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Britain's Scientists Are 'Freaking Out' Over Brexit (washingtonpost.com)
"To use a nonscientific term, the scientists in the country are freaking out," reports the Washington Post. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes their report:
The researchers worry that Britain will not replace funding it loses when it leaves the E.U., which has supplied about $1.2 billion a year to support British science, approximately 10 percent of the total spent by government-funded research councils. There is a whiff of panic in the labs.
Worse than a possible dip in funding is the research community's fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and the country's universities will find themselves isolated. British research today is networked, expensive, competitive and global. Being part of a pan-European consortium has helped put Britain in the top handful of countries, based on the frequency of citations of its scientific papers... Anecdotal evidence suggests that headhunters may already be circling.
Meanwhile, NPR reports that Britain's vote to leave the EU "has depressed the value of the British pound," prompting many Britons to vacation at home rather than abroad -- while "Americans will find their dollars go further in Britain these days." And an anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from CNBC that Ford "is considering closing plants in the UK and across Europe in response to Britain's vote to leave the EU, as it forecast a $1 billion hit to its business over the next two years."
Worse than a possible dip in funding is the research community's fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and the country's universities will find themselves isolated. British research today is networked, expensive, competitive and global. Being part of a pan-European consortium has helped put Britain in the top handful of countries, based on the frequency of citations of its scientific papers... Anecdotal evidence suggests that headhunters may already be circling.
Meanwhile, NPR reports that Britain's vote to leave the EU "has depressed the value of the British pound," prompting many Britons to vacation at home rather than abroad -- while "Americans will find their dollars go further in Britain these days." And an anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from CNBC that Ford "is considering closing plants in the UK and across Europe in response to Britain's vote to leave the EU, as it forecast a $1 billion hit to its business over the next two years."
Well, perhaps we could find a better way to hand out grants to scientists, so we don't end up wasting it. I mean there's the Replication Crisis to consider, and the Decline Effect, and then somewhere north of 40,000 neurology papers that were a waste of time (not all British of course).
I think Ford are closing plants all over the place. Their sales are weaker in the USA and China too, which is absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, although Brexit is a wonderful excuse for useless executives to hang their poor performance on.
Like Y2K Brexit is turning out to be a non-problem. Wiser heads have already made a killing out of buying the dip to profit from the over-reaction driven by hyperbolic media scare-mongering.
UK business and growth will get a great boost from fall in pound - as the article already mentions more people holidaying at home and tourists and other businesses seeking bargins in UK. This can only bump up employment and reduce welfare payments.
Trade will continue on as it has - the EU sends more to UK than UK sends to EU, so the EU is net worse off if it starts implementing tarriffs
And UK has done themselves a huge favour getting out of EU before the PIGS economies go into default (inevitable over next 10 years given their high debt-to-GDP ratios and massive youth unemployment). They are too big to bail out, but EU's silly attempts to prop them up will inevitably hurt the stronger economies of the EU. Far better to be outside looking in than inside trying to prop up basket cases.
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UK will inevitably have a stronger economy going forward than it would have within the EU, and this can only help investment in science and R&D within UK (as it will be wasting less money on subsidising poor performing EU economies).
Maybe next time walk the streets in time. If you can't be bothered with politics, politics can't be bothered with you. Britain dialed itself backwards one generation. Which is not the worst time to be in unless you want to be at the forefront of anything. Which would be the point of most scientific research. So obviously scientists had a world to lose but you would not have noticed it. And in absence of respectable input they could trust, the voters basically were back to gambling on buzzphrases.
Ford had already marked those plants for closure BEFORE the referendum date had even been set
Do some research ...
The scientists are losing money. They are also losing research and work opportunities. That is the problem. Sorry reality does not match your narrative but that's how it is.
It isn't as big a problem as some are making it out to be though. Moving to the EU from England is not such a big deal, they will be fine.
The EU will have less money to spend. The UK was a net contributor and due to its relative economic performance, was going to be an even bigger net contributor in future.
in Britain should be freaking out about the brexit.
As a convinced European I find it highly amusing that the main "leave" campaign guys are now running away and officially stating that they have no idea what they actually planned (Yeah, we heavily lied in order to get you to approve a plan which we don't have, because it does not make any deeper sense).
I hope that the EU gives them choice between coming back without any special status, joining the Euro and the Schengen zone or remaining in "splendid isolation". In case of the latter: not terrible for the rest of the EU - one competitor is gone, and in 30 years there will be a new developing country with cheap labor.
Are you being sarcastic? Or do you really believe that Britain is losing money with the EU? Oh boy you are in for some cognitive dissonance.
entropy happens
As a whole, the country paid more than it got back. Scientists, on the other hand, got a "good" deal.
Though it certainly did come with a lot of strings attached. Leaving aside the fact that all scientists became paid lobbyists for the EU, much of that "research" money had to be spent on specific things, such as travel and meetings, and all of the "research" that was actually carried out had to be done in accordance with the EU's rules, which were mainly focused on the production of detailed status reports known as "work packages". An EU-funded research project would produce a tonne of paperwork, lots of office politics, and very little actual science.
We're also far smarter than the Europeans and Americans, so we won't repeat their mistakes and we'll be here to stay at the top.
Says the guy that buys a litre of milk in a fucking plastic bag.
How is it a problem when you start losing less money? Don't English scientists know math?
On the simple calculation fees - money coming then yes, we spent 100 million a week. On the other hand if you count the benefits in terms of trade, inward investment by companies wanting to do business in Europe, etc. then we almost certainly gained. The brexiter's argument (when not lying) was that they'd rather be poorer with fewer immigrants.
It is possible to take part in EU science programs and funding like Horizon 2020 without strictly being an EU member. For example, Switzerland used to participate in such programs almost the same way member states do (including receiving funding, but of course also by funding it itself).
Unfortunately, the EU really likes using such programs to put pressure to non-member states for completely unrelated negotiations, and as a result has recently excluded Switzerland from Horizon 2020. I wouldn't be surprised if they used the same tactics also against the UK in the future.
... the piece in the Washington Post is long on opinion and *very* short on fact.
For example, the piece makes much of comments by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, that one third of the teaching staff in Edinburgh hold EU passports and are "very twitchy right now". Well, that's real science, right there, eh? I mean, that's an empirical survey if ever there was one.
