The govt have neglected housing for 3 decades, it's a roundabout cause of brexit - cost of living is too much because of stagnant wages, soaring houses prices and rents, both affected by immigration. Funny thing is the middle classes flat out refuse to accept that more people going after jobs = lower wage or that more people trying to rent or buy = higher housing costs, it's a very weird denial of the most fundamental aspect of capitalism which is 'supply and demand'. But hey, easier to just chant 'racism'.
Not denying that it is a factor, but I don't really expect the wages to go up or the cost of housing to go down post-Brexit... or at least not in any significant way. I do expect a drop in high-paying jobs in financial services companies, banking and fintech, which will reduce the amount of money circulating in the local economy. Being just back from a short business trip in Blighty, I don't think the shop keepers need another reduction in business. Talking of supply and demand, Blighty doesn't produce half the food it produces.
Well tried, but if you are a US citizen you will still pay US taxes on income after leaving. And you have to pay to renounce the nationality, including an exit tax on your assets... which is all kind of fucked up as those assets were bought with your post-tax income.
This. I see loads of jobs in London, Oxford, Reading and other big cities that pay about the same as I get now, but housing costs are 3-4x as much.
This. The rent for a small flat close to our London office costs 7 times the monthly payment on my current property. Staying in a hotel 500 meters from the office and eating lunch/dinner in restaurants is cheaper than renting a flat in the 5 kilometers zone around the office. That's more or less what I did the last time my then-employer reassigned me for 3 months in Guildford, 15 years ago. The real estate market in the UK is seriously screwed and has been for some time.
There's indeed a possibility that a lot of Europeans were filling those jobs and went away because of Brexit. Friends of mine relocated away from the UK weeks after the Brexit vote, as they were made to feel very unwelcome all of a sudden (Spanish husband, Polish wife, in the UK for 10 years). The short-term, no-benefits jobs may also be because quite a few of the banks and financial places are now executing their contingency planning. My local financial regulator has been swamped since July 2016, even tho they have more than doubled their capacity to process license applications.
I'm now getting pinged hourly by recruiters for positions in the UK, and they can't seem to understand why I'm not interested. Even pre-Brexit, moving to the UK would have made no sense to me because of the cost of living increase (earn more or less the same pre-tax, increase my cost of living by more than 30%).
Look at the first link... I'll concede that the US overall ranks 11th with cost factored in. However:
It ranks 5th on "quality care", 3rd on "effective care", 7th on "safe care", 6th on "coordinated care", 4th on "patient centered care", 11th on "healthy lives"... none of those factor in cost.
From my experience, a lot of the resumes you see have been doctored by the recruitment agency/company in India. One team member went to such and such university for a summer class, the whole team suddenly graduated "magna cum laude" from such and such university. One team member went to a RedHat event, the entire team is RHCE/RHCA.
To be honest, that problem exists to some extent with all recruitment/sourcing companies in the world. I once accidentally received my own resume doctored by a recruitment company as it had landed on a colleague's desk. I had met the recruiter for a specific position and didn't give them the authorization to send my resume to other clients. They were trying to sell me for a pure dev role for less money than I was actually making at the time. It took me a few minutes to even acknowledge it was my resume as they had inserted a ton of bullshit in my previous jobs.
The US healthcare system is #11 out of 11 on outcomes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/06/16/u-s-healthcare-ranked-dead-last-compared-to-10-other-countries/) and #37 out of 191 on efficiency (http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf)... hardly the best, hardly the worst. It is however definitely #1 in costs.
People with money travel from all over the world if they have cash, because expensive untested treatments are available in the US but not in other places.
North America pays better, twice to three to seven times better.
Yeah I could increase my income by moving to the San Francisco office from the European office (doubling it, tops). However, the mortgage on my house is currently ~12% of my pre-tax income (2% fixed rate on 20 years)... there's no way I could find a house for a similar fraction of my salary 1h from the office. Most of my colleagues from the SF office drop 50% of their paycheck on accommodation outside the 1h commute belt. Once I throw in health services, pension, the cost of quality food, the cost of good education if I get kids, PTO... moving to SF is at very best status-quo and most likely a losing proposition.
H1B, outsourcing to Europe or Asia is always undercutting and threatening. There is just so much pressure on the American software developer to always keep improving and running ahead of the endless hordes of lower cost options snipping at the heels.
