When I went to India, I though to my-self the living standard in the villages were HIGHER then the cities.
The air in the villages were clean - it was much cooler weather due to not being trapped in the congested cities.
The village people though I was crazy to think that their village was a paradise, and everyone wanted to move to the city.
I think its a serious lack of education that India/Bangladesh will not learn easily. A large number of people need to die due to cancer for it be taken seriously, unfortunately.
We are talking about a country where chain smoking is really common !
And no I a person from the sub-continent so I am not being racist, just pointing out some of the terrible facts about why I am terrified of going back.
I do not think it is crazy for people of villages to think moving to the city is a good idea. It might seem pristine and like paradise to a person from a city visiting a village but for a person living in a village its a different story. It's not the environmental paradise they are trying to escape from, its mostly lack of opportunity. Most villages in India are agriculture based, and most of central and southern India does not have perennial rivers and solely depend on monsoons for irrigation. So, if monsoon fails (less or more than expected), so does their income for he year. Not to mention lack of education, transport, banking etc. I have been to villages where even now if you need education beyond middle school, you need to leave the village for a neighboring town. Not to mention the social pressures such as not having equal opportunities for women in villages where as in a city, it is common place and generally socially accepted for women to have jobs and careers.
I agree about smoking though, and specially the prevalence of the cheap cigarettes called "beedis", these are simply tobacco rolled over in a tobacco leaf and do not even have filters. Being very cheap, it is consumed by the poorer people and when coupled with lack of education, I assume does contributes to lot of smoking related diseases.
Since my source of income was built due to being in global cities and the only infrastructure I need is the Internet and my ability to think. My source of income is not disrupted due to being in the village.
But I think if your work doesn't allow you to do things remotely, yes there is a lack of opportunity in the village.
I was just thinking of the fact that my main income drain is rent in a global city. So moving to the village eliminates my biggest expense.
It also eliminates any opportunities for personal development and expanding social circles that are critical for both career and personal growth. There is a reason why rents are so high in the cities: they are desirable places to live because of the opportunities they offer for recreation and personal and professional progress.
Edit: Also I think its hard for anyone (including myself) to relate to kind of lifestyle that most Indian villagers face. Lack of education, illiteracy, importance of superstitions and so on can greatly hinder the progress of any people.
Vehicular pollution, construction dust, diesel generators are a common problem in almost all big cities in India.
However you are looking at the advantages of villages as a visitor with a point of view towards being closer to nature. There are other problems in villages that you probably won't encounter unless you live there on a day to day basis. Finally, grass is always greener on the other side (holds true for both villages & city dwellers).
> A large number of people need to die due to cancer for it be taken seriously
Cancer isn't uncommon in villages and city pollution isn't the only cause.
True, I think if you lived in the village it would be hard for you to escape it and get highly educated.
For that you prolly need to move to a big city, but from my immediate reasoning, I could work remotely from the village for the rest of my life as a programmer and could have a higher standard of living then being in the city.
But I guess that is due to the nature of my job, rather than anything.
You may not get your favorite loaf of bread, although you'll get fresh organic eggs. You may not be able to watch the latest movies in a theater. A good gymnasium probably won't exist, but you can always run in a grass field. There are countless other differences. People are materialistic & not everyone can make that compromise :)
The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's closures."
Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire "Lambda: The Ultimate..." series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.
On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying "Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man's closures." Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened.
Actually, no. It was about constructing objects "inside out" (data untouchable from the outside) using closures. This is an accomplishment in a language where object system has data totally open and accessible to anyone.
This is going to be similar to the Kansas Experiment but a scaled up version.
Can Britain really afford to cut taxes ? It has already cut services to the bone, while running a large twin deficit.
Ireland can afford lower tax rates because its such a small country - Dublin is nothing like London and can survive on low investment, and Ireland does not have complex public health service like the NHS.
Also lower rates really doesn't mean anything if you are unable to access customers. What Brexit represents is a demand shock to British business, a kind of deflation that has caused the collapse of society in the past.
A market of 55 million people is too small for doing any serious 21st Century type globalized business.
> Ireland does not have complex public health service like the NHS.