What the British Government has said (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36916836) is that it wants and expects to protect the rights of EU workers currently living in Britain, but that such protections would be conditional upon EU countries providing the same protections for UK citizens living in the EU. That doesn't seem reasonable, but it doesn't explain the scaremongering attempted by the Washington Post.
I guess it is worth pointing out that President Obama and the US Administration were very much in favour of the UK remaining within the EU. Washington saw the UK membership of the EU as a lever it could apply to get the EU to go along with things like TTIP and joint military participation with operations like those in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In other words, you have to treat this article in exactly the same way that a scientist would treat a claim that some random sub-atomic particle could travel faster than the speed of light: look for substantiating evidence; look for corroboration; examine the sources of evidence; look at the statistical significance of the sampled data, and so on.
This rather shoddy article contains a lot of supposition, suggestion and conjecture, but it has been very selective in it's reporting of "facts".
Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
That doesn't seem *unreasonable*. Doh.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12176663/EU-Facts-how-much-does-Britain-pay-to-the-EU-budget.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35943216
Benefit in terms of trade? UK has a 25 billion deficit with the EU, it trades at a LOSS with the EU.
That was kind of the main thrust of the Brexit arguments... why pay 10.5 billion net to access a market to pay another 25 billion in losses? Likewise the claim that UK won't have a free trade agreement with the EU doesn't make sense. The tariffs on trade with the EU are less than the 10.5 billion we pay.... i.e. even if it had to subsidize industry due to EU imposing tariffs it would still be better off. But EU would be shooting itself in the foot to block access to the UK, and give up 25 billion ontop of the 10.5 billion it will already be losing.
"The brexiter's argument (when not lying) was that they'd rather be poorer with fewer immigrants"
You seem to want to change the subject, on trade and money terms, UK will be far better off. Even the fall in the pound mentioned should help exports of services (UK's main export group).
Well, perhaps we could find a better way to hand out grants to scientists, so we don't end up wasting it.
Perhaps we could also farm unicorns and sell the sparkles that they poop.
I think your idea is lovely in theory (hey thinks we should waste more?), but very difficult in practice. It turns out that we're already doing about everything right in that the UK has about the best scientific output per unit of currency invested of any large country. Grants are already fiercely competitive, and standards for hiring are orders of magnitude higher than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
I've hashed over this topic many many times. I'm a former academic and it's a somewhat popular topic especially among younger academics (since we get fewer grants than the older ones), but despite many very long, earnest conversations, I've not encountered any ideas that aren't really easily shot down.
It's easy to come up with notions. It's a bit harder to come up with ideas, it's harder still to come up with a plan that isn't really easily shot down because it will fail in some way or be sufficiently more expensive that you may as well just spend the money on the old method and get better results overall.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Please stick to talking about Brexit, if you know anything about it. It's clear that you know nothing about Y2K.
Y2K passed off with barely a whimper because millions of software engineers around the planet took it seriously and worked their asses off for a good 6 months to make their software cope with the year ticking over to 2000. Code that would break was found absolutely everywhere, and quite astounding budgets had to be mobilized to fix everything in time. Additional contractors were engaged almost around the clock at extortionate rates in the final months, because there was so much code to remedy.
So yeah, Y2K went off very quietly, but no thanks to you. The thanks go to all the engineers who worked ridiculous hours to keep the systems you rely on from falling apart.
And what does popularism get you? A deep and long depression, unemployment and no less immigrants.
-- Cheers!
And what does popularism get you? A deep and long depression, unemployment and no less immigrants.
Absolutely. The biggest worry is that the government maintains the same level of immigration to keep business costs (i.e. wages) low, but that without the preference to European countries that means more Muslims - with the consequent increase of child rape gangs, terrorist acts, "honour" killings, no-go-areas etc.
I must stress to all that this line of thinking is representative of the English majority, rather than the UK as a whole.
We don't trade at a loss with the EU, we are in a state of trade deficit because we buy more from the EU than we sell. I'm at a trade deficit with the local supermarket because I do all my grocery shopping there and they don't buy anything from me.
Losing/reducing the EU market would only be a good thing if we could source the goods we import from the EU more cheaply elsewhere, whilst at the same time either maintaining our exports or selling elsewhere at a better price or volume.
The sort of logic that presents a trade deficit as "25 billion in losses" is the kind of faulty thinking that landed the UK in this mess in the first place, and why most people weren't remotely able to cast an educated vote.
As a whole, the country paid more than it got back. Scientists, on the other hand, got a "good" deal.
Though it certainly did come with a lot of strings attached. Leaving aside the fact that all scientists became paid lobbyists for the EU, much of that "research" money had to be spent on specific things, such as travel and meetings, and all of the "research" that was actually carried out had to be done in accordance with the EU's rules, which were mainly focused on the production of detailed status reports known as "work packages". An EU-funded research project would produce a tonne of paperwork, lots of office politics, and very little actual science.
Sort of like most bureaucratic organizations. It's not surprising the same thing happens on this side of the pond.
I will make an observation, those at the top of the food chain on both sides aren't the best at advancing science but rather navigating the politics of their respective funding bodies and insuring compliance with minutiae of bureaucracy.
Those are the same people that will be out in the cold with Brexit. Not surprising they would be upset.
The paperwork is really not that bad. You need to report your results and how you spend the EU money. Other research project would generate a similar amount of paper trail. As soon as your project is greenlight, the amount of documentation is fair given the big amounts of money most project receive. The bigger issue is that to get your project funded you need to send in big and really well written project proposals and your chances of actually getting money are rather small.
Jan
And what does popularism get you? A deep and long depression, unemployment and no less immigrants.
Crystal ball ??
How long has that depression of the U.K.'s manufacturing sector been going on ?
Both staying and leaving were awful options, but those are the only two options that were given by people that only wanted to use it as a pressure tool, not expecting leave to actually win.
The "actually fix EU" option was never on the table.
It's a problem, due to there being absolutely no guarantee that the UK will spend the money it currently sends to the EU on all the EU supported projects - science, agrigulture, business development. It's not a guarantee, because a lot of the money will go to funding the extra costs Brexit will incur, such as outsourcing trade negotiators, border security costs (visting EU nationals), vetting of EU nationals wanting to work in the UK, amongst others.
