6 ms·

World: If you jump off the cliff, it's going to hurt really badly. England: Nah, everything will be so much better at that bottom of this cliff. World: But th

World: If you jump off the cliff, it's going to hurt really badly. England: Nah, everything will be so much better at that bottom of this cliff. World: But that's a really high cliff, and you're talking about jumping off of it. England: YOLOooooOOOOooo Also England: These broken legs really hurt. I probably won't be able to walk for a while. World: <Jackie Chan face>

pojzon 4y ago
Thank you for explaining it for younger audience, but I dont think many of them visit hackernews.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  The YOLO crowd have to be in their mid to late 20's at least, now, right? That seems like prime HN demographics.
  - OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
    What are the hn demographics? Is there a regular survey or anything? Would people be interested in a survey?
    - kergonath 4y ago
      That would actually be very interesting. There’s a bunch of young idealists, but also a bunch of old geezers, and I assume everything in between.
    - reducesuffering 4y ago
      You can roughly tell by the prevalence of Twitter compared to Snap/IG/Facebook. 30s is definitely highest proportion, not 20s by a longshot.
- sph 4y ago
  The younger ones are not the one that need an explanation, as the distribution of votes in favour of Brexit was strongly correlated with older age. Brexit reinforces my very controversial belief that pensioners should not be able to vote. The future is not theirs. Elderly wisdom is a terrible cultural meme. People grow wiser as they age, but are not wiser in the absolute. Also, a young mind ingests many orders of magnitude more information about the world than a person with declining mental faculties and ossified beliefs. /rant
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Hmm. I am going to oversimplify a little bit. On average, young people see the world, see that it does not work, and want to change it. Hence, they chant: "Change things!" On average, old people see the world, they already settled on a routine that mostly works for them ( genuine survivor bias ) and do not want to change one thing for fear of losing what little they have. Hence, they chant: "Stop changing things!" It is a question of balance. I always said that the biggest problem with democracy is its weakest link as it depends on a well informed voter. Fear is not a great advisor, but it is a great motivator.
    - sph 4y ago
      The other huge problem of democracy is that it doesn't account for human biases, such as the Donning-Kruger effect: people with high expertise tend to see flaws in one party or the other and will tend to not vote for anybody, while people with low expertise and knowledge buy any politician's lies wholesale and thus can be easily swayed by the best liar. So on average more liars get to govern us than good politicians. Additionally, the other issue is that the best people with the expertise to solve a country's issues are exactly those that couldn't be bothered to get into politics. Likewise, career politicians tends to be absolutely inept and unqualified to run a country. Democracy is the least worse form of government, but it still is very very bad.
  - andrewinardeer 4y ago
    My grandfather is 98 years old. Despite family protestations he still drives. There is no law in my state which demands he undergo yearly driving tests to ensure he still has the capacity and mental faculties to do so. This is not going to end well for him or more importantly someone else. It is crazy.
mrlonglong 4y ago
Nicked.
yodsanklai 4y ago
To play devil's advocate, I'm not sure (the rest of) Europe is much better off.
- origin_path 4y ago
  Sshhh, you're not supposed to point out that inflation and recession are happening in many countries. The unwritten rule here is that if anything bad happens anywhere in the UK, it's always because of leaving the EU. Also we're not allowed to remember that just a year ago the UK was crushing Europe in vaccine access so badly the EU was openly talking about seizing British assets to try and catch up; the unique performance of the UK in this area was due to it ignoring the EU joint acquisition programme. That's all been memory holed a long time ago, of course. The EU is best at everything.
  - pasabagi 4y ago
    Eh, you're overthinking the vaccine story. It's unsurprising that the UK had better access to vaccines: the UK is one of the world's biggest medical industry centers. The point about inflation and recession is not that it isn't happening elsewhere: it's just that it's worse in the UK. It's also kind of obvious that putting a tariff on all your exports (leaving the common market) is bad for the economy. I suspect brexit is more a symptom than a cause. The UK has had horrible economic growth for over a decade now, largely driven by a political system that concentrates power in the hands of not particularly competent people.
    - makomk 4y ago