While I agree that there's top notch talent in the US, my experience over the last 20 years with US companies (automotive, banking, big iron, start-ups) is that there's tons of dead wood as well. People that are stuck in the way of doing things they learnt in college and never updated their skill set. People that will piss crap undocumented code that isn't maintainable by anyone else or do the worst possible architecture choices, in order to protect their god-given-right to a decent salary.
I'm currently working for a 10+ years old "start-up" that keeps stumbling on the most basic things, there's close to no documentation, there's close to no process and the entire thing relies of heroics to stay up and running. I'm currently fixing issues in our core business application because the dev teams in the US can't even be arsed to look at P1 issues that have been reported 22 months ago. As the program management team is made up of non-technical people, they don't even spot bullshit when the dev team announces 2 weeks of solid work for a whole team to add an item in a drop-down list (Spring/MVC app). So far in a week, while handling my regular work and auditors, I have fixed 3 of those P1 bugs, refactored the code to get rid of anti-patterns and make it easier to maintain in the future.
Repeatable builds - you shouldn't have unique/fragile artifacts all over your infrastructure (Infra/platform as code). Provisioning standard services shouldn't require manual interventions.
Change management - changes should be prioritized and ordered. There shouldn't be multiple changes happening at the same time. All key players (network, security, operations, dev, DBA, the business owner of the change) should assess the impact of the changes. This requires a...
CMDB - you should have somewhere a list of the functional services IT renders to the business, and what machines/technical services are delivering those functional services. You can then quickly assess the impact of changes/incidents This will also greatly simplify the task of the person implementing monitoring.
Documented processes - or even better, automated processes. Because nothing satisfies a senior sysadmin better than hand-editing config files across hundreds of hosts(/sarcasm)
DevOps is basically ITSM-light mixed with the best practices of industrial management.
To date, my electronic devices have only been inspected (beyond "can you turn it on?") by the US border control. Granted, there may be others in the world but I normally don't travel to totalitarian hell-holes.
One of my previous employers made a policy in 2008 about what devices could be taken through the US border control and under which circumstances. Exec summary: if not on official business, no device from the employer can be taken to the US. If on official business, a loaner laptop is handed out and it will be re-imaged on return.
That is BS. Most people given CPR/defib don't survive or only survive for a few miserable hours or days, and even those that last longer usually have a very poor quality of life. They often are confined to bed or a wheelchair and often suffer brain damage.
I was given the defib in 1981 following a severe reaction to intravenous corticosteroids (lungs and heart stopped) and CPR in 1984 following a fall where I landed flat on my back with a stone between my shoulder blades (lungs and heart stopped again). While I agree with you that I wasn't running and jumping a few minutes later in either case, here I am 35 years later leading an active life like nothing happened.
Ireland doesn't deny the sweetheart deal, they deny that it was illegal... while they were already phasing it out with a target date of 2020 because it was illegal.
Apple is also not paying tax on money made in the US through cross-licensing of IP, to the tune of $13B a year, from a shell entity in Dublin that doesn't pay tax in anywhere. There are at least two separate Apple corporations in Ireland, one has employees while the other just has a management board.
Tracking is going to be even more prevalent in the next couple of years, as the new directives on AML and on payment services are reducing the minimum threshold for due diligence. The new threshold is low enough to pretty much require DD/KYC of all customers.
I don't know if it's true and still the case, but about 10 years ago a British colleague told me that gay porn videos couldn't legally be produced in the UK. The legal argument was that gay sex was only tolerated in the privacy of your own home, and that a camera counted as a third set of eyes in the room... therefore making it an illegal lewd act in public.
But but but... tyranny and oppression from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, curvy bananas and 300 rules on pillows. I've actually read on this very site that nobody in the UK has ever voted for the European Parliament.
A quick summary of the events to date: The UK PM went up to Brussels to "negotiate a better deal" by threatening to leave the UK because that had always worked before. Before going, he told the population that he would call for a vote on E membership if he didn't get another discount and a few more exemptions. The EU called his bluff this time around and he went back home without a special deal. Boris Johnson saw an opening to take the leadership of his party by running on the BREXIT side against his party leader. I don't think he ever expected the leave camp to win the vote, otherwise he wouldn't have "retired" the day after the vote. The full effects of that internal party politics gamble won't be known for another 2 years, but the price of non-local food has already started to creep up.
As for the leaving date, at this point the government may say that they'll trigger before the end of March 2017 but they may have to take some seriously nasty shortcuts to make it happen. The Supreme Court ruling on the appeal launched by the government won't be released before January 2017. The government is now considering sending a bill to trigger Article 50 before the Supreme Court ruling, which may trigger some interesting side effects.
