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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.
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 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.
What a long pile of stupid delusions.
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.
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
Only if you completely ignore the relative sizes of the UK & EU GDPs and overall exports. Guess what, absolute numbers need context. A simple way of looking at it is "who would be hit hardest if UK-EU trade stopped overnight".
In 2015, the UK exported 220 billion GBP to the EU, whereas it imported 290 billion GBP. That is 44% of the UK's exports went to the EU, whereas 8-17% of the EU's exports went to the UK, so the UK would be a bigger loser.
As a percentage of GDP, the UK's EU exports made up about 10% of its GDP (2 trillion GBP), whereas the EU's UK exports made up a mere 2% of its GDP (12 trillion GBP).
Source: https://fullfact.org/europe/uk...
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.
Your facts are fear mongering. I don't want to hear them. I'm tired of experts and I don't like immigrants. And we won a big war a long time ago so there.
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
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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!
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 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.
"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!?
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.
"Seriously Remainiacs are some of the dumbest people I've ever met." says the person who believed Johnson, Gove, Farage, Daily Mail, Daily Express... my god, you must be embarrassed, if not, you should be
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
Says someone who has no clue about the problem. As the rest of your post shows.
I fixed about 1.5 millin lines of code written in COBOL and PL1. (Two different projects, the PL1 Job was only a quallity assurance as the original code was already fixed: "manually by the consultants you hate", while my company used a kind of specialized compiler)
The company where I fixed the close to 1 Million lines COBOL code woke up regarding the Y2K problem very late. They just got bought by an american company. And the new directors went ape shit when they realized the Y2K problem was not even tackled yet (that was mid 1998).
The company would have been out of business now, if we had not fixed ist software. And so would beall the customers of said company!!!
While we worked on such projects we had a partner company, a spin off from IBM basically but based on the Software Tool Chain that was developed by a Belgium/Dutch Company in an Erasmus project. (European EU wide distributed research Projects, mainly done in universities, partly in spin offs)
We had a joined venture with the Netherlands branch of "TriLoc Software Engineering, Milwaukee".
Basically every Company whee we fixed the code for would not have survived if we had not (or if we had made majour mistakes).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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.
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
You've completely missed the point - the fact that even though the UK has a trade deficit with the EU, it's the UK that is likely to be hit hardest because the relative size of their respective economies.
"Exports would go to the next highest marginal buyer."
If that would happen in the UK, so everything is fine and dandy, why would you discount it happening in the EU too?
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.
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.
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
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.
It doesn't work that way, though. Britain spends a lot of money on the EU, but gets back far more in indirect returns (benefits from the single market, free labour to shore up industries, banking passports allowing London to be the financial capital of the world, etc.). You are suggesting that Britain somehow makes some money out of thin air to make up for the money it no longer receives from the EU. Scientists are always begging for scraps from everyone - EU, Westminster, it doesn't matter. Don't pretend that it's simply because it's the EU that this is changed in any way. Your understanding of this is strangely lacking.
But naaaah - instead of improving our situation within the EU, let's just stomp around and blame all kinds of nebulous "ills" on Brussels, weaken our voice in Europe, and still be almost entirely beholden to their whims. You're so clever! Yay you!
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.
Except that UK citizens will be worse off because the cost of imported products (including such basics as oil) will increase.
Perhaps you are too young to remember, but try googling the following words: "the pound in your pocket Wilson". Devaluation didn't work out then and there is no reason to think that it will work out now.
The Leave campaign was based on lies and this continues. A few days after the vote, there were statements in the newspapers proclaiming how the pound had risen strongly. Yes, the pound had risen a little, but it was still way less than than its pre-Brexit-vote value. The small bump in the value of the pound was irrelevant in comparison to the large drop immediately after the vote.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
Trade deficit is a net loss due to trade.
No, it's not. You got something for that money after all. Or do you call every buy a loss?
You can also source the goods and services domestically, or not import optional goods at all. Both those reduce the trade loss.
Then why don't you? The EU doesn't mandate that you do not buy from within your own country.
more people holidaying at home
So a big downgrade in quality of life. A nice holiday overseas reduced to a week in Bognor. Butlins must be happy.
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
That's an incredibly simplistic misunderstanding.
Take German car manufacturers. The dealer buys a car from the factory in Europe, which now costs them 10% more than it did before the vote. Someone is going to have to take this hit - either the manufacturer, the dealer or the consumer. Even cars made in the UK don't benefit much, because after we let our steel industry be destroyed by China (yay! free trade!) a lot of the parts are imported anyway, and now cost more.
And in the wider picture, other EU members are looking to protect the EU itself and discourage others from trying to leave. Given a choice between 10% tariffs and the union suffering further damage and break-up, they will opt to screw the UK and take the hit. Less than 10% of their exports go to the UK, around 45% of our imports come from the EU. We will suffer far more than they will.
UK will inevitably have a stronger economy
Germany's economy is 15% larger than the UK's per head of population, despite Germany being the union of a western and an ex-Soviet block country. Their economy, along with the EU as a whole, is growing faster than ours. When they announce that they want to leave the single market during negotiations things will get even worse for us. It will be another Black Friday.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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