This likely cut in funding was almost immediately obvious when areas such as Cornwal & Wales immediately realised that by voting Brexit, development funds from the EU would be likely to be stopped. Cornwall, for example is wanting assurances about how it will be funded
Alternate sources, if you're not keen on the Grauniad:
Cornwall demands £500m to replace lost EU cash
Cornwall votes decisively for Brexit - then seeks 'assurances' that it won't lose the £60million a year it gets in EU subsidies
It might result in fewer immigrants. Or, at least, fewer immigrants with marketable skills. We saw this a decade or so back when the Polish economy improved and a load of Polish plumbers decided to go back there, leaving the UK with a skills shortage. There still aren't enough British plumbers to make up the shortfall, but we've benefitted from importing them from other countries so plumbing work is now only very expensive to get done and not totally extortionate.
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And what does popularism get you? A deep and long depression, unemployment and no less immigrants.
Oh don't forget we got to really stick it to the political establishment by siding with Gove and Johnson over Cameron. Take that, Eton toff. Cameron I mean, Johnson.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No rational political actor would trigger article 50
43% of UK business happens with the EU.
UK industry requires the large inflow of people to feed the economic beast.
Research funding and participation.
The EU as an entity cannot give a departing UK a sweetheart deal.
Northern Ireland - the UK is party to a bilateral peace agreement in NI - with the Republic of Ireland - that is literally written into the Irish constitution - based on EU membership of both states - it cannot unilaterally rescind this agreement without breaking international law. The EU is not simply about the single market.
Scotland - whatever about a recent YouGov poll - actually invoking article 50 will most certainly precipitate a Scottish secession vote.
The Pound is at a 35 year low against the dollar and article 50 hasn't even been invoked - the pound would crater to parity (and everybody knows it).
The economic impact is only starting to take its toll on the UK - give it a year and the public WILL be ready to reverse the vote.
The city (name for London's financial sector) accounts for about 10% of UK GDP cannot effectively compete in the EU single market - with the UK on the outside (get serious).
Only a bunch of self-styled 'swashbuclking men of the world' in the Tory party and out-and-out racists in UKIP/BNP are really 'bought into' Brexit - for (largely) English nostalgist/nationalist reasons. The rest - are simply registering a protest vote.
Virtually every mainstream politician and business voice still supports the UK staying in the EU. Added to which many businesses are public stating that investment will not happen or has been redirected to other EU countries as a result of the Brexit vote. The only way to arrest the rot is to secure the UK's membership of the EU - triggering article 50 would simply pour rocket fuel on a economic fire that would blaze for a decade... and the political and bureaucratic establishment KNOWS it.
Bottom line - no responsible government would actually trigger article 50. The likely (though not guaranteed) outcome is some huffing and puffing over the next year or so, and then some mechanism that allows the UK to remain in the EU with some fudge on migration concocted by the EU (think temporary derogation on 2004 EU accession countries).
The paperwork is really not that bad.
As a former Framework Warrior, the hell it ain't!
Other research project would generate a similar amount of paper trail.
No they don't. Compare, for example the reporting requirements of RCUK to the EU framework projects.
These reporting requirements relative to the amount of actual work of these projects are legedary. It's what grizzled old postdocs talk about in the pub.
Nonetheless, the money is still good, and you get to keep the equipment after and keep researching with it. Not to mention the inevitable side projects that the postdocs and students work on. I think the indirect impact of the work is actually more than the direct impact sometimes. I did my best work while moonlighting on an FP7 project.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It is common courtesy to write some text around your links, or at least make them clickable via some basic html.
But nevermind that. The point of your links is that the UK does send about 8 billion pounds to the EU every year (much less than the 18 billion claimed by the Leavers), which is true. But the question to ask is whether this is just money burned, or is it an investment that pays off. In other words, is the extra money the UK makes from being in the EU more than 8 billion an year?
Well, given that the UK's GDP is about 1800 billion pounds, and that the pounds lost about 10% of its value since the Brexit referendum, the UK is already 180 billion bounds poorer. France has immediately overtaken it as the 5th largest economy in the aftermath of the referendum. This suggests that the contribution to the EU budget is just chump change compared to the value of being in the EU.
entropy happens
The trouble that Europe has is it is stuffed full of old people. That is why the place has the same level of visionary development as your grandparent's living room has had since the 1970s. Old people are at a different time in their life, and understandably care less for change and progress, but when they clog up the political system, they make life extremely grumpy and difficult.
The trouble is that not all of Europe is old, and those who are young are getting tired of the 'waiting for death' and 'back in my day' mentality that is gripping the West. Globalization might have it's problems, but most young people are no longer under the illusion that their problems are being caused by that Greek or Chinese person who they partied with in Ibiza last year.
The danger for the West is that there are other places with better demographics, and rapidly increasing standards of living. Europe should be busy trying to bring in young skilled workers from these places to offset the coming demographic cliff, and also encouraging young people to procreate. Instead they are closing off the borders, and making it harder and harder for young people to afford to start families by trying to extract all their earnings through rent seeking activities in the belief that storing fiat currency is a viable way to fund their pensions.
It is hard to see how it will not all crash and burn at some point. The global retirement asset bubble thing will burst when the inflow of new money to the ponzi scheme declines (either from prices simply becoming impossible to afford by new entrants, or old people having to cash out) which will wipe out the supposed retirement savings of millions, forcing them to have to rely on state pensions. This will then set up a direct political contest (as opposed to the proxy contest going on in the housing/debt market right now) between young workers and pensioners. Stripped of the housing capital gains illusion, I think any young person who is not debt enslaved will vote with their feet at this point, which will accelerate the dependency ratio shrinkage (a problem Japan didn't have to deal with due to its tight knit culture).
Eventually we'll reach a sensible compromise where young people will have to pay a bit more tax to prevent poverty among old people, and old people will have to accept a reduced standard of living in their retirement. Unfortunately it will be a bumpy road getting there, but that is how populous democracies solve these sorts of problems.
And the one party leader who had the guts to say that they were both bad choices and that 'remain and reform' should be the way forward was subsequently crucified by his MPs for doing so.
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The statistic from last week: the loss in value of the UK taxpayer-owned portion of RBS since the referendum is more than the total that we paid to the EU in a year.
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And yet the areas that had benefitted most from this bought the lie that they'd be better off voting more power to the people who'd been screwing them for the last few decades.