Where exactly did you get that idea? As bbrazil wrote, that's certainly not the case. We also spend more on healthcare per head here in Ireland than is spent in the UK. We have one of the highest spends in the OECD and a complex legacy of the pre-independence healthcare system plastered over almost a century of half-hearted reforms to deal with.
People in Ireland envy the NHS for three reasons: compared to the Irish 'system', it's cheap and relatively simple, and the outcomes are better than our more expensive hodge-podge.
I think it's a great move and I would love to see it go further.
I take your point on asking whether Britain can afford to cut taxes but I reckon it will be funded by removing pension tax relief: It costs around £34 billion per year [1]. By this, I mean that the treasury loses out on £34 billion a year.
The solution will be to tax income as normal, no pension tax relief but to allow zero tax on the pension drawdown at the other end.
From the current chancellors point of view it's a win-win: He gets an additional £34 billion a year and the problem of zero tax at retirement age becomes someone elses issue.
10% of GDP, IIRC, which is more than the NHS and for worse outcomes. If anything, the Irish system is more complex because of the legacy of being formerly Church-dominated and decades of half-hearted reforms. There's a reason why the Irish health system has long been nicknamed 'Angola'.
"Lower the taxes of businesses so that they can invest" - That's been the theory behind decades of such experiments in many countries. Worked out great, we all can see how the money keep s"trickling down".
That theory is actually very un-capitalistic: It assumes that only a few people know what is best for the majority. Because it's built into the system (and with a certain perverse logic, not at all irrational of course) that those who've had success are more likely to know how to have more of it.
So the system is actually incredibly anti-risk with money - in an age when "money" surely is not a limiting factor. Not overall - it is because a few have so much they don't find good investment opportunities (when you have billions, only hundreds of millions of opportunity at once make sense to even look at), but for the vast rest of us it is.
So it becomes a tautology: The system is set up to make it far more likely that the successful succeed more, and that is then used as justification for itself, "see, it's too risky to give resources to the inexperienced, data prove it". So we get ever more concentration of control ("money", "power" are indirect terms, "control" is what it comes down to. Th eproblem of the 0.01% isn't their jets, their yachts, their mansions, it is their control of too much of economic life at the expense of most everyone else.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
> That's been the theory behind decades of such experiments in many countries. Worked out great, we all can see how the money keep s"trickling down".
Do you have an example? I don't know of any serious economist that backs trickle-down theory except as a strawman, but many point to lower and flatter taxes that can be used to support market-based economics as enabling high productivity. The obvious country that backs this - the US - has done pretty well from it, as have a multitude of smaller nations (Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore, the UK, Canada, Australia).
Some countries with higher taxes but also based around a free market economy have done well - Germany is the prominent example and Sweden and Finland. Some have succumbed to corruption and are failing, or on the brink of failure (Italy, Spain, Greece).
The opposite - high taxes, lack of a market and extreme governmental intervention - has certainly been tried in many, many countries. Most (all?) have failed badly in a way that has destroyed generations of productivity (North Korea, Cuba, The Soviet Union, Venezuela, etc.) and really fucked-up their societies that way - usually accompanied by secret police squads, the crushing of liberties and very low quality-of-life.
> That theory is actually very un-capitalistic: It assumes that only a few people know what is best for the majority.
That's actually very 'capitalistic' - the man with the capital makes the ultimate decisions as to where it gets invested. Perhaps you meant democratic?
I'm not convinced by the rest of your argument either. The capital owner usually employs many people to invest portions of the capital into smaller investment opportunities - it's not like Bill Gates has to invest all of his fortune into just one opportunity is it? If anything, this site is based around the idea of giving capital to the unexperienced to start businesses with promising ideas - that's pretty much the exact theoretical definition of angel investors, incubators and VCs.
One might argue that these institutions suffer from cronyism and don't do their job as well as they should, but their job is after all to re-allocate accrued capital to value-producers in a risk-balanced way across a broad portfolio which, I think, is what you seem to want to advocate.
A not too large and not too small and recent example - using the whole of the US is more muddled also because of larger timescales which include the ability to blame other developments - see Kansas.
Unless those companies behave like arseholes and use bizarre corporate structure to (often illegally) avoid tax.