      UK inflation in September: 10.1% Eurozone inflation in September: 9.9% I've seen some wild claims circulating that, for example, 80% of the UK's inflation is caused by Brexit but those don't seem at all plausible. No EU member has inflation that low, France's is about the lowest at 6.2% and that's with some fairly substantial and expensive energy price subsidies keeping it down. In fact I don't think there's any country in the developed world with inflation as low as that would imply the UK's should be if not for Brexit.
eloff 4y ago
Yeah, that about sums it up. I ended up holding a bunch of GBP, in an company in admistration (bankruptcy.) I'm getting a haircut on my haircut. If you made an inverse ETF taking the opposite side of my lifetime investment decisions, the performance would be stellar.
unity1001 4y ago
You described the process as something that was quite polite. It was more like they screamed, yelled at, smeared and insulted everyone who warned them. And when people informed them that the warnings started visibly coming true, they doubled down and declared everyone as an enemy. Brexit process and its aftermath was a crazy, crazy case study, once in a lifetime observation opportunity for social sciences.
- thedrbrian 4y ago
  its not Brexit. They spent 700 billion on covid.
  - BerislavLopac 4y ago
    Both of those are effects, not the causes.
  - gghhzzgghhzz 4y ago
    not sure that there was 700 billion spend during covid. but there's nothing wrong with pumping money into an economy that you have forcibly restricted (or that is in a recession for that matter) the issue is that you need to be in control of where it ends up. UK has an extremely financialised economy where nearly everything anyone uses or does flows up to the top. Therefore taxes needed to be increased and targeted on where the money flowed to to avoid even further accumulation of assets by a small pct of the population.
pessimizer 4y ago
It's weird to see this stuff posted so much without anyone bothering to make a case for how Brexit caused this. Somebody just posts a "told you not to do brexit," which begins a thread of mutual congratulations and praise. How did Brexit affect the US economy so badly at the same time?
- mywittyname 4y ago
  Numerous economists spent years informing everyone the downsides of the UK leaving the EU. And pointing out that there was no way the the EU would allow the UK to keep the benefits of open trade with the bloc while not having to accept the "downsides" the UK was seeking to avoid. So when Brexit happened, and all those predictions happened, the only thing really to say is, "we told you so." The British economy has been hurting so much worse than the rest of the world. The British pound has fallen 14% against the dollar compared to the Euro, which only fell by 10%. They are completely unable to sell bonds now. At this point, they are being forced to buy their bonds in order to keep the market for their bonds from total collapse. This is only going ot further erode the value of the pound and continue to make inflation in England the worst in the developed world. The UK is going through everything the EU is, plus a bunch of self-imposed issues. They are in a leadership crisis and an economic crisis, and their near-to-mid term economic prospects are bleak.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > So when Brexit happened, and all those predictions happened None of them happened. There weren't rampant food, fuel, and medicine shortages and mass deportations, and Britain didn't become a Mad Max wasteland. The pound lost a few cents, and then a couple of years later, when everything was dropping against the dollar (because of US interest rate decisions) and all of Europe is having fuel problems for obvious reasons, these things also happened to Britain. What part of not doing Brexit would have prevented this, and how did Brexit also cause these problems in the EU? This doesn't make all of the Tory/UKIP lies about the benefits of Brexit more truthful, but time shows Remoaner statements about the consequences of Brexit were at least wild exaggerations, if not outright lies themselves. I would say that Corbyn's 70/30 Remain/Brexit evaluation turned out to be the most realistic assessment, but he was hated and destroyed for it by both the Remoaners and Brexiteers.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
People often blame England, but it was the whole of the UK, there were enclaves of opposition in all of the home nations. Also, there were plenty of opposing voices in the UK (I realise we're party of the World, still!). Financial experts unanimously agreed it would damage our financial system; they only differed in whether it was worth it. Those for Brexit agreed that there would be up to a decade of economic damage.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > Those for Brexit agreed that there would be up to a decade of economic damage. Those for Brexit never argued such a thing before it was obvious things were going to be bad. The day before the referendum you had Farage on the radio saying that leaving the single market would be stupid and that the EU would just fold and let the UK in with its own rules. Remember the “pro cake and pro eating it”?
  - tim333 4y ago
    Which is the kind of stuff that makes me think there should have been or maybe be a second vote now people know what the actual deal is. Still I went on the 2nd vote marches but the MPs weren't having it. Dunno where it goes now.