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The article is about sciences grant, collaborations. Let us say you had a lab in Frankfurt wanting to have a 5 year collab on a subject, and they have the choice between an UK lab and a swedisch one. Which one do you think would be safe form them to take ? Excately : not the UK one. And to add , let us say you are a researcher in UK getting an EU grant. What hapenned afterward ? *maybe* the rgant runs to tis end, but afterward ? Well here you go . no more EU grant and now the Uk has to give more grants to *keep* the same funding amount of science, and the collaboration is not as easy anymore. What this has to do with worker right ? Nothing whatsoever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"I assume everyone who disagrees with me is a racist. This makes it much easier for me to assume a moral high ground and dismiss their opinions and experiences out of hand without engaging." -everyone who voted to stay
I can see why you people do this. It's very easy and conveinient!
I am a British scientist and am freaking out.
I am a British scientist and am not freaking out.
I have nothing to do with the EU and don't give a rat's ass about the whole matter.
I am from Scotland and the English can go shave the Queen's.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Certainty.
Think about it, or read Anti-Fragile.
Not sure if all people that vote for Brexit were what you alleged i.e. uneducated, old racists. But I am sure there are surely solutions to this problem - some of them have been tried in the past - you can start with reeducation camps and see what you do next if that does not work.
In other words by calling all Brexiters old uneducated xenophobes you slur at educated tolerant people that did not believe all the lies, think there are ways around problems and value democracy more than the undemocratic bunch in Brussels. Now I do not live in UK but in Germany and in German press there was a lot of calls for ignoring referendum results - to save democracy not less. With such a bunch it is maybe better to keep out, I do not know. In any case I have uneasy feeling when I look, for instance, at how we were all forced in an alliance with Turkey - something that has not been discussed with anybody besides some head of states i.e. something that lacked legitimacy while at the same time some alternative solutions were at hand (which Austria used together with Macedonia). Then there are other arguments - the policies of EU left huge groups of people in each country without benefits - the local governments helped of course and Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece have much to blame there too but EU stance was not ideal to say the least. Then take any of the common policies - common agricultural or fisheries policies - they are failures and there is no sign of improvement there. The list of negatives is long, at least as long as the least of positives. EU HQ refuses to address any of these problems and I do not mean curvature of cucumbers and banana and other some nonsense which by the way would not be possible if EU regulations did not provoke blatant exaggeration and the EU authorities bothered to explain these things to dumb folk of EU.
There is unfortunate part of Brexiters that are xenophobes are uneducated and have generally problems with the rest of the society. If you are going to single out a small London minority as the only Brits than I am afraid you are on a good way to political area where most of us do not want to be. The same process is seen in almost any other country. In Germany the propaganda machine works efficiently and people still believe what they are fed. Not sure if that is all that good. Sometimes you have to give up few good things together with the ones you cannot tolerate. Maybe that is what Brits did. Calling the Brexiters od uneducated and xenophobic means that you gave up quite big chunk of population - what are you going to do with them?
Btw - I personally profited greatly from open borders in EU. I did live better when the borders existed tho. I accepted the decrease of life quality but only because I considered it worthwhile. When I look at likes of Juncker or Merkel or great democrats in Spain that cannot calm down their own separatism movements but are already salivating at the possibility for continental blockade to get the Rock back, when I look at all this, I start to have justified doubts. Maybe UK will suffer short term. In long term they will be as good as others. And as for EU - if we have problems because of brexit we can always let Turkey in - that will surely strengthen our democracy.
Europe is a competitor not a supermarket. Trade deficit is a net loss due to trade. Pretending a deficit isn't a loss is just words. It's not a "cost of doing business", other countries in the EU trade at a profit.
"...if we could source the goods we import from the EU more cheaply elsewhere"
That's a false dichotomy. You can also source the goods and services domestically, or not import optional goods at all. Both those reduce the trade loss.
Your argument is really the classic : "make up the losses in the volume" that loss-making companies make. You really cannot do this, you need to keep borrowing and borrowing to cover those losses. In Britains case it's been privatizing to keep the inflow of cash into the UK. e.g. China building a nuclear power plant. But that cash has not resulted in a net trade gain. It's not productive investment into the UK as it is false presented as.
These things happen when the government represents the interests of its own people instead of the interests of the globalist elite
Uh, what? You mean the referendum didn't benefit people who made a killing from the Murdoch press backing Leave? That the outcome won't benefit the people who were pushing for TTIP, whose strongest backer in the EU was the British prime minister and who are now pushing for a direct US/UK treaty that won't have the strong opposition from the European Parliament able to block it? That voting to take power from the people who just passed the General Data Protection Regulation and giving it to the people who just voted to pass the Investigatory Powers Bill is good for the people? That voting more power to the people in Westminster, who have consistently underspent per capita on the poorest areas in the EU at the expense of the City of London, and taking it away from the organisation that has been redressing that balance will help the people?
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The part of the argument i.e. about lost opportunities if trade war ensues is true. Al will lose - some more than the others.
The point is - better to avoid trade war and try to make an arrangement. This will not be easy with current climate in EU corridors of power. Then there is the UK side - the people that felt disadvantaged may get the UK chunk of corrupt elite stay with them and suck on their blood. There is a bit more work to be done than to say 'brexit'. There was also hope on the some continental quarters that EU shocked with Brexit will look at itself and tries to correct its ways. I do not see it happening - instead I see typical infighting between commission and council about Brexit negotiations for instance. We need to throw the old commission out and modify few things if EU is to survive and we all are to prosper. If we let the elites suck all the benefits and leave the rest alone to rot than we deserve another run of middle ages.
The Doctor and Clara find themselves under attack by a robot/computer/whatever still fighting a war that was lost thousands of years ago.
Actually, I think I saw that on Gilligan's Island too, but with a Japanese submarine.
Anyhow, the Brexit vote is in the past, but parts of Project Fear were damaged in the fighting and are now unable to comprehend that the war is over. Meanwhile, reality is turning out to be the exact opposite of most of the doom and gloom predictions.
See that "Preview" button?
The science was always going to be the first one to be hit from brexit. Basically the system is based on funding collaborations across the EU, and rightly or wrongly, collaboration groups are dropping UK based research institutes as a high risk to the projects funding prospects. There has been no real impact yet as very few grants have been awarded since the vote, but as we see the next few rounds of various Horizon 2020 EU grant scheme go through we will see a drop in funding going to the UK.
Next that will be obvious is the decrease in funding for regional development, and that will be when it starts to impact the people that actually voted to leave. That is going to take a year or so to become obvious.
