If you send your neighbour nudes then they have your nudes. You can put in as many contracts as you want, maybe they never digitised it but their friend is over for a drink and walks out of the door with the shoebox of film. Do not pass GO, do not collect.
Conceivably we can try to control things like e.g. is your cellphone microphone on at all times, but once someone else, particularly an arbitrary entity (e.g. not a trusted family member or something) has the data, it is silly to treat it as anything other than gone.
But most laws in democracies pass with just about majority. The president in america was selected with just-about majority. Do you suggest changing elections so that we keep doing them until the vote skews to 100%? 90%? What's the threshold?
I suggest not having laws that 50% of people disagree with, e.g. if 49% of people like raspberry jam then the 51% who like strawberry shouldn’t ban it regardless of whether they are in control.
People tend to care when they feel that they are being given a good deal.
In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or a small house at least, maybe a car, etc.
In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a well off partner or you are in some shoebox counting your pennies to make the bus fare, your life is just stressful and you don't feel like an equal to the person on the other side of the counter.
There's also no real future to look forward to. Take London. Outside of finance, technology and law, even manager level positions won't earn you enough to ever own the roof over your head. The median salary is just under 50k pounds. Once you pay out of your ass for the myriad of taxes, you are left with say 30k. That's enough to rent yourself a really shitty apartment from an absentee landlord living either abroad or somewhere in a large house in Surrey. Anywhere within commute distance to London, living is so expensive that a large portion (probably the majority) of the population has the beautiful outlook that they'll never own anything and will work until the day they drop dead. Why bother? What is the point of making an effort?
The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.
Sadly this is true. 150k a year is "only" about 80-85k net, good luck buying a tiny Victorian row house for >1mln quid without your parents sponsoring the down payment. Or you can buy a crappy apartment built to "UK Standards" where everything is done by people who truly don't give even a shred of effort to quality and you are in the hilarious position that you don't even own your own walls.
And that is all on a very-very good salary in the UK (90th %ile is 60k).
Moving out to the suburbs or to satellite town is not a solution either. If you want to be on a main train line, the prices will be just as bad as in the city. If you compromise on the transport, prepare for your life to become an unmitigated misery as the terrible, dysfunctional, unreliable and at the same time extremely expensive UK train system bends you over the barrel.
There are a few lucky people who manage to pull off a London level salary and work remotely from a LCOL area, but this is not possible if your job physically requires your presence (e.g. you are a dental hygienist).
When the vast majority of people stop caring about working in London then wouldn’t the prices drop noticeably?
It seems to be contradictory, the very fact of the price wage disparity suggest many many people care to an extremely high degree of working within that literal specific geographic area.
Which demonstrates they care very very much about their economic interests at least.
I think we have crossed some wires. People care about living in and around London, that much is clear. People want to live in cities for many reasons, economic ones are just one of them. What this thread - and my posts - are about, is people caring about doing a good job, whatever that job may be.
And this is where the crux lies: you'll get paid better for your work in London, but unless you become truly rich, you'll still not earn enough to afford your own roof over your head. All your money will go on transport, rent and living expenses. The amenities afforded by a city, restaurants, cinemas, etc - these all cost money and are more expensive than outside of London. So you end up paying through the nose for the reasons why you actually moved to the city.
So you do the grind for 10 years, say you are actually quite good and have a bit of luck and you are now earning 5x the salary you could earn in some bumfuck village in the country, but you still can't afford to own anything, you are permanently feeding rent seekers on everything. Once this realisation hits, it's difficult to care about doing a good job. You realize that you could do a shit job, put the minimum effort and still get 80% of your "peak" salary, and this marginal decrease won't affect you in any material way. Perhaps you have to cut back on eating out, or maybe lease a 2 year old car instead of a brand new one. But you realize that this marginal 20% increase in salary won't get you anything that'd be worth all the extra stress coming from caring about your job.
You'd need to sacrifice all your social life, your energy and free time, put in a hardcore grind, save every last penny you can, and then after 10-15 years you can buy a tiny rowhouse on a mortgage with a postage stamp sized garden - if you are lucky. And then you realize you spent the prime years of your young adulthood but instead of a landlord you are now beholden to a bank and an interest rate. You are terminally burnt out and haven't been able to properly enjoy life in any way up till now, and the grind isn't over. Instead of paying rent, you now have to fund the mortgage payments for another 10-20 years.