I'm working in the financial service industry, and the biggest effect I foresee on BREXIT is going to be the foreign banks reducing their operations in the UK or even fully relocating them abroad. A lot of those banks are based in the UK because they can easily passport their financial licence to the rest of the EU. Once the UK is out, that's no longer an option. EFTA members can't passport financial licences, which is why UBS has such large operations in London. From discussions with my local financial regulator, they've been swamped with licence applications from the morning of June 24. So swamped that they have rented new office buildings and are recruiting new personnel to be able to process them in a reasonable time frame. While I do sort of understand that part of the BREXIT camp can see high-paying jobs leaving the country as a positive (possibly lowering the rents), I don't think they thought about the secondary effects (less money circulating in the local economy, secondary services jobs earning less or going away,...).
So have you prepared your derogatory remarks for the next country that leaves? Maybe you're right. Maybe it's just the crazy girlfriend thing.
What derogatory remarks? I'm just stating reality: the UK has been playing Europe's special snowflake card from day 1. Do you think they got all the nice exemptions they have by asking nicely? They have received them by threatening to leave at pretty much every summit. If you actually listen to the BREXIT crowd in the UK, the EU is going to give them all they want while they're not going to give the EU anything... how's that not pining for the good old days of the British Empire?
While you probably are going to be right, stalling requires someone to first stall. There hasn't been time to do that.
I don't know, I seem to recall that on June 23 someone decided to pack their shit and go. Yet we're now on November 7 and not only are still there, they don't even want to commit on a date. You know, that sort of stalling.
Too bad it doesn't seem to be triggering a similar discussion in the EU. Yet.
Well, the UK hasn't left yet, nor have they officially announced they were leaving... going back to the cat analogy.
There's three possible paths: tweak the way the EU works every time a problem arises, scrap the current EU and go back to mini-states, or scrap the current EU and go full integration. Right now the EU is still trying to operate as a confederation, and those are rarely stable in the long term (Switzerland being again the exception).
Do you think it would fly in the US if a member state decided that the constitution doesn't apply to them? Or threatened to leave the Union if you didn't grant them an exception on the first amendment, or ultimately if you didn't let them rule the whole union? Because that's ultimately the issue the English have with the EU: they aren't the ones ruling it unlike the UK.
Personally, I'm glad that the UK finally took a decision. For decades they've literally been EU's cat, always on the wrong side of the door. They've been threatening to leave for ages, in order to get exceptions allowing them to take the full benefits without taking the full responsibilities or following the same rules as the rest of Europe. They can go wallow in their pipe dream of a British Empire restored, while the EU can continue on its own path without the added weight of the crazy ex-girlfriend that breaks up with you, publicly insults you but still wants to benefit from being in your house and raiding your fridge without paying her share of the rent.
The EU has been clear from the day after the BREXIT vote: even tho it pains us to lose a long time friend and ally, the UK has to respect the will of its population and the sooner the better. The EU isn't the one stalling here, the UK is. The issue is that the UK government knows it's going to be a shitstorm if they trigger Article 50. They're fucked if they do and they're fucked if they don't, the only option that makes sense for them is to stall as long as possible so it becomes "someone else's problem". Bonus points if they can stall it until after the next election, so they can have a clear idea of what the population really wants
I hope that BREXIT will end up being a net positive for the EU by forcing them to have a real serious discussion on where they want to go post-BREXIT. It's a shame it will have to make life so painful for a lot of my friends.
Rejoining would require approval from 100% of the member countries, which isn't going to happen once you leave. If I recall correctly, the first time around already required Germany's influence to get you in. Even if it were to happen, that would mean no more sweet deals and exemptions.
Based on Russia's behavior in the last years, your assumption that they do not want a war is not apparent from their actions.
In 2014 alone, 38 airspace violations (Finland, Estonia, Denmark,...) from Russian military planes... including close encounters with passenger planes and US planes or boats.
They are actually regulated as a bank in Luxembourg, and the results is that they may have to indefinitely hold the funds in your account without telling you exactly why (due to AML regulations).
Slashdot Mirror
Blighty doesn't produce half the food it produces.