My frustration with the referendum is that the leave side of the vote wasn't actually had no specific actions assigned to it in the law that set it up, in the end it was a very expensive nation wide opinion poll on EU membership. In a way, people who voted leave didn't actually vote for anything concrete.
The vote should have had article 50 legislatively tied to the vote when the referendum was first setup, with an automatic and immediate invocation of it outside the control of the UK parliament and prime minister. It would have dramatically curtailed the leave campaigns ability to basically come up with contradictory and fanciful scenarios of what voting leave would mean, it would have been a much starker and obvious choice.
Weren't they cutting funding anyway despite the vote?
Dude, get over it. We brexited. Deal with it.
RBS's business is the same as it was pre-referendum. Once Ross McEwan (CEO) stops talking the bank stock price down it will rebound.
> It is common courtesy to write some text around your links
I agree: some descriptive text is in order and would be of great help for people who browse with little time (like at work for instance). If the author her/himself works at a pretty liberal place, that would be excusable (also kudos for the employers for being knowledgeable about management).
> or at least make them clickable via some basic html.
There's no need for that. It's 2016: just triple-click on the address and it will be entirely selected; then drag and drop it onto the tab bar (tested in Firefox and Chromium) -- a little arrow will appear showing the insertion point for a new tab which will open the selected address.
Of course, in Linux you can also middle-click to paste, much easier than the Windows Control-C, Control-V manoeuvre (English syntax as courtesy).
"Face it, Canada is rapidly rising to be the next dominant superpower, both politically and economically. We're also far smarter than the Europeans and Americans, so we won't repeat their mistakes and we'll be here to stay at the top."
And thanks to global warming, in another century or so it will be a tolerable place to live.
hrmph. What do you mean "you" people!?
These things happen when the government represents the interests of its own people instead of the interests of the globalist elite.
Why would globalists want EU? In truely globalized world there can be no EU, as all countries are equally important parts of the world. EU is just next iteration of Holy Roman Empire, I'd call it Forth Reich. They're really prone to treat everyone outside EU like trash, kinda like Third Reich.
"re still aren't enough British plumbers to make up the shortfall, but we've benefitted from importing them from other countries so plumbing work is now only very expensive to get done and not totally extortionate."
That, and the long-standing European tradition that if you are newly trained as a plumber and there is already a plumber in your village, you have to wait until the first one retires.
Virtually everything you read about Brexit in the media before and after the referendum has been FUD.
Britain was one of the world's most prosperous, safe, and culturally advanced nations for over a thousand years.
I'm sure they will do just fine as they watch the EU collapse under the weight of their open borders policies
If the UK voted to leave the EU, there is little chance that it will vote to join the U.S.
The last time we tried to acquire Canada, Washington DC burned down.
At the moment the U.S. has plenty to worry about than trying to expand it property. An election of two rather unpopular candidates (With one being batshit crazy, who seems to have conned much of the uneducated portion of the population). In a world that wants us to get more involved and less involved at the same time. While trying to maintain the growth and prosperity it achieved after it was the only major country that didn't have its infrastructure knocked out from WWII.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How do you know that abstainers would vote for remain?
How do you know that abstainers did not make a conscious decision not to vote because for instance both options were considered bad?
Scumbag news article is trying to say that vacationing abroad is a good thing. Unless you're Disney, support vacationing in your own country.
Less issues of picking up a disease your body cannot handle and your money goes back into your economy.
The EU and globalization in general is a scam.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Dissolve the EU. It serves no person only the corporations.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
You say the UK receives more than it pays into the EU. Who pays for Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechia, Portugal, Latvia, et al? Is Germany paying for *everyone*? Christ, what a mess.
Y2K passed off with barely a whimper because millions of software engineers around the planet took it seriously and worked their asses off for a good 6 months to make their software cope with the year ticking over to 2000.
Much of that work was frankly unnecessary. Not all the code was fixed on time and some countries spent very little on Y2K remediation (South Korea, Italyand yet they experienced very few problems. Millions of small businesses did virtually zero remediation and yet they experienced virtually zero problems. While I'm not arguing that all the remediation was useless (much was definitely necessary) the problem was definitely blown out of proportion and there is copious evidence to support that assertion.
Additional contractors were engaged almost around the clock at extortionate rates in the final months, because there was so much code to remedy.
That was because large companies were worried about liability if by some chance something should go wrong. Consulting companies made a ton of money selling Y2K remediation to credulous executives for several years before the actual year 2000 arrived. Basically they were buying expensive insurance for a problem that they didn't fully understand.
The thanks go to all the engineers who worked ridiculous hours to keep the systems you rely on from falling apart.
Those engineers got paid to work those hours. You make it sound as if it was some heroic sacrifice on their part. Never mind that it was (mostly other) software engineers that created the problem in the first place by utilizing bad programming practices over the preceding decades.
of course we can devalue the pound if we want to, that was the purpose of not joining the euro
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
That's not how it works, iris-n. The pound fluctuates against the euro, it always has done and it always will. It went from 1.3 to 1.2, but it's been 1.04 before. This doesn't make Britain richer or poorer linearly as most of the GDP is spent within the UK itself. For instance the NHS pays doctors and nurses in pounds, therefore the pound going down makes no difference, but it will make drugs more expensive to buy from abroad.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Britain was one of the world's most prosperous, safe, and culturally advanced nations for over a thousand years.
That's no guarantee that it will remain so. The British Empire is a shadow of what it was just 100 years ago.
I'm sure they will do just fine as they watch the EU collapse under the weight of their open borders policies
If the EU collapses for any reason it won't be because of their border policies. The thing most likely to cause the EU to fail is the problem of fixed exchange rates within the currency union. In a single country like the US, capital and labor can flow relatively freely to where it is needed when there are imbalances between regions. But since the EU is comprised of sovereign countries when you get a region in financial distress (see Greece) they have the problem of effectively having fixed exchange rates between sovereign states with more limited labor and capital mobility.
If Greece was still on the drachma, their exchange rate would have adjusted in response to the economic problems. But since they effectively had a fixed exchange rate, they get the problems of a fixed exchange rate. It's not clear that the EU can manage this problem in the long term. Note the already tense and clumsy response to the Greek bailouts. If a bigger economy within the EU (say Spain or France), were to run into similar problems the problem might become too large to handle.