Well yeah life is competitive…?
exceedingly so for property within London it seems.
Even if millions of Londoners hate it that doesn’t change the fact that they are continuing to do so day after day… so something must still outweigh all the downsides combined.
So their care is very high, just focused on perhaps a very peculiar basket of things, so to speak. I can’t see any other explanation for such large scale behavior.
Right. I'll try one more time: this thread is about caring to do a good job. People move to London, try to do a good job, find that they'll never be properly rewarded for going the extra mile, give up, and do a shit job going forward.
They still feel better off than doing a shit job in the countryside, otherwise they'd move there. But the question we are discussing is: "Why don't people care about doing a good job?"
I think that most people, especially above the age of say, 30, should be aiming to spend a percentage of their income, lowering over time.
At the end of the day, the cars get you where you want to go, the roof gives you a safe space, the hiking trip to the local park/reserve gets you relaxation. Over that, it’s novel but you’re always chasing.
I don't think this is limited to the US, I have exactly the same viewpoint as a Brit and so do many people I know.
People like walking to work and like taking the tube after a night out, but ultimately, the car is just vastly more convenient and comfortable for such a large amount of stuff.
You may as well ask me to give up running water because technically I could just carry it from the well.
Realistically if public transport advocates want progress they need to demonstrate that they also understand the utility of cars because otherwise they come across as simply being wilfully ignorant.
I think there are two different things though, and in the UK the bar is (mostly) just a practical one.
Lots of my colleagues cycle to work, because the cycling infrastructure is great (both from Cambridge City, and from my employer). For those along the Guided Busway corridor, quite a few get to work like that because it is convenient.
Step 1 is to make the public transport good enough so that it is at least as good as taking a car. But the US has Step 2 - convince people that they aren't looking poverty stricken if they take a bus.
100% this - make it more comfortable and handle the rush.
I live in London, we have tons of public transport.
In the middle of the day, outside of rush hour, I use it a lot and it can be really pleasant, particularly suburban rail, you can stretch out a bit, there is often air conditioning, a nice view from the window, etc.
When it's busy I will drive even if it takes longer because my car is guaranteed to have personal space and is clean.
I don't care that much about "labour issues" because it seems like a logically flawed avenue to explore to begin with.
To be financially successful under any market system I can think of requires you, in a mathematical sense, to be close enough to the top within a company that you get a greater proportion of the profit than simply 1/employees.
In simple terms - I can't employ a maid unless I earn more than a maid, a maid can never be paid enough that I would want to be a maid (being the maid's employer, or at least having that optionality, is strictly superior).
Some jobs have comparative advantage, e.g. I might enjoy working on my car but know that a mechanic can do the same job in 1/10th the time. But a lot of stuff is just straight - I earn more than you, you do it for me, so I can get more things done.
No, it is not mathematically ordained that conditions must suck on the bottom of the pyramid in an absolute sense. In a relative sense, your argument isn't wrong, but in an absolute sense, the failure of our economy to bring modest levels of comfort on the bottom despite truly astonishing advances in fundamental capacity is a scathing indictment.
In the absolute sense, from my perspective as someone who was born with not much (I often have a sense that this discussion is driven by people who were always fairly well off and see "the poor" as a different species) the primary issue is excessive regulation, resulting in things like property being hilariously expensive, so that it's difficult to afford a house or start a business.
Wages and hours for low level jobs feel like a distraction, barely anyone needs more toys, the issue is that the necessary items for life are monopolised.
So from my perspective the only thing that labour regulation can achieve is to basically just compress that experience, we still won't build more housing or make it easier to do so etc.
> Wages and hours for low level jobs feel like a distraction, barely anyone needs more toys, the issue is that the necessary items for life are monopolised.
They’re related. Unions aren’t just labor movements, they’re efforts to reduce the power of corporations.
Monopolies form because they make a lot of sense for the people on top. Competition is cool, but mostly a fools errand. The true winners know how to work together to widen the gap between their in-group and everyone else.
What’s evident to me about market theory is that it naturally tends to monopolies. To me, it is human nature. So therefore, we need extra structures, extra systems, to keep it in check.
It’s more like bullshitting which is inbetween the two. Basically, like that guy who always has some story to tell. He’s not lying as such, he’s just waffling.
Until then, the choice is being made by the entities funding all of this.