I meant food it consumes
"cost of living increase"
The govt have neglected housing for 3 decades, it's a roundabout cause of brexit - cost of living is too much because of stagnant wages, soaring houses prices and rents, both affected by immigration. Funny thing is the middle classes flat out refuse to accept that more people going after jobs = lower wage or that more people trying to rent or buy = higher housing costs, it's a very weird denial of the most fundamental aspect of capitalism which is 'supply and demand'. But hey, easier to just chant 'racism'.
Not denying that it is a factor, but I don't really expect the wages to go up or the cost of housing to go down post-Brexit... or at least not in any significant way. I do expect a drop in high-paying jobs in financial services companies, banking and fintech, which will reduce the amount of money circulating in the local economy. Being just back from a short business trip in Blighty, I don't think the shop keepers need another reduction in business. Talking of supply and demand, Blighty doesn't produce half the food it produces.
Well tried, but if you are a US citizen you will still pay US taxes on income after leaving. And you have to pay to renounce the nationality, including an exit tax on your assets... which is all kind of fucked up as those assets were bought with your post-tax income.
This. I see loads of jobs in London, Oxford, Reading and other big cities that pay about the same as I get now, but housing costs are 3-4x as much.
This. The rent for a small flat close to our London office costs 7 times the monthly payment on my current property. Staying in a hotel 500 meters from the office and eating lunch/dinner in restaurants is cheaper than renting a flat in the 5 kilometers zone around the office. That's more or less what I did the last time my then-employer reassigned me for 3 months in Guildford, 15 years ago. The real estate market in the UK is seriously screwed and has been for some time.
There's indeed a possibility that a lot of Europeans were filling those jobs and went away because of Brexit. Friends of mine relocated away from the UK weeks after the Brexit vote, as they were made to feel very unwelcome all of a sudden (Spanish husband, Polish wife, in the UK for 10 years). The short-term, no-benefits jobs may also be because quite a few of the banks and financial places are now executing their contingency planning. My local financial regulator has been swamped since July 2016, even tho they have more than doubled their capacity to process license applications.
I'm now getting pinged hourly by recruiters for positions in the UK, and they can't seem to understand why I'm not interested. Even pre-Brexit, moving to the UK would have made no sense to me because of the cost of living increase (earn more or less the same pre-tax, increase my cost of living by more than 30%).
Look at the first link... I'll concede that the US overall ranks 11th with cost factored in. However:
It ranks 5th on "quality care", 3rd on "effective care", 7th on "safe care", 6th on "coordinated care", 4th on "patient centered care", 11th on "healthy lives"... none of those factor in cost.
From my experience, a lot of the resumes you see have been doctored by the recruitment agency/company in India. One team member went to such and such university for a summer class, the whole team suddenly graduated "magna cum laude" from such and such university. One team member went to a RedHat event, the entire team is RHCE/RHCA.
To be honest, that problem exists to some extent with all recruitment/sourcing companies in the world. I once accidentally received my own resume doctored by a recruitment company as it had landed on a colleague's desk. I had met the recruiter for a specific position and didn't give them the authorization to send my resume to other clients. They were trying to sell me for a pure dev role for less money than I was actually making at the time. It took me a few minutes to even acknowledge it was my resume as they had inserted a ton of bullshit in my previous jobs.
The US healthcare system is #11 out of 11 on outcomes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/06/16/u-s-healthcare-ranked-dead-last-compared-to-10-other-countries/) and #37 out of 191 on efficiency (http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf)... hardly the best, hardly the worst. It is however definitely #1 in costs.
People with money travel from all over the world if they have cash, because expensive untested treatments are available in the US but not in other places.
North America pays better, twice to three to seven times better.
Yeah I could increase my income by moving to the San Francisco office from the European office (doubling it, tops). However, the mortgage on my house is currently ~12% of my pre-tax income (2% fixed rate on 20 years)... there's no way I could find a house for a similar fraction of my salary 1h from the office. Most of my colleagues from the SF office drop 50% of their paycheck on accommodation outside the 1h commute belt. Once I throw in health services, pension, the cost of quality food, the cost of good education if I get kids, PTO... moving to SF is at very best status-quo and most likely a losing proposition.
H1B, outsourcing to Europe or Asia is always undercutting and threatening. There is just so much pressure on the American software developer to always keep improving and running ahead of the endless hordes of lower cost options snipping at the heels.
While I agree that there's top notch talent in the US, my experience over the last 20 years with US companies (automotive, banking, big iron, start-ups) is that there's tons of dead wood as well. People that are stuck in the way of doing things they learnt in college and never updated their skill set. People that will piss crap undocumented code that isn't maintainable by anyone else or do the worst possible architecture choices, in order to protect their god-given-right to a decent salary.