pojzon 4y ago

Thank you for explaining it for younger audience, but I dont think many of them visit hackernews.

bee_rider 4y ago
The YOLO crowd have to be in their mid to late 20's at least, now, right? That seems like prime HN demographics.
- OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
  What are the hn demographics? Is there a regular survey or anything? Would people be interested in a survey?
  - kergonath 4y ago
    That would actually be very interesting. There’s a bunch of young idealists, but also a bunch of old geezers, and I assume everything in between.
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    You can roughly tell by the prevalence of Twitter compared to Snap/IG/Facebook. 30s is definitely highest proportion, not 20s by a longshot.
sph 4y ago
The younger ones are not the one that need an explanation, as the distribution of votes in favour of Brexit was strongly correlated with older age. Brexit reinforces my very controversial belief that pensioners should not be able to vote. The future is not theirs. Elderly wisdom is a terrible cultural meme. People grow wiser as they age, but are not wiser in the absolute. Also, a young mind ingests many orders of magnitude more information about the world than a person with declining mental faculties and ossified beliefs. /rant
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Hmm. I am going to oversimplify a little bit. On average, young people see the world, see that it does not work, and want to change it. Hence, they chant: "Change things!" On average, old people see the world, they already settled on a routine that mostly works for them ( genuine survivor bias ) and do not want to change one thing for fear of losing what little they have. Hence, they chant: "Stop changing things!" It is a question of balance. I always said that the biggest problem with democracy is its weakest link as it depends on a well informed voter. Fear is not a great advisor, but it is a great motivator.
  - sph 4y ago
    The other huge problem of democracy is that it doesn't account for human biases, such as the Donning-Kruger effect: people with high expertise tend to see flaws in one party or the other and will tend to not vote for anybody, while people with low expertise and knowledge buy any politician's lies wholesale and thus can be easily swayed by the best liar. So on average more liars get to govern us than good politicians. Additionally, the other issue is that the best people with the expertise to solve a country's issues are exactly those that couldn't be bothered to get into politics. Likewise, career politicians tends to be absolutely inept and unqualified to run a country. Democracy is the least worse form of government, but it still is very very bad.
- andrewinardeer 4y ago
  My grandfather is 98 years old. Despite family protestations he still drives. There is no law in my state which demands he undergo yearly driving tests to ensure he still has the capacity and mental faculties to do so. This is not going to end well for him or more importantly someone else. It is crazy.

mrlonglong 4y ago

Nicked.

yodsanklai 4y ago

To play devil's advocate, I'm not sure (the rest of) Europe is much better off.

origin_path 4y ago
Sshhh, you're not supposed to point out that inflation and recession are happening in many countries. The unwritten rule here is that if anything bad happens anywhere in the UK, it's always because of leaving the EU. Also we're not allowed to remember that just a year ago the UK was crushing Europe in vaccine access so badly the EU was openly talking about seizing British assets to try and catch up; the unique performance of the UK in this area was due to it ignoring the EU joint acquisition programme. That's all been memory holed a long time ago, of course. The EU is best at everything.
- pasabagi 4y ago
  Eh, you're overthinking the vaccine story. It's unsurprising that the UK had better access to vaccines: the UK is one of the world's biggest medical industry centers. The point about inflation and recession is not that it isn't happening elsewhere: it's just that it's worse in the UK. It's also kind of obvious that putting a tariff on all your exports (leaving the common market) is bad for the economy. I suspect brexit is more a symptom than a cause. The UK has had horrible economic growth for over a decade now, largely driven by a political system that concentrates power in the hands of not particularly competent people.
  - makomk 4y ago
    UK inflation in September: 10.1% Eurozone inflation in September: 9.9% I've seen some wild claims circulating that, for example, 80% of the UK's inflation is caused by Brexit but those don't seem at all plausible. No EU member has inflation that low, France's is about the lowest at 6.2% and that's with some fairly substantial and expensive energy price subsidies keeping it down. In fact I don't think there's any country in the developed world with inflation as low as that would imply the UK's should be if not for Brexit.

