How do you know we didn't bribe the people who make the rankings? Gotta be two steps ahead.Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
How do you know we didn't bribe the people who make the rankings? Gotta be two steps ahead.
Thinking that we are one of the most corrupt countries in the world is like insisting that Scott McTominay is world class because you say him score a forty yarder against City that time. Right, and have you watched any football before or since?
I'm going to assume the European corruption is largely tax fiddling. African corruption being death squads, election fraud and delicious blackmail. That's a bit more exciting than shell companies and 'this is in my wife's name'.
Yeah, you lot are Sunday League level in corruption. Thinking otherwise is deluded.
It's 100% a symptom of the 'everything is awful' news mongering society we live in and it really needs to stop. During the expenses scandal I had a guys from Pakistan and South Africa in my team and they were laughing their arses off at how seriously us Brits were taking it. The latter compared the duck house stuff to a politician from back home who'd built a massive pool and explained it away as emergency water storage in case of a fire.
I have been saying "now, everything is shit" for some time and I stand by it.
Isn't that just being old?
I dunno, you used to be able to get an NHS dentist, you used to be able to get a doctor appointment, the road used to be not full of potholes, the schools used to not be crumbling, heating your home used to be a lot more affordable, housing used to be a lot more affordable.
I don't think being less corrupt than Pakistan or South Africa means we're not corrupt nor does it mean everything isn't shit.
And yet, if we look at TTH, we all own homes, can get doctor's appointments, still drive our cars and heat our homes. NHS dentist I'll give you, but there's no definition under which everything is shit.
Your 2024 doctor appointment [or AI based e-consult] is probably more likely to see you not die so it's swings and roundabouts.
In the world at large, everything is getting significantly better every year. Of course each country has its peaks and troughs, our issue is being short on housing supply, if you solved that we'd be back into a golden age very quickly.
But seriously, think about what life was actually like in say 2006, a year you can remember. Almost everything was worse, apart from your waistline and number of possible futures. I mean jeez, you had to go and buy music in shops.
It's mental to think how Western politicians have pissed the last thirty years up the wall. If you could to time travel back to the end of the Cold War with a plan to deliberately fuck everything up across the board, what would you have done differently?
And yet all of those things are more difficult for the average person than they were 20 years ago.
Childcare costs an arm and a leg as well.
I literally cannot get a neuro appointment. As in, they said "we have no appointments" over 6 months ago and I've heard nothing since.
Yep. My wife has a knee problem and needs surgery, first went to the doctors last Feb. Had a scan in September and was told need an operation heard nothing since.
Be healthy, requiring no help or support, and you won’t experience any problems, seems to be Yev’s sentiment.
I'm a twit
I think the Accountant in Oxfordshire may just be a tad out of touch with what it's like for average Joe.
I reckon a fair chunk of that stat will be down to care (for elderly and young people alike) costing a packet/being a bit shit.
To borrow a phrase from our Palestinian friends "nothing happens in a vacuum". It's a whole mess. There are far, far too many people in receipt of benefits - especially disability benefits and the associated carer ones - and the hospital appointments that could potentially help to address this just cannot be found.
Add to that an increasingly aging population and less than 50% of young people having kids and we have a problem that is just going to keep getting worse. Taxes will continue to rise, wages will continue to stagnate and, well, yeah, everything is shit.
Only thing I’ve been shown to be out of touch on is the doctors point, which do seem much better here based on your experiences. If I had to guess why there’s a stark difference I suspect that’s down to fund raising/donations from successful Oxford graduates keeping the show going.
Far from it. My sentiment is that everything isn’t shit, although I accept some things are worse than they were.
You need evidence on hous prices being disproportionate and fuel poverty being on the rise? Ok.
Earnings and house price growth over the past 20 years:
SHIT.
Fuel poverty:
Well, until pretty recently it was surprisingly NOT SHIT, but don't you worry, they've addressed that balance superbly over the last 3 years and I can confirm that fuel poverty is, in fact, SHIT.
I forgot about all the actual literal shit that's in the rivers and sea as well.
In more interesting and (if you're Icelandic) more shit news, there are some cracking videos on Twitter (SHIT as of 2023) of this latest volcanic eruption.
I had a thought the other day about whether lava is sustainable. Turns out it is, for as long as the Earth's core doesn't burn out. What a mad fucking thing we live on.
And yet, as I said initially we (on TTH) all still have homes that we heat and can fuel our cars. As for fuel poverty itself, I thought we'd all agreed that that was a (temporary, lol) price worth paying to stand in solidarity with our Ukranian brothers and sisters. I suspect the overlap on a venn diagram of people who think things are SHIT and support the nonsense we're indulging in in Ukraine would be off the charts.
