but as you process it, you will still feel some degree of anger / discomfort. You can acknowledge that something is a cherry picked example, designed to tug the sensibilities of users, but it will still tug on your sensitivities.
And so sure enough, as you keep getting rage baited, concern trolled into algorithmic oblivion, it changes your gestalt. Your worldview shifts to one where those are data points, and it starts distorting your perception of reality.
Garbage In. Garbage Out.
Other people have said that it's like electricity consumption. No. This is very much like tobacco. I don't use social media. Even though I get paid to post to it.
You can still change the channel, it turn it off.
However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.
Get people hooked on local solutions and local social networks that exist "IRL."
Ok, but how could we do that? Especially since thing like eg. work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote...
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Man, right now if you're white and male you are very much the bottom of the pecking order in the UK.
The only successful professional white men I know and have known for the last 10 years are self employed...and even that is under attack. If you want a permanent job as a white man in the UK, your hope of career progress is minimal at best. You will only be promoted if there is no other option.
There is so much home grown talent in the UK going to waste in the name of modern ideology.
Its creating a kind of apathy towards work for a lot of people. Especially those now reaching their 40s. There are loads and loads of professionals with 20 years under their belts that have seen nothing but stagnant wages and slow / non-existant career progression.
The sad thing is, all of this hard line "white and male is stale" rubbish hasn't changed the balance in terms of wealth distribution...you can still he financially successful as a white man in the UK, just not through permanent work and definitely not working for British businesses.
Ive seen it first hand, I spent ages pitching a business idea and prototype to raise some funding. Not a sausage. As soon as I had a couple of black ladies involved (great lovely women, but far from the top of their game) money fell put of the sky. They didn't even have to deliver high quality pitches.
What is equally as sad is these two ladies don't want to be given hand outs based on their race. They struggle to work out whether what they're trying to do actually has value or whether they're just being given money because they're black and female. It messes with their heads as well.
Qualified immigration is indeed a net economy boost. But that isn‘t what‘s happening.
> One of these seems like the solution to the other.
Humans are not fungible cogs
Yeah totally agree - whether it’s Keir or Boris or whoever in charge, the one thing I want to scream at them is “turn the ‘net off! Turn it off!” People are simply too stupid to handle social media. If I was in charge of authoritarian Britain the first thing I’d do would be to flip the serious switches in the big network cabinet down at GCHQ.
As if the authoritarian state doesn’t prefer its subject distracted and entertained by Netflix, Reddit, TikTok instead of reading books and meeting in coffee shops to discuss anarchist literature and Uncle Ted’s manifesto. The Internet has proven to be the ultimate sedative for the masses.
Sorry to say, gizajob, you would make a terrible dictator.
> I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
Absolutely. It's not the only problem, but it is a serious and deep problem.
That’s absolutely spot on!
the empire was always propped by colonialization - there wasn’t much to go once the colonies were no longer a cash cow for the UK
This narrative is bullocks and I’m sick of hearing this framing. “The UK deserves it because colonialism”.
Contrary to your statement, the UK is a center of education, innovation, and still a major player in finance. The current malaise infects the West and is much more than “brexit” or “colonial hangovers”.
the sun sets on the british empire. The queen is dead, long live the queen.
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