If brexit was a vote against globalisation and austerity it makes no sense to cut taxes which simultaneously gives huge corps some benefit while reducing quality of services even further.
> Can Britain really afford to cut taxes ? It has already cut services to the bone, while running a large twin deficit.
Britain has absolutely not cut services to the bone - that claim in incredibly hyperbolic. More could be done, but in general no-one goes hungry, people are not homeless, garbage is collected, clean water is provided, the rule of law is enforced, the court system is healthy, public transport is good, schools and universities are doing fine, pensions are paid and health care continues to be rather good and excellent value for money. Cash budgets have increased every year in the past twenty. It's not perfect but don't let the resentful wailey-wailey nature of those who want more public spending from 'moral' conviction convince you that the UK is anything other than a well-functioning first world country with good public services and a well-educated population. Public services are about the best that they have ever been. That will continue to be true even if the rate of corporate tax is reduced.
> Ireland can afford lower tax rates because its such a small country - Dublin is nothing like London and can survive on low investment, and Ireland does not have complex public health service like the NHS.
Other people have already told you that Ireland spends more and achieves less on health care. There are many large countries with lower taxes than Britain that are doing more or less just fine. There is much, much more to investment than tax-and-spend governmental intervention.
> Also lower rates really doesn't mean anything if you are unable to access customers. What Brexit represents is a demand shock to British business, a kind of deflation that has caused the collapse of society in the past.
I'd love to have an example of British societal collapse in the recent past as a consequence of demand shock, but you won't be able to give me one because it doesn't exist. At worst, we have the union-backed strikes in the seventies causing a collapse of public services, but there was no revolution, no breakdown in law and order and no termination of any major political entity. The current global system is undergoing something of deflation with almost all major currencies undergoing 'quantitative easing' to attempt to address it. This is not a Brexit phenomenon and affects the Euro area and the EU worse than it affects sterling. That will likely continue to be true.
> A market of 55 million people is too small for doing any serious 21st Century type globalized business.
In accordance with the rest of your claims, this is both subtly incorrect in fact and hyperbolic in claim. Your population figure is low by 15%, but the main point is that Brexit doesn't mean building a Trump-style wall around the island or pulling it into the mid-Atlantic. Cross-border trade will function just fine outside of the EU and Britain will continue to be a tier-2 globally trading nation behind the US, China and perhaps Japan, but on a par with or ahead of everyone else. Brexit does not mean a severing of all ties with the rest of the world and the breathless discussion of what it means really pisses me off. Some (not all) of the UK's interaction with European countries will change in some subtle ways. New accommodations will be reached. Predicting 'societal collapse' is chicken-little-style doom-mongering and hysteria - if you took the same approach to your regular life, you'd never go outside for fear of being hit by a meteor, catching SARS, being hit by lightning or some other flouncey, drama-queen, childish panic.
In short: Brexit - some stuff will change, but most of it won't be as bad as you think, and perhaps some of it might be good! :-)
> Britain has absolutely not cut services to the bone - that claim in incredibly hyperbolic. More could be done, but in general no-one goes hungry,
Use of foodbanks is at record levels. Families in poverty are at the highest they've been for years; often those families are in work.
> people are not homeless,
If by homeless you mean "rough sleeping" then rates of homelessness are at the highest they've been for years. (numbers for 2015 are double the number for 2015) If you mean statutory homelessness then they're at the highest they've been for years. (But counting rough sleepers, statutory homeless, and vulnerably housed people in the UK is tricky).
> garbage is collected,
Amount of fly-tipping appears to have increased, although that might just be better reporting and recording. Most councils have moved from weekly collections to fortnightly collection, and some are thinking of moving to once every three weeks.
> clean water is provided,
This is a commercial service provided by tax avoiding private companies.
> the rule of law is enforced, the court system is healthy,
Legal aid has been cut from many many people, leaving a lot of people without access to justice. This is especially the case in family law. There's a risk that children's human rights to a family life are being interfered with.
> public transport is good,
Mostly private companies. Public transport is good in large cities; somewhat good in large towns; pretty lousy outside large towns.