I'm not saying the EU will collapse but if anything causes it to, it most likely will be the failure of the monetary union rather than immigration policy.
[...] Face it, Canada is rapidly rising to be the next dominant superpower, both politically and economically. We're also far smarter than the Europeans and Americans, so we won't repeat their mistakes and we'll be here to stay at the top.
LOL is right. I'm still laughing as I type this. Thanks, I needed that. Canada... world leader... bwhahahahahahhaaaaa. Nice one. Woohoo....
I mean there's the Replication Crisis to consider, and the Decline Effect, and then somewhere north of 40,000 neurology papers that were a waste of time
Actually your examples point to the problem which is not how the grants are assigned within a field but the level of funding between different fields. The effects you point to are all predominantly (but not exclusively) related to medical sciences. This is an area where politicians, corporations and the public love to pour huge quantities of money into because of the intense personal connection medicine has to all of us.
A perfect grant allocation system will give the most promising research ideas the highest priority for funding until all the funds are allocated. This means that the more funds you have the lower the quality of research that will be funded even if you have a perfect allocation system. This is what I believe we are seeing today with a good, but obviously not perfect, allocation system.
The solution is to redirect research funding away from medicine to other areas of science. This will have the effect of increasing the output of other fields which will lead to discoveries some of which will in turn help advance medicine as well as advance productivity so we can pay for all the new medical techniques being developed. However this is hard to do because while we all have a strong personal connection directly or through loved ones to curing things like cancer or heart disease very few people have a strong personal connection to making a better battery, understanding superconductivity, finding the nature of Dark Matter or solving quantum gravity etc.
Britain was one of the world's most prosperous, safe, and culturally advanced nations for over a thousand years.
So was Greece. And Rome. And Egypt.
As a whole, the country paid more than it got back.
Still waiting for the gov to say anything about using that money to fund what is going to lose funding, and what might be done with the rest. Of course, after the result everyone just kinda shut up about that. I guess they've already committed a bunch of it away to their private interests. I mean we can fund trident in the aftermath but not bursaries for nurses and midwifes, who now aren't going to be coming in from the EU or from outside because they don't earn £35k/annum (Thanks to May for that one). So we can kill millions in a revenge attack that will never happen while fucking the NHS even harder. God damn mother fucking tories! All as a result from Scameron trying to score a few political points. Don't worry about him though, he's a multi millionaire and will be just fine in this shit show he got us in to.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
And what does popularism get you? A deep and long depression, unemployment and no less immigrants.
Absolutely. The biggest worry is that the government maintains the same level of immigration to keep business costs (i.e. wages) low, but that without the preference to European countries that means more Muslims - with the consequent increase of child rape gangs, terrorist acts, "honour" killings, no-go-areas etc.
Or worse; more Australians.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The pound fluctuates against the euro, it always has done and it always will. It went from 1.3 to 1.2, but it's been 1.04 before.
That is a bit of an understatement, Gomuchul. The pound has hit 1.04€, it is true, but in the height of the 2008 crysis. If you look at the whole history of the GBP vs. EUR exchange rate, you see that the pound starts off rather valuable, decreases to about 1.5€ and stays there for some yeara, then crashes to 1.05€ in the 2008 crysis, slowly recovers to 1.5€, and then rapidly gets down to 1.2€ as the referendum gets near.
It's true that the effect is not linear, as lots od the pounds are spent in Britain itself, but still the economy is deeply integrated with the EU. I'm sure the amount of wealth lost is much larger than 8 billion pounds, even if it doean't reach 180 billion pounds.
entropy happens
Most of this is a cynical exercise by companies using Brexit as a pretext to engage in mass lay off and withdraw from their commitments despite receiving massive subsidies from the local governments.
how Britain will look after Brexit
I'm really tired of hearing of people "Freaking Out" over anything. That phrase has become so overused that it not only doesn't mean what it used to mean, it barely means anything at all any more. It used to be reserved for something that was nearly a complete psychotic breakdown, now it means any time someone has to find another box of kleenex, finds their pen is out of ink, or that their favorite starbucks barista is out sick.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We will fix the EU, but the only language it understands is this one. Here's to my country leaving as well!
The correct way to build the EU would have been to grow it slowly, over a period of generations. Forcing it in a few years, using immigration as a weapon against the identity of the people of Europe, for no better reasons than power, money, and glory for a handful of unelected bureaucrats, is shameful and doomed to fail.
Once the coming civil war is over and the guilty have been sentenced, then we can consider a new union. One that actually respects the people and cultures it unifies.
Very Sorry, AC, I honestly had not come across any evidence of Cameron saying that he would stand down if he lost.
Golly, I reckon that if more people had been aware of that, even more would have voted for exit than the 52% majority...
You do realize that in single countries like the US they have nothing but fixed exchange rates? Texas dollars are the same as California dollars.
The US also has free movement of labor and capital within the country which is how economic imbalances get solved. If New Jersey has economic troubles, the labor and capital can (relatively) easily move to another state. If labor costs in Michigan get out of line, the business moves to Georgia and the people as well. The Federal government controls the currency and acts to help allocate it where needed. Some states effectively subsidize others. Workers can become a citizen of another state simply by moving there. A Greek citizen cannot become a French citizen nearly so easily and the EU has the single currency but they do not have the ability to move capital and labor around as easily to deal with imbalances in local economic conditions.
They also have similar problems to the Greek bailouts (for example, problems with solvency of some of the states/territories in higher debt such as Illinois or Puerto Rico).
The problems in various US states bear little resemblance to the Greek bailout unless you squint really hard and don't go any deeper than the fact that they are related to debt service. The problems in Puerto Rico are solvable if Congress and/or the Executive branch could be bothered to give the island any attention and they are much easier problems to solve than the Greek ones. Interestingly many of the problems in Puerto Rico are challenging precisely because it is not a State. If it were there would be more tools available to them.
Yeah, those fucking racists. I wonder why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
With one being batshit crazy, who seems to have conned much of the uneducated portion of the population
Well, we know now from the leaked emails that she would never have gotten the Democratic nomination if it hadn't been rigged in her favor.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
no its really not racist
Nationalist , but not racist. That word literally has no meaning after the past decade
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Someone learned what a fallacy was and now claims everything is a fallacy.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Britain was one of the world's most prosperous, safe, and culturally advanced nations for over a thousand years.
