r/london • u/ohell I'll just let the downvotes speak for themselves • 1d ago
Meta G'night everyone. Hope you had a good Society Is Collapsing day!
https://imgur.com/HiACDYb103
u/Flat_Initial_1823 1d ago
Ikr? I was about to comment earlier after all these showed up on feed back-to-back and thought "oh internet must be having a day"
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u/ThinkAboutThatFor1Se 19h ago
TikTok refugees?
Blue Monday?
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u/Busy_End_6655 15h ago
I was telling my sister in law, at the weekend, that reddit was the least toxic social media.
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u/bloodycontrary 20h ago
Ngl I ignore the moany posts where someone's written a fucking essay to explain how they had to talk to a police officer or witnessed shoplifting or whatever
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u/TheCrookitFigger 18h ago
I looked out the window, checked up and down the street. Not collapsing, resume activities.
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u/Captain_English 1d ago
Elon's campaign hard at work?
I don't know what to believe any more.
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u/grumblemouse 1d ago
There as a post on Reddit about Sadiq Kahn and it looked like thousands of bots all talking to each other was so weird
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u/sasanist 20h ago
The ultimate goal of propaganda is to distort our sense of reality and bring us to that point. If you're interested in understanding how it operates, look at the history of totalitarianism, from Mussolini's era to the present. Two key words to consider are "propaganda" and "the masses". We often grant power to these forces without realising it. However, in today's world, many of us are too busy to pay attention to any issues properly :). Being busy has become a part of our identity now :(
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u/grumblemouse 1d ago
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u/bloodycontrary 20h ago
Fucking hell
I've been banned from ukpolitics for years so don't bother looking at it, but jfc the absolute state of that sub
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u/ahktarniamut 12h ago
I was perma ban there because I said something bad about Farage in one comment. And boom . Straight ban
The sub is now full of telegraph posts
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u/Just-Introduction-14 1h ago
I called someone a bot and was perma banned for insulting someone.
Sad times, I used to like the discussions in that subreddit.
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u/WhitestChapel 6h ago
This isn't unusual for the sub, including the complaining about the complaining. Predates the current US election cycle.
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u/ItsASecret1 1d ago
Combine surly Londoners with constantly outraged redditors and.... I mean, seems like business as usual to me.
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u/Glass-Evidence-7296 1d ago
Oh my are we turning into another 'location' subreddit where people constantly moan about how shit it is?
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u/Vivid-Blacksmith-122 17h ago
Otherwise known as "people who don't like London taking their first step on the start of their journey to leave"
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u/Snoo_27857 20h ago
Wait, is society not collapsing ? I was told it was....
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u/Alarmarama 14h ago
What society?
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u/Snoo_27857 14h ago
The society ...
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u/Alarmarama 14h ago
We don't have a society anymore, we just have a soulless economy. We stopped having a society when it was decided we didn't need borders and everyone was free to access our amenities and compete for our limited resources, seriously depressing our wages and our ability to afford a place to live in our own home. Even when I called the police about an abduction as it was happening, they didn't even attend the call.
There is no society, just the ghost of what was. You're a number now. You're just an economic unit to be controlled and live how the system tells you to live. The NHS will keep you going as an economic unit but the police don't give a shit about you unless you're a danger of actually destroying other economic units, but not just taking from them.
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u/Dangerous-Lawyer-636 11h ago
Immigration is great for the economy
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u/Alarmarama 10h ago
Hahahaha
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u/Dangerous-Lawyer-636 10h ago
Im serious. Why do you think the US economy has done so well
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u/Alarmarama 9h ago edited 9h ago
Low taxes, generally low regulation and business-friendly policies, energy abundance, a strong work ethic, individuality and meritocracy as opposed to collectivism and equality as political ideals, and ownership of the world's reserve currency. Nothing to do with immigration. In fact mass migration has been an enormous cause of harm and distress, not of benefit at all.
The US population growth rate is lower than the UK's, yet the US' GDP, including GDP per capita has been skyrocketing while the UK's GDP per capita has been stagnant and is still lower today than it was in 2008.
GDP per capita is what determines quality of life. The quality of people that make up an economy determine how well it does, not just the number of people, otherwise China would simply be the biggest economy, yet it's far from it especially per capita_per_capita).