> schools and universities are doing fine,
Cost of loans has increased, amount of debt that students leave university with is highest it's ever been
> pensions are paid
Tell that to the 50something women who've been fucked over by governments increasing retiring age several times, leaving those women thousands of pounds out of pocket. Or tell that to C&A workers.
> and health care continues to be rather good
A&E 4 hour targets aren't being met; consultant-led waiting times aren't being met; UK has pretty terrible outcomes for cancer; MH is not good.
Children with mental illness find it very hard to get a bed, and those beds may be hundreds of miles away from their home. Community care for children with mental illness has always been rough, but with the Young People's Transformation Plan we were supposed to see things get better. Some CCGs took that money for young people and spent it elsewhere.
Last month there were zero in-patient beds for adults with mental illness. This means that very sick people (because rightly nowadays you have to be very ill to get an in-patient place) are at increased risk of death and severe harm. Out of county in-patient treatment for adults with mental illness is at record levels.
Politicians lie if they say the NHS has had increase in spending. NHS deficits are at record levels; NHS budgets have been cut in anyway you define budget and cut. It isn't possible to look at current NHS budgets and say they've been increased.
Cutting wages (and removing bursaries) means there are many posts that are unfilled, and some of those are substantive posts.
> and excellent value for money.
We do a lot for not much money. But there are a lot of things that have excellent "spend to save" numbers that we don't do because they're too expensive, so we save today but spend tomorrow.
Austerity has had massive impact on public services, especially the NHS.
Was about to write a similar response- I totally agree that the cuts have definitely had negative effects.
After listening to friends and family who work as teachers, magistrates and in the emergency services, I feel that public services are really stretched and that the cuts have hit all areas negatively...Maybe it is not so obvious to the average person, but I think if you talk to anybody working in the public sector they will echo these sentiments!
Poverty is an extremely loaded term - a child in poverty is defined as a child living in a household with less than 60% of the national average income - it has no connection to specific material deprivation.
Foodbank use is up - but there is no measure of whether this is down to misplaced priorities instead of actual need. Flour and good quality fresh vegetables are the cheapest and most widely available they've ever been.
Clean water in Scotland is paid for by council tax so I count it as a publicly-provided good. I'd also argue that the framework for delivering the water and sewage systems are significantly connected to the government. Note that Tax Avoidance is not illegal, nor is it morally repugnant. A tax system that is reddled with loopholes and exceptions that can only be understood by the private entities making money off it is the problem there - perverse incentives rather than a nominally low rate. (Although the rate is not particularly low.)
Fly tipping may or may not have increased. But my local council runs several large recycling centres and collects refuse biweekly in addition. The fact that some people are breaking the law to avoid paying recycling charges has nothing to do with Brexit.
Public transport may be provided by private companies but these are often bidding to supply government contracts. Public transport has always been poor outside large towns and always will be - your neighbours should not be forced to pay for empty buses to drive about the countryside in case someone in a sparsely populated area wants to go somewhere.
Student numbers are up to the point where a lot of students are paying for degrees that they cannot use to get a job. International student numbers are good, which surely proves that universities are remaining globally competitive.
The unfeasible public commitment to paying old people using income from young people has problems - nevertheless, the government is meeting its commitment to pay retirees a state pension. Why should women get to retire earlier than men? They are equally capable of working and supporting themselves.
For the record, I don't believe that the NHS is a good system - anything that politicises something as important as healthcare is bad. I suspect that the French and German models are better (but still nowhere near perfect). But the NHS has, for as long as I can remember, had a funding crisis. There have always been headlines about funding problems and service unavailability - fifteen years ago the service was getting pilloried for leaving patients on carts in the corridor rather than providing beds. I'm not convinced it's getting rapidly worse. Mental health treatment has always been a disgrace - not just in the UK but worldwide. Nevertheless, the care provided for the money spent in the NHS is good - a lot of countries (e.g. US, Ireland) spend more and get less. The formal NHS budget will rise by £35bn in the period form 2009/10 to reach £133bn. Inflation (which the previous commenter claimed we shouldn't worry about as we will suffer deflation causing 'social collapse') will eat £24bn of that meaning that the NHS budget over ten years will increase at a rate of about 0.9% a year over inflation. No-one's lying and the total budget has not been cut.