An aggressive cunt of a nation that is finally due its comeuppance. The fact that leaving the EU is a self-inflicted injury is hilarious.
Enjoy your newfound irrelevance. Nigeria will overtake your economy in size in the next few years but I'm just major trading blocs will be queueing up to cut deals with you. LOL.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
As a 'remainer' I seriously didn't want this course of events.
Now however it seems to me that our best bet would be to join the EEA (which is basically 'Soft Brexit'), since this gets us out of the customs union. It'll also minimise the damage overall. This means renegotiating all the curent EU trade deals again, so thats rather alot of work to do in any case.
The only silver lining to this would be the ability to negotiate trade deals where the EU feared to tread. Whether this would be affective, and not disastrous, does depend on the agendas of the UK negotiators. With Liam Fox in charge of this process I am NOT confident. He'll be doing deals for the benefit of his corporate chums, not the UK as a whole.
Full USAian TTIP with the ISCS supranational secret court screwing UK small business and industry as well as UK people is a nightmare waiting to happen. We'll see a depression like the worst in the US Rust belt. (This was due to unrestricted globalisation with no thought paid to the damage it would do to those businesses and people in the Rust belt, and no mitigation in place to help).
Didn't France say that the TTIP was dead because of this?
The EU governance/parliament values science, and the dickheads running the UK do not value science. That too fucking hard for you to follow?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The leave voters, who only want brown/foreign people to go away, are not going to be overly concerned about science funding. When I say not overly concerned what I mean is, they'd be pleased to hear that those egghead cunts are not getting to squander more money.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The last time we tried to acquire Canada, Washington DC burned down.
Well, if that's not a good reason to try again, what is?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not even that - a narrow majority of the votes cast, which on a 70% turnout approximates to 36% of the electorate. There is (or soon will be) a 40% threshold for strikes in health, education and transport to be valid. So a level of support that cannot even validate a one-day strike by, say, teachers, is sufficient to jeopardise Britain's prosperity, territorial integrity and foreign relations?
The muslims that immigrate are usually those that run away from: child rape gangs, terrorist acts, "honour" killings, no-go-areas etc
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sorry, this belongs below, in response to the comment about the result being the majority of English voters. Scotland, Northern Ireland and London voted firmly to remain.
Says someone who has no clue about the problem. As the rest of your post shows.
You have no idea what my background is so you're not really in a position to judge. Furthermore the public facts are that there is a ton of evidence that Y2K simply wasn't as big a problem as it was made out to be. There were a few bits that definitely needed some serious fixing but the hype around the problem exceeded the reality of the problem for most companies.
I fixed about 1.5 millin lines of code written in COBOL and PL1.
Good job. Your personal experience doesn't change the facts though. Most companies had nothing close to that amount of code to fix if they had any at all and the core operations of most weren't ever at substantial risk. The only real risk to many was that their bank or Microsoft wouldn't deal with the problem adequately. As long as that happened most other problems weren't too serious.
The company would have been out of business now, if we had not fixed ist software.
That is the exception that proves the rule. Not a single company I have worked for or consulted to or worked with (which is many) would have been put out of business by Y2K. Most companies exposure to the Y2K problem was minimal. A typical restaurant or a manufacturing company simply were not in substantial danger from the problem. A few companies had serious exposure to the problem and needed substantial mitigation. Most did not.
Basically every Company whee we fixed the code for would not have survived if we had not (or if we had made majour mistakes).
Are you familiar with the concept of selection bias? You worked on some of the few companies that actually had major problems. Some unquestionably did and no one should minimize the seriousness of what they dealt with. Most however demonstrably did not have serious problems with Y2K and had minimal to no mitigation required. It wasn't clear at the time how serious Y2K would be but we we have the advantage of hindsight and data about those who did little to deal with the problem. Turns out it just wasn't as bad as we feared for the most part.
I worked with several myself that did basically nothing in regards to the problem. My primary employer just before and during Y2K was a large manufacturing concern (Fortune 500 at the time) and while they did a systemic review (which I was involved in), there was very little they needed to do and the only potential significant risks to them were things that were entirely out of their control. None of the companies I consulted with in the 5 years before and after Y2K were in any substantial danger either. I think if you were to look around objectively you'd see the same thing in most places.
This.
And popularism also gets you more xenophobia.
-- Cheers!
Hey, who wants a double caramel latte chocca mocca made by someone who isn't a graduate? /s
It'd obviously taste terrible!
(With one being batshit crazy, who seems to have conned much of the uneducated portion of the population).
So you've got Hillary covered. What is your criticism of Trump?
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
"Of course, in Linux you can also middle-click to paste, much easier than the Windows Control-C, Control-V maneuver. " (correct spelling the word to a US and most of the world centric version is for my benefit).
It is much easier to cut and paste using the traditional keyboard shortcuts than it is to remove your hands from the KB and position the mouse then return to the keyboard again. Whether you are using *nix or Windows. I can't say for OSX as I've never really been a big user. The use of a mouse is slow and inefficient if you are typing any length of text. That is why the 'tab' functions the way it does.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If the UK voted to leave the EU, there is little chance that it will vote to join the U.S.
Hey, but at least they wouldn't be taxed without representation!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, if you cherry-pick the dates, 10% is roughly correct.
Now if I cherry-pick my own dates (April to today), we can see that the pound has only fallen 4% against the Euro.
Given that currency markets fluctuate significantly over time, isn't it possible that the Pound could recover all its value against the Euro within the next 3-6 months? Will you come back to admit your point is no longer valid if this occurs?
Over a thousand years? You really think that Britain in, say, the 13th or 14th C was advanced compared to China, Korea, Japan, the Fatmid Empire, India, or Ghana? You probably didn't even realize Ghana was once a major world power because of the parochialism of history as taught in European schools, but it was the world's largest producer of gold. Ghanian gold in trans-Saharan trade caused inflation in medieval Egypt, and high prices spurred the development of Venetian trade. That brought wealth and knowledge into Italy, making the Renaissance possible. So no Ghana, no European civilization as we know it.
Until the Enlightenment, Europe was the most backward shit-hole in the world, intellectually, culturally and technologically. Why do you think Columbus and everyone else was so anxious to get to China? Because that's where all the good stuff was; amazing stuff like paper, chimneys, dental fillings,cast iron and a merit-based civil service system. The one thing Europe was advanced in, though was fighting. Europeans were unruly, uncivilized barbarians who fought each other all the time, so naturally they got very good at it.