I'm currently working for a 10+ years old "start-up" that keeps stumbling on the most basic things, there's close to no documentation, there's close to no process and the entire thing relies of heroics to stay up and running. I'm currently fixing issues in our core business application because the dev teams in the US can't even be arsed to look at P1 issues that have been reported 22 months ago. As the program management team is made up of non-technical people, they don't even spot bullshit when the dev team announces 2 weeks of solid work for a whole team to add an item in a drop-down list (Spring/MVC app). So far in a week, while handling my regular work and auditors, I have fixed 3 of those P1 bugs, refactored the code to get rid of anti-patterns and make it easier to maintain in the future.
Let me sum up ITSM in plain terms
Repeatable builds - you shouldn't have unique/fragile artifacts all over your infrastructure (Infra/platform as code). Provisioning standard services shouldn't require manual interventions.
Change management - changes should be prioritized and ordered. There shouldn't be multiple changes happening at the same time. All key players (network, security, operations, dev, DBA, the business owner of the change) should assess the impact of the changes. This requires a...
CMDB - you should have somewhere a list of the functional services IT renders to the business, and what machines/technical services are delivering those functional services. You can then quickly assess the impact of changes/incidents This will also greatly simplify the task of the person implementing monitoring.
Documented processes - or even better, automated processes. Because nothing satisfies a senior sysadmin better than hand-editing config files across hundreds of hosts(/sarcasm)
DevOps is basically ITSM-light mixed with the best practices of industrial management.
Only if the TCO of said automated vehicles over their amortized life is lower than the cost of sub-contracting the whole thing for the same duration.
To date, my electronic devices have only been inspected (beyond "can you turn it on?") by the US border control. Granted, there may be others in the world but I normally don't travel to totalitarian hell-holes.
One of my previous employers made a policy in 2008 about what devices could be taken through the US border control and under which circumstances. Exec summary: if not on official business, no device from the employer can be taken to the US. If on official business, a loaner laptop is handed out and it will be re-imaged on return.
That is BS. Most people given CPR/defib don't survive or only survive for a few miserable hours or days, and even those that last longer usually have a very poor quality of life. They often are confined to bed or a wheelchair and often suffer brain damage.
I was given the defib in 1981 following a severe reaction to intravenous corticosteroids (lungs and heart stopped) and CPR in 1984 following a fall where I landed flat on my back with a stone between my shoulder blades (lungs and heart stopped again). While I agree with you that I wasn't running and jumping a few minutes later in either case, here I am 35 years later leading an active life like nothing happened.
That would make sense, which is why it isn't going to fly... also because it goes against the prosperity gospel.
Ireland doesn't deny the sweetheart deal, they deny that it was illegal... while they were already phasing it out with a target date of 2020 because it was illegal.
Apple is also not paying tax on money made in the US through cross-licensing of IP, to the tune of $13B a year, from a shell entity in Dublin that doesn't pay tax in anywhere. There are at least two separate Apple corporations in Ireland, one has employees while the other just has a management board.
Tracking is going to be even more prevalent in the next couple of years, as the new directives on AML and on payment services are reducing the minimum threshold for due diligence. The new threshold is low enough to pretty much require DD/KYC of all customers.
I don't know if it's true and still the case, but about 10 years ago a British colleague told me that gay porn videos couldn't legally be produced in the UK. The legal argument was that gay sex was only tolerated in the privacy of your own home, and that a camera counted as a third set of eyes in the room... therefore making it an illegal lewd act in public.
There are still businesses running the books by hand on paper, because interns as Mechanical Turks is often way cheaper than the tech alternative.
But but but... tyranny and oppression from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, curvy bananas and 300 rules on pillows. I've actually read on this very site that nobody in the UK has ever voted for the European Parliament.
A quick summary of the events to date: The UK PM went up to Brussels to "negotiate a better deal" by threatening to leave the UK because that had always worked before. Before going, he told the population that he would call for a vote on E membership if he didn't get another discount and a few more exemptions. The EU called his bluff this time around and he went back home without a special deal. Boris Johnson saw an opening to take the leadership of his party by running on the BREXIT side against his party leader. I don't think he ever expected the leave camp to win the vote, otherwise he wouldn't have "retired" the day after the vote. The full effects of that internal party politics gamble won't be known for another 2 years, but the price of non-local food has already started to creep up.