eloff 4y ago

Yeah, that about sums it up. I ended up holding a bunch of GBP, in an company in admistration (bankruptcy.) I'm getting a haircut on my haircut. If you made an inverse ETF taking the opposite side of my lifetime investment decisions, the performance would be stellar.

unity1001 4y ago

You described the process as something that was quite polite. It was more like they screamed, yelled at, smeared and insulted everyone who warned them. And when people informed them that the warnings started visibly coming true, they doubled down and declared everyone as an enemy. Brexit process and its aftermath was a crazy, crazy case study, once in a lifetime observation opportunity for social sciences.

thedrbrian 4y ago
its not Brexit. They spent 700 billion on covid.
- BerislavLopac 4y ago
  Both of those are effects, not the causes.
- gghhzzgghhzz 4y ago
  not sure that there was 700 billion spend during covid. but there's nothing wrong with pumping money into an economy that you have forcibly restricted (or that is in a recession for that matter) the issue is that you need to be in control of where it ends up. UK has an extremely financialised economy where nearly everything anyone uses or does flows up to the top. Therefore taxes needed to be increased and targeted on where the money flowed to to avoid even further accumulation of assets by a small pct of the population.

pessimizer 4y ago

It's weird to see this stuff posted so much without anyone bothering to make a case for how Brexit caused this. Somebody just posts a "told you not to do brexit," which begins a thread of mutual congratulations and praise. How did Brexit affect the US economy so badly at the same time?

mywittyname 4y ago
Numerous economists spent years informing everyone the downsides of the UK leaving the EU. And pointing out that there was no way the the EU would allow the UK to keep the benefits of open trade with the bloc while not having to accept the "downsides" the UK was seeking to avoid. So when Brexit happened, and all those predictions happened, the only thing really to say is, "we told you so." The British economy has been hurting so much worse than the rest of the world. The British pound has fallen 14% against the dollar compared to the Euro, which only fell by 10%. They are completely unable to sell bonds now. At this point, they are being forced to buy their bonds in order to keep the market for their bonds from total collapse. This is only going ot further erode the value of the pound and continue to make inflation in England the worst in the developed world. The UK is going through everything the EU is, plus a bunch of self-imposed issues. They are in a leadership crisis and an economic crisis, and their near-to-mid term economic prospects are bleak.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > So when Brexit happened, and all those predictions happened None of them happened. There weren't rampant food, fuel, and medicine shortages and mass deportations, and Britain didn't become a Mad Max wasteland. The pound lost a few cents, and then a couple of years later, when everything was dropping against the dollar (because of US interest rate decisions) and all of Europe is having fuel problems for obvious reasons, these things also happened to Britain. What part of not doing Brexit would have prevented this, and how did Brexit also cause these problems in the EU? This doesn't make all of the Tory/UKIP lies about the benefits of Brexit more truthful, but time shows Remoaner statements about the consequences of Brexit were at least wild exaggerations, if not outright lies themselves. I would say that Corbyn's 70/30 Remain/Brexit evaluation turned out to be the most realistic assessment, but he was hated and destroyed for it by both the Remoaners and Brexiteers.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

People often blame England, but it was the whole of the UK, there were enclaves of opposition in all of the home nations. Also, there were plenty of opposing voices in the UK (I realise we're party of the World, still!). Financial experts unanimously agreed it would damage our financial system; they only differed in whether it was worth it. Those for Brexit agreed that there would be up to a decade of economic damage.

kergonath 4y ago
> Those for Brexit agreed that there would be up to a decade of economic damage. Those for Brexit never argued such a thing before it was obvious things were going to be bad. The day before the referendum you had Farage on the radio saying that leaving the single market would be stupid and that the EU would just fold and let the UK in with its own rules. Remember the “pro cake and pro eating it”?
- tim333 4y ago
  Which is the kind of stuff that makes me think there should have been or maybe be a second vote now people know what the actual deal is. Still I went on the 2nd vote marches but the MPs weren't having it. Dunno where it goes now.