In any case, I think there's a bit of the Steve Bruce semantics here in that worse doesn't automatically mean shit.
Would you take shorter NHS waiting lists but, for example, give up online shopping? This is of course not a choice available in reality but a choice that sums up the last 20 years of whether things are shit or not.
If you only focus on pet issues or things that you specifically perceive to have got worse than it's easy to decide that everything is worse, when in fact it's far better and will continue to get better, too.
I'm not sure health, housing and wages are really "pet issues"
I can only go by personal experience here, but I can assure you that the people I visit - who often live with their curtains permanently drawn and the lights off, in their black mold covered flats, with their breath visibly hanging in the air - couldn't give 2 fucks about Ukraine. That's very much the domain of people that complain about having to switch to the Essentials range in Waitrose.
I was struggling to get "Surery based Spark Plug Salesman" to convey the same level of sass and vim as "Accountant in Oxford", so thank you for this.
TTH is not representative of society at large, Yev.
Of course and I was making that exact point when seriously questioning what we're doing in Ukraine as people here are clearly suffering as a result. To be clear, I think most of the things people are citing were better years ago but they don't in and of themselves make everything shit.
I mean, I obviously don't actually mean "everything" is shit. I'm generalising to paint a picture of a society that is in decline. I would hope we can agree that the trend of every successive generation doing better than their predecessors has been reversed.
What an idiotic post lmao.
If Floyd has a coherent worldview these days it appears to be that putting up with absolute shit is somehow the noble course.
Go back to the same people in the 1990s and tell me they were having a better time. If we're talking about bias, your job is literally to deal with the people at the worst end of things.
No, I'm just not stupid enough to think that there are not costs and benefits to everything. Take immigration as an easy example. The benefits of immigration are well-advertised but the main one is a vast amount of cheap labour which has driven corporate profitability in certain sectors, as well as the cultural enrichment yada yada. The costs of it are pressures on housing, pressures on health, downward pressures on wages, pressures on law and order. Some people like to emphasise the benefits and other the costs. What no one seems to be willing to do is own both the benefits and the costs. If you want to push a point of view in a mature way you need to accept the fact that there are ALWAYS downsides and consequences, both intended and unintended - and yes, that means that you need to be prepared to put up with some absolute shit. It's only mollycoddled five year olds who can have their cake and eat it.
I think everybody knows about costs and benefits. But some things have greater costs than benefits, and other things, like NHS waiting lists and online shopping, aren't remotely related. If you 'own both the benefits and the costs' then you own nothing, and you absolve yourself from taking any ownership of anything, which is basically the last thirty years of de-politicised declinist shit in a handy phrase.
I would imagine healthcare would have fully collapsed without immigration. They staff half the service. They tend to be younger which means they are in work, paying tax, and have lower burden of illness. They have more kids than the native population which helps with our lopsided age demographic.
The healthcare system's problems are predominantly to do with the (mainly white British) elderly population.
Everything is related. What no one does is admit that in promoting their particular list of desired nice things, bad things will also result but these are a price worth paying. Nigel Farage, for example, should be out there saying that we should stop immigration to lessen pressure on NHS, housing and crime, and that this will also mean paying £10 more for a deliveroo. If you don't own up to the costs of things then you're effectively just whingeing.
The point being made is that there were much less of them in the 90's. Both by number and population percentage.
Lads, online shopping and deliveroo are not the achievements you think they are.
They must be, we swapped the NHS for them, after all.
I thought we swapped the EU for the NHS?
What was the figure again?
£350 million a week, which adds up to £18.2 billion a year. NHS spending is actually about £39 billion a year more now than it was in 2015/16. So the bus was right and then some.
I know this isn't - or can't be - entirely serious, but those aren't equivalent positives and negatives.
The problem with the immigration debate is that 'immigrants' is a largely pointless term. Immigrants from wealthy countries are more likely than not to make a positive financial and social contribution, and, as every country that bothers to collect the data has found, immigrants from crap countries are not. If you could click your fingers and every Somalian in the United Kingdom vanished the only noticeable trends would be thousands of vacant council houses and less crime being committed. The same would not be the case for Chinese or American immigrants. This should be the main point informing the immigration debate, but the people in charge of it are of the same mindset as you, that if you want the wage suppression you have to accept the wage suppression, and you couldn't do anything about it anyway because if we stop the wage suppression how will we suppress the wages?
If the Chinese vanished, Durham would be a ghost town. They seem to be the only people buying up retail units for their restaurants and boba tea places.
Last edited by Shindig; 14-01-2024 at 08:59 PM.
But trust me on the sunscreen…
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