"Austerity" has meant no overall cash cuts. Austerity has meant an increase in public spending year-on-year over the rate of inflation. There are lies going on about public spending but to imagine that public services are 'cut to the bone' is so nonsensical as to damage the credibility of anyone arguing thus.
> The formal NHS budget will rise by £35bn in the period form 2009/10 to reach £133bn.
> The formal NHS budget will rise by £35bn in the period form 2009/10 to reach £133bn.
Conversation is pointless with people who believe this. It's clearly, unambiguously, a misrepresentation of the facts. Why do you think everyone is writing STPs? (Do you know, without googling, what I'm referring to when I say STP?)
I wonder if they're counting the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds?) of Asian men who work manual labor or the shipping industry in areas like Manhattan's Chinatown or Brooklyn's Sunset Park. Probably not as they're mostly likely paid under the table, but they'd skew results quite a bit.
When you only allow the already-successful or already-high-IQ people into the selection pool, don't be surprised when you find that your pull is full of successful high-IQ people. This is called selection bias: the Asians in this study have already been filtered by the immigration process while the white people have not, so it's not a random sampling.
Then how do you explain the same Asians people being successful in other countries where the immigration process is not as strict as USA? By saying that "already-high-IQ" people immigrate to the home country aren't you in effect saying that there is no one in the native homeland with a higher IQ than the immigrating pool? Isn't that a self-defeating argument in itself? Are you saying that there is a preference given to Asians over white people by the employers?
> Then how do you explain the same Asians people being successful in other countries where the immigration process is not as strict as USA?
Since immigration costs money and it's "easier" to stay where you are born, there is no way to escape a selection bias.
> By saying that "already-high-IQ" people immigrate to the home country aren't you in effect saying that there is no one in the native homeland with a higher IQ than the immigrating pool?
No, and I'm not sure how that follows. The argument that I'm defending just asserts that the ones who immigrate are "better" than average in some way.
> Are you saying that there is a preference given to Asians over white people by the employers?
Again, no. The preference is already given by the immigration office.
See my other comment in the GP post. There are a bunch of Asian men who make little or no money (usually under the table) in the US. They're not counting them because they don't report taxes or just out of convenience.
The Labour Movement in the 1930s-1950s was a force to reckon with. Politicians used to be scared of its influence.
Imagine how much power labour had when FDR was able to enact a tax rate 90% of top marginal income.
That force was destroyed, but just like a nuclear submarine lying idly by, just because the engine is switched off or silent doesn't mean it cannot do a lot of damage.
Right now a lot of people are quite enraged because they are empirically on the losing side of globalization. It would be a sad day if they hand their collective power over to Mr Trump - its a repetition of situations of the past where labour gave its power to other bigots or strongmens - rather than people like FDR or Lenin.
One positive thing to out of Brexit is the prospect of Britain turning into Hong Kong 2.0.
The EU is highly protectionist, very similar to china.
Why should an EU farmer get an higher wage than an African farmer ?
the EU is most likely to start treating the UK just like it treats african countries. It will increase tariffs for financial services to prop up its own domestic one.
This is not a bad thing for the UK, the UK could learn to start trading with a much more potentially lucrative group of african countries. Africa has a lot more primary resources then Europe and the UK could potentially help open up the block just it it did for the EU.
The EU and China have been fighting a war over Africa for 2 decades now, and China has been pretty much winning.
China has committed trillions to developing African countries they build hospitals, schools and "cultural centers" and then offer loans to cover huge infrastructure projects like roads, railways, ports and power plants all are later built by Chinese companies.
China is also smart they send chinese teachers to those schools they build teaching the chinese language and culture to Africans.
So when it comes to Africa the UK has probably considerably less prospects than you would imagine, especially considering that China and the EU have already made claims there.
It's going to be really interesting to see just what deal would the UK strike with the EU if it even pulls out.
Boris Johnson said today that he will not be aiming to be the MP mainly because although being one of the leaders of the Leave camp he doesn't actually wants to leave.
Does someone know how to boot Linux on a Windows 10 machine ?
Its proven extremely hard to boot Elementary OS on my X1 Carbon.
