About half of social housing in London is headed by people born outside of the country. Social housing is quite rare in the UK now after 1980s mass privatization started. It is provided at a steep rental discount and if you qualify for it you can keep it for life. Or purchase it at a steep discount.
Quite bizarre, but difficult to talk about, because it plays in to the wrong side of ongoing culture wars for some people.
Main blocker is I am using apps like Conductor and have lots of plates spinning at once. But that's on, me and I should try and start completing the last part myself.
One of the reasons they exhaust me, is that it's always "one more prompt" to get a UI correct. It's often just slightly off, but it can take 5-10 mins sometimes to rework something. It has led to me working much longer hours.
I think this is in part because I am one of the software engineers that always liked building products more than writing complex software. So, I am driven by the feeling of creating something. And I want to get the feature perfect and complete. But getting from 95%->100% done can take a long time with UI work for me.
Immigrating to Canada was a breeze for decades until the last 2-3 years when they started to reduce immigration numbers in response to citizen concerns.
There has never been a British election where the majority votes cast have been for parties that pledged to increase immigration.
I take your FPTP point, but when has the winning party under FPTP had a manifesto commitment to increase immigration?
Let’s just face facts. We might disagree personally but a majority of people have always voted against immigration and it’s regularly a top 3 issue. Often the top issue!
But we can look at the polling data going back decades now on this issue. People were not happy when it was 50,000 net migration. At one point it hit 950,000.
Obviously the issues that people are concerned about on housing, on transport, on education and more aren’t resolved by reducing the flow for a couple of years.
My point is simply that these feelings have existed for a long time and the government has generally gone against what the electorate have asked for. Are you prepared to concede that point?
If so, then I think blaming it on big tech is a major stretch since this all happened before they had as much command of our attention.
A) people had an issue with immigration when it was mostly from the EU as well, one of the main drivers of Brexit
B) leaving the EU did not mean that non-EU migration had to go up
C) immigration going down for one or two years doesn’t change the fact that millions of people are in the UK that most British people didn’t want to enter in the first place over a period of 15+ years
D) net immigration going down still means lots of people are entering the UK from elsewhere, while people from the same culture (ie grew up in the UK) are leaving which still changes the culture of the country
Note: I’m not saying I personally agree with any of those points but it’s clear what the issues are if you’re prepared to listen. There is opinion polling on all of this.
I believe it’s tied to your earnings in the US though, which it isn’t in the UK.
I also have a number of qualifying years in the UK when I didn’t work, and for decades you could buy a year contribution for about £150. The payout is £12,500 per year.
Yes, far better than how the UK runs its state pension system.
The Australians seem to have the best model overall though. Mandatory payments in to private investments has made them very wealthy.
The UK system takes the national insurance contributions of workers but doesn’t invest them in anything on behalf of the individual. So despite decades of payments you technically have nothing at the end and survive on the goodwill of the government and current taxpayers. That works right now because of the population pyramid.
The last sports radio station in Vancouver literally closed this month!