If you were sentenced to be sent back by time machine to live in the 1200s, Europe would be low on the list of places you'd want to end up. China probably wins based on the availability of toilet paper alone. Britain was relatively peaceful and advanced for Northern Europe, but it's hard to think of places in Asia or Africa that suffered multiple decades-spanning civil wars that Britain did.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If the UK is so prosperous, why it is a home of some of the poorest and least developed areas in the EU - worse than Romania or Bulgaria?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
No decent Canadian would ever write like you do, so I guess that you're an immigrant from the U.S.
The time is nigh for Canada to build a wall on its borders and make U.S.icans pay for it!
You're obviously not a Canadian either - your accent is wrong, and you didn't say "eh" even once!
#DeleteChrome
>And thanks to global warming, in another century or so it will be a tolerable plaote>
Yeah, but when your currency is based on the value of beaver pelts, global warming has a downside too...
#DeleteChrome
My company is actually expanding operations with two British companies we do business with. Much of this is possible by the weakened pound and knowing that their EU membership tax (which was shockingly large we found out) will be lifted. I'm starting to think all this fear mongering in the media is being orchestrated by the big fish so they can have first dibs at the best pieces.
The "loss in value" is virtual bullshit. The money that gets paid to the EU and distributed to other countries is real.
Stock markets will normalize, and people who don't panic can profit off of the situation.
On the other hand, good luck getting your money back after some Greek guy spent it on gyros.
In FF you can just highlight the link, then right click and open it (in the current tab, in a new tab, in a new window, or in a private tab).
If the UK is so prosperous, why it is a home of some of the poorest and least developed areas in the EU - worse than Romania or Bulgaria?
WTF? I'm an independence-inclined Scot with no patience for the rest of the United Kingdom that's dragging us out of the EU against our will.
And even I'm going to call BS on this unless you can elaborate on and substantiate your claim.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The reporting requirements in H2020 funded projects are way less. Even with late FP7 projects, our POs already told us that deliverables >120pages were somewhat frowned upon as they also realized that no one reads them anyway.
something clever to make me stand out!
It'd be awful merely to be sentenced to England 100 years ago, it'd be even worse to be in an English colony. If you weren't born to the right parents your advancement options were slim. And 100 years ago the Great War was still in progress, probably pretty sucky to be male back then and stuck in a trench with all your superiors being upperclass twits fighting a pointless war because the major hobby in Europe those days was having wars. That's the whole reason for the EU anyway, an experiment to unite all these close neighbors rather than invading each other.
And it's those eastern Europeans who got the brunt of xenophobic backlash the day after the Brexit vote.
I don't want to break your fairy tale, but thousand years ago Britain wasn't a nation and comparing to some others it definitely wasn't "most prosperous, safe, and culturally advanced".
Yes. The company I work for also exports all over the world, much less to the EU, so it's good for us too.
you will be surprised how many brown people voted to leave , hint hint Commonwealth citizens are allowed the vote as well.
Wanted : A Signature.
I can't tell you how many British scientists are looking for positions in North America or the rest of the EU, but it's pretty large. Some are staying in Scotland, betting they will stay in the EU after Scexit (or Indyref2) happens, some are betting on Northern Ireland for the same reason, but it's a sad state of affairs.
Decisions have consequences, just like Maggie Thatcher's actions caused a brain drain from Britain for more than a decade.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://money.aol.co.uk/2014/05...
http://www.westbriton.co.uk/co...
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
That appears to be a relative comparison, and appears to include a weighting for (e.g.) prices.
That's not to say that such concerns aren't legitimate. For example, housing in the UK is generally expensive, reaching ludicrous and obscene levels in the South East of England and especially London. It means that anyone who isn't on a well-paid job in that area is going to have serious problems finding affordable accommodation. (FWIW, I'm disgusted that the UK economy is so obsessed with ever-increasing house prices and the fact that this is assumed to be a good thing. Not if you're looking for your first bloody house, it isn't.)
Social exclusion is another area that's very relative; if most people have a higher income and social life revolves around activities requiring that level of income, someone earning less is going to be socially excluded. In fact, that's probably true regardless of the level of absolute income- it's the amount of inequality that's more likely to be important there.
But in absolute financial terms, it's utterly misleading to compare any region or country within the United Kingdom to Romania or Bulgaria.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Holy Fuck you lucky git. My FP7 PO complemented us on the quality of our report, then dinged us because it wasn't long enough. No joke.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Does what you are saying mean it is no longer white peoples fault the world sucks? Or is this a new way of phrasing the same old tired refrain?
Oh, genetic testing has pretty much shown the whole idea of a "white person" is wrong. The whole notion of inbreeding groups that descend, largely pristine, from primordial times is a fairy tale. So it can't be white peoples' fault, any more than it can be the fault of the fairies. There's no such thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why? GDP per capita of Wales in 2014 was about 17k GBP (source: Wikipedia). That is comparable to Greece or Slovenia in absolute numbers. Should be embarrassing for a rich and prosperous country. Even the GDP per capita of North Rhine - Westphalia, currently the economically weakest German federal state, is almost twice as high.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
That is comparable to Greece or Slovenia in absolute numbers.
Who mentioned anything about Greece or Slovenia? We were discussing your comparison of the United Kingdom with Romania and Bulgaria.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
yes, people are complaining about those coming in and taking the high paying jobs.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Which was absolutely valid. In relative numbers - GDP to purchasing power - Wales is indeed on the level of Romania and Bulgaria. In absolute numbers it is comparable to Greece and Slovenia - both countries are very poor. No matter how you take it, it is unworthy of "the 6th largest economy in the world" and only shows that a large part of that economy is the city of London casino.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
We know no such thing. You're speculating on the outcome of a hypothetical situation.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Every time I think of British scientists I think of the Monty Python sketch of Upperclass Twit of the Year.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I'm working on my alternative citizenship, so that I can take myself out of the racist shithole that is Britain (country of my birth) and move to a more amenable European country (and taking my tax revenue with me). Speaking another language for breakfast. So fucking what?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
A trend against science and research and education has been seen in the US. Why not also in the EU and UK?
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
What makes you think post-brexit UK will opt out of the open border policy?
Mod up, informative.
Get a course on macroeconomics, the money lost is real enough.
Definitely need a course in macroeconomics. Should be a requirement for voting these days.