I tried turning off fast boot and a whole set of options - even changed boot partition from Linux on a USB but when I do it windows still loads and says something like 'boot partition corrupted.. fixing problem'
I gave up after a while and just accepted my fate.
I think the main 'magic' of NLUI is not the mapping. This person is projecting the model of how GUI works to NLUI.
A better way to think about NLUI is having another person have access to the real GUI - and you are merely commanding the person to achieve certain goals.
The thing about advanced NLUI is that it can convert really vague context sensitive commands to highly structured set of sub-routines that programmers will never be able to do easily.
I find your examples sort of surprising? These don't seem so structured. Imagine a GUI that had three buttons:
Recommend University | Recommend Major | Recommend Headphones
Now...this set of capabilities is sort of an odd mix. But your application is going to be amazing if you can deliver on what your UI is promising here. If you can help someone make a better decision on their degree, that's life-changing. The UI that triggers that functionality seems quite beside the point.
1 || Weakened by the leave of the British - it will disintegrate. First from the periphery and then one of the core members like France. This disintegration will result in a liquidity crisis as entire countries default on their debt, plunging the entire world in a recession. The worst hit would be the countries within the EU. Germany's currency will have the highest appreciation similar to when Japan allowed appreciation of their currency - resulting in Germany having a few lost decades.
Britain will the least effected - it will really bad - but not as bad as the euro countries.
2 || The EU project moves towards faster integration. The EU is no more paralyzed by British malaise. Merkel realizes the dire problem the EU faces and accelerates the formation of a central command for the EU army - allowing it to deal with any migration crisis in the future. Allows more democratic representation in the EU. Scottish Independence is one bad British recession away. UK disintegrates into just England. London is unable to support itself due to the mass exodus of the financial industry ( who is going to pay for Crossrail ? )
The only thing for certain is that if you are buying index funds is a bad idea to buy British stocks as they are unlikely to give as good returns 30+ years from now - when you are about to retire.
The UK had the most Europ-skpetic vote in the EU Parliment - its something that Boris and his cornies never mention, they constantly got overruled since they were always against anything that allowed the EU project to move forward.
The UK will go on fine just like The republic of Congo is doing fine.
The EU for a long time has provided great boost in wealth for about 40 years. Its only due to the financial crisis that
things have not been really great lately.
However the European Project is much larger than any single nation state or generation of people. Given the change that has been happening over the last 50 years, do you think trade, movement of labor is going to decrease in the next 100 years ?
America is an economical powerhouse with 3/5 of Europe's population. Same goes for China. Even India has more clout when it it dealing with american companies since the consumer base has more value.
Europe has two paths, one is disintegration and one is faster and more united integration.
The important thing from the Perspective of British interest is that both path leads to Britain being a loser.
If the European Project fails then Britain is going to suffer as much as any other European country ( one of the reason why britain's foreign policy for 400+ years has been promoting continued stability in Europe )
And if Europe goes down a path of deeper integration the UK will be a competitor to a trading bloc that is essentially is a giant Star ( 15 Trillion vs 2 Trillion )
The EU also has plans for integration with Turkey, a country with the largest land army in Europe. As much as british people think of Turkey as a joke - its one of the fastest growing economy in the world.
Who do you think will have more leverage when forging trade deals with the middle east ? Turkey and Friends or the UK ?
The thing that most british people do not seem to realize is how small 55 million is - in a flat world of 7 billion people. It used to be different, but not anymore.
It has had those plans since 1993. They haven't gone anywhere (there's effectively been a stalemate since 2002), and I don't expect meaningful progress for another generation.
When I went to India, I though to my-self the living standard in the villages were HIGHER then the cities.
The air in the villages were clean - it was much cooler weather due to not being trapped in the congested cities.
The village people though I was crazy to think that their village was a paradise, and everyone wanted to move to the city.
I think its a serious lack of education that India/Bangladesh will not learn easily. A large number of people need to die due to cancer for it be taken seriously, unfortunately.
We are talking about a country where chain smoking is really common !
And no I a person from the sub-continent so I am not being racist, just pointing out some of the terrible facts about why I am terrified of going back.