As for the leaving date, at this point the government may say that they'll trigger before the end of March 2017 but they may have to take some seriously nasty shortcuts to make it happen. The Supreme Court ruling on the appeal launched by the government won't be released before January 2017. The government is now considering sending a bill to trigger Article 50 before the Supreme Court ruling, which may trigger some interesting side effects.
I'm working in the financial service industry, and the biggest effect I foresee on BREXIT is going to be the foreign banks reducing their operations in the UK or even fully relocating them abroad. A lot of those banks are based in the UK because they can easily passport their financial licence to the rest of the EU. Once the UK is out, that's no longer an option. EFTA members can't passport financial licences, which is why UBS has such large operations in London. From discussions with my local financial regulator, they've been swamped with licence applications from the morning of June 24. So swamped that they have rented new office buildings and are recruiting new personnel to be able to process them in a reasonable time frame. While I do sort of understand that part of the BREXIT camp can see high-paying jobs leaving the country as a positive (possibly lowering the rents), I don't think they thought about the secondary effects (less money circulating in the local economy, secondary services jobs earning less or going away, ...).
So have you prepared your derogatory remarks for the next country that leaves? Maybe you're right. Maybe it's just the crazy girlfriend thing.
What derogatory remarks? I'm just stating reality: the UK has been playing Europe's special snowflake card from day 1. Do you think they got all the nice exemptions they have by asking nicely? They have received them by threatening to leave at pretty much every summit. If you actually listen to the BREXIT crowd in the UK, the EU is going to give them all they want while they're not going to give the EU anything... how's that not pining for the good old days of the British Empire?
While you probably are going to be right, stalling requires someone to first stall. There hasn't been time to do that.
I don't know, I seem to recall that on June 23 someone decided to pack their shit and go. Yet we're now on November 7 and not only are still there, they don't even want to commit on a date. You know, that sort of stalling.
Too bad it doesn't seem to be triggering a similar discussion in the EU. Yet.
Well, the UK hasn't left yet, nor have they officially announced they were leaving... going back to the cat analogy.
There's three possible paths: tweak the way the EU works every time a problem arises, scrap the current EU and go back to mini-states, or scrap the current EU and go full integration. Right now the EU is still trying to operate as a confederation, and those are rarely stable in the long term (Switzerland being again the exception).
Do you think it would fly in the US if a member state decided that the constitution doesn't apply to them? Or threatened to leave the Union if you didn't grant them an exception on the first amendment, or ultimately if you didn't let them rule the whole union? Because that's ultimately the issue the English have with the EU: they aren't the ones ruling it unlike the UK.
Personally, I'm glad that the UK finally took a decision. For decades they've literally been EU's cat, always on the wrong side of the door. They've been threatening to leave for ages, in order to get exceptions allowing them to take the full benefits without taking the full responsibilities or following the same rules as the rest of Europe. They can go wallow in their pipe dream of a British Empire restored, while the EU can continue on its own path without the added weight of the crazy ex-girlfriend that breaks up with you, publicly insults you but still wants to benefit from being in your house and raiding your fridge without paying her share of the rent.
The EU has been clear from the day after the BREXIT vote: even tho it pains us to lose a long time friend and ally, the UK has to respect the will of its population and the sooner the better. The EU isn't the one stalling here, the UK is. The issue is that the UK government knows it's going to be a shitstorm if they trigger Article 50. They're fucked if they do and they're fucked if they don't, the only option that makes sense for them is to stall as long as possible so it becomes "someone else's problem". Bonus points if they can stall it until after the next election, so they can have a clear idea of what the population really wants
I hope that BREXIT will end up being a net positive for the EU by forcing them to have a real serious discussion on where they want to go post-BREXIT. It's a shame it will have to make life so painful for a lot of my friends.
The UK wants the benefits without the responsibilities. I think it's time they wake up and smell the coffee...
Rejoining would require approval from 100% of the member countries, which isn't going to happen once you leave. If I recall correctly, the first time around already required Germany's influence to get you in. Even if it were to happen, that would mean no more sweet deals and exemptions.
Based on Russia's behavior in the last years, your assumption that they do not want a war is not apparent from their actions.
In 2014 alone, 38 airspace violations (Finland, Estonia, Denmark, ...) from Russian military planes... including close encounters with passenger planes and US planes or boats.
They are actually regulated as a bank in Luxembourg, and the results is that they may have to indefinitely hold the funds in your account without telling you exactly why (due to AML regulations).