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> 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 peop

> 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¢.

winterismute 1y ago
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?
- throawaywpg 1y ago
  Get people hooked on local solutions and local social networks that exist "IRL."
  - winterismute 1y ago
    Ok, but how could we do that? Especially since thing like eg. work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote...
    - throawaywpg 1y ago
      organize things offline. political stuff, social stuff, hobbies, exercise. The things that people want, that online life isn't providing. I can't see another option other than waiting until tech is so commonplace that the advances don't interest people anymore.
    - robotnikman 1y ago
      >work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote... I wish this were the case so badly... it seems to be more the opposite with many companies doing RTO now.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - korse 1y ago
    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?
  - immibis 1y ago
    They were right.
    - AngryData 1y ago
      In what ways? What things would be better without TV and radio? You think they would be more informed? Or harder to manipulate? People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far? Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors. To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.
- wongarsu 1y ago
  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
  - whstl 1y ago
    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.
  - Noumenon72 1y ago
    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?
- areoform 1y ago
  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.
  - dingaling 1y ago
    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.
Aurornis 1y ago
> 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.
- 6510 1y ago
  [flagged]
ben_w 1y ago
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 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) 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.
- Yeul 1y ago
  The Netherlands is politically dysfunctional and the people are egotistical assholes but at least the economy is ticking. Without money society is just doomed.
  - volemo 1y ago
    > 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.
    - kokx 1y ago
      Our politics does have some good parts. The political system we have is reasonably good. We have many political parties due to the proportional representation system. A single party is also unlikely to get a majority in parliament on their own, so parties with different backgrounds will have to work together to form a functioning government. We do suffer from many political parties not willing to cause short term pain to improve long term outcomes. There are a few urgent issues going on in politics at the moment. Stuff where a decision needs to be made now and action should be taken. But the political parties do not want to make those decisions because they would inflict short term pain to some voters but would also improve the long term quality of life and economics of the Netherlands. The worst part is that those issues have been known for a long time, but decisions were postponed over and over again because politicians didn't want to make the decision. Making the issues worse and more urgent over time. At the same time populism is clearly on the rise in the Netherlands. A famous thing happening in a debate before the previous elections was a populist saying "But this woman cannot wait for the costs to be decreased, she needs it now." about decreasing a specific part of healthcare costs for citizens. Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.
wyager 1y ago
> One of these seems like the solution to the other. Humans are not fungible cogs
alias_neo 1y ago
> 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.
- octo888 1y ago
  > 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?
  - alias_neo 1y ago
    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.
    - olivermuty 1y ago
      That is not how marginal tax works. Marginal tax is… uh… tax on the marginal part? It is funny you say these are well known and documented, yet provide no links or sources.
jen20 1y ago
> 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.
hnlmorg 1y ago
That’s absolutely spot on!
jahewson 1y ago
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.
- Calavar 1y ago
  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.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  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.
systemstops 1y ago
> 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.
- notahacker 1y ago
  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.
  - systemstops 1y ago
    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.
    - notahacker 1y ago
      Sure, these guys were disgusting scumbags, but they weren't immigrants https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dxj570n21o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dxj570n21o News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly
      - systemstops 1y ago
        THOUSANDS of young girls were sexually exploited for YEARS and the government did nothing about it because they didn't want to appear to be racist. There is no equivalence with any of the "average" sex crimes that happen in modern advanced nations. There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.
gizajob 1y ago
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.
- uncircle 1y ago
  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.
ujkiolp 1y ago
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
- lll-o-lll 1y ago
  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”.
  - ujkiolp 1y ago
    the sun sets on the british empire. The queen is dead, long live the queen.
selfmodruntime 1y ago
Qualified immigration is indeed a net economy boost. But that isn‘t what‘s happening.
vithlani 1y ago
[dead]
hhtechnology 1y ago
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.

winterismute 1y ago

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?

throawaywpg 1y ago
Get people hooked on local solutions and local social networks that exist "IRL."
- winterismute 1y ago
  Ok, but how could we do that? Especially since thing like eg. work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote...
  - throawaywpg 1y ago
    organize things offline. political stuff, social stuff, hobbies, exercise. The things that people want, that online life isn't providing. I can't see another option other than waiting until tech is so commonplace that the advances don't interest people anymore.
  - robotnikman 1y ago
    >work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote... I wish this were the case so badly... it seems to be more the opposite with many companies doing RTO now.
Aurornis 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- korse 1y ago
  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?
- immibis 1y ago
  They were right.
  - AngryData 1y ago
    In what ways? What things would be better without TV and radio? You think they would be more informed? Or harder to manipulate? People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far? Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors. To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.
wongarsu 1y ago
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
- whstl 1y ago
  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.
- Noumenon72 1y ago
  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?
areoform 1y ago
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.
- dingaling 1y ago
  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.

Aurornis 1y ago

> 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.

6510 1y ago
[flagged]

ben_w 1y ago

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 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) 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.

Yeul 1y ago
The Netherlands is politically dysfunctional and the people are egotistical assholes but at least the economy is ticking. Without money society is just doomed.
- volemo 1y ago
  > 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.
  - kokx 1y ago
    Our politics does have some good parts. The political system we have is reasonably good. We have many political parties due to the proportional representation system. A single party is also unlikely to get a majority in parliament on their own, so parties with different backgrounds will have to work together to form a functioning government. We do suffer from many political parties not willing to cause short term pain to improve long term outcomes. There are a few urgent issues going on in politics at the moment. Stuff where a decision needs to be made now and action should be taken. But the political parties do not want to make those decisions because they would inflict short term pain to some voters but would also improve the long term quality of life and economics of the Netherlands. The worst part is that those issues have been known for a long time, but decisions were postponed over and over again because politicians didn't want to make the decision. Making the issues worse and more urgent over time. At the same time populism is clearly on the rise in the Netherlands. A famous thing happening in a debate before the previous elections was a populist saying "But this woman cannot wait for the costs to be decreased, she needs it now." about decreasing a specific part of healthcare costs for citizens. Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.

wyager 1y ago

> One of these seems like the solution to the other. Humans are not fungible cogs

alias_neo 1y ago

> 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.

octo888 1y ago
> 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?
- alias_neo 1y ago
  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.
  - olivermuty 1y ago
    That is not how marginal tax works. Marginal tax is… uh… tax on the marginal part? It is funny you say these are well known and documented, yet provide no links or sources.

jen20 1y ago

hnlmorg 1y ago

That’s absolutely spot on!

jahewson 1y ago

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.

Calavar 1y ago
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.
jimbokun 1y ago
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.

systemstops 1y ago

> 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.

notahacker 1y ago
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.
- systemstops 1y ago
  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.
  - notahacker 1y ago
    Sure, these guys were disgusting scumbags, but they weren't immigrants https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dxj570n21o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dxj570n21o News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly
    - systemstops 1y ago
      THOUSANDS of young girls were sexually exploited for YEARS and the government did nothing about it because they didn't want to appear to be racist. There is no equivalence with any of the "average" sex crimes that happen in modern advanced nations. There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.

gizajob 1y ago

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.

uncircle 1y ago
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.

ujkiolp 1y ago

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

lll-o-lll 1y ago
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”.
- ujkiolp 1y ago
  the sun sets on the british empire. The queen is dead, long live the queen.

selfmodruntime 1y ago

Qualified immigration is indeed a net economy boost. But that isn‘t what‘s happening.

vithlani 1y ago

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hhtechnology 1y ago

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.