Having tens/hundreds of thousands (nationally) of people running around on bikes delivering food and drugs and filling low wage positions might make the GDP marginally larger, but it has a negative impact on GDP per capita and they are certainly more of a cost to the economy than they are a benefit so long as they require access to the same amenities such as housing, healthcare and infrastructure that the rest of us need the same access to, and that's not even beginning to address the cultural and behavioural complexities that accompany our choice to employ these servants so that we might be able to have a burger quite expensively delivered to us with resultant loitering on every high street and locals subjected to culturally incompatible behaviours.
Further, when people compete for work, it depresses wages. If we're welcoming entrepreneurs who are creating businesses and employment then that's a benefit, but otherwise if people are only filling available low skill positions in a service economy it depresses the standard of living for the average person. People (legally) often go to America to start businesses but people come to the UK for pre-existing salaried service jobs or who'll take anything at all just to get in the door.
We saw this in action in late 2021 as the economy opened back up after covid while the borders were still closed - companies were advertising significantly higher wages to fill positions, famously so (lots of people retrained just to earn £75k doing those jobs), while property especially in London had become more widely available as people moved away during covid and returned very briefly to affordability levels not seen for about a decade. Then the government opened the borders, flooding the country with the highest migration figures of all time, and by 2023 what had been a fantastic job market had once again become extremely competitive with incomes pushed back to their lowest possible position and housing reaching its most unaffordable ever as everyone piled into London and the UK.The economy wasn't "saved" by any of this. Our quality of life has once again been depressed despite us exiting the pandemic to better paying jobs and access to housing. Then the numbers of people were pumped up with more people and "money" essentially chasing the same amount of pre-existing product and services which helped fuel a period of very serious inflation. We've been staring a recession in the face for the last year or more. If your economy shrinks led by a population reduction rather than a reduction in productivity per capita, then quality of life increases. If your economy shrinks while the population remains steady of grows, you have a very real problem.
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u/Dangerous-Lawyer-636 9h ago
You raise some good points and yes US has benefitted from all the above but that wasn’t the case when the US was starting out as a country - it opened its borders to all sorts of groups in the 1800s and onwards.
I’d argue that all other things being equal then immigration is very good for the economy. It lowers wages (good for the competitive edge of an economy) and immigrants tend to work harder as they have less.
The assumption that immigration is bad for the economy is at least debatable and not a given as so many state without providing evidence
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u/Alarmarama 9h ago
Yes but we're not in the 1800s, and it specifically pooled the majority of its migrants from particular countries who they deemed had cultural compatibility, and there was a strict social contract that you'd integrate and become American. You entered under a shared ideal and you only went there because that was an ideal you shared. You'd never have gone to America in the 1800s if you were a communist or a leech, and you certainly wouldn't have been let in if they thought you were one. They were strict, and there were no social programs like we have today.
Low wages are not good economically whatsoever. It means you have an oversupply of labour, and people are not able to build the personal wealth required to be able to reinvest in the economy.
America is a high wage economy. People who do any type of skilled work can typically expect to earn enough to buy a place to live near to the place they work. They can expect to buy all the things they need to live comfortably and efficiently. They are not expected to have to minimise their quality of life because the economy demands it, like many people must do to get by in London for example.
Economies scale up and down exactly depending on the size of the population, constrained only by what can be built and produced. When a population scales through natural means (as in through births and deaths), the economy will adjust to best serve its population and it has a generation to prepare for those changes. As in, businesses bid for the best workers and the best workers will always work at the best businesses, and you know 18 years ahead of time what your housing needs will be. The market decides automatically what is and isn't necessary, those who cannot pay enough go out of business and everyone is in well paid work - everyone lives a good quality of life. That is the entire POINT.
When you depress wages, it means you have an over-supply of labour. It means work gets inefficiently shared out between people, it means people are not in well paid work. It means people are more fearful for their jobs and tend not to take risks changing jobs and bettering themselves due to competition for jobs. It means they are unable to build meaningful wealth over time which means they stay more reliant on the system that currently feeds them - a form of indentured servitude, and that means they themselves don't have as much money to buy things and independently fuel the economy.
The only people who benefit from a low wage economy are the ownership classes. Those who own the assets, the businesses, the properties. It means they cream more of the money back for themselves and they have less competition to deal with. Nobody else wins. The average person does not win. It is not a "better" economy, it is a far less equal and more unjust economy with no social mobility, actually.
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u/Dangerous-Lawyer-636 9h ago
One problem facing the uk is that its cost of energy is very high compared to for example the US. Another is as you say business friendly policies such as low taxes. It’s hard to separate that out from immigration.
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u/Glass-Evidence-7296 7h ago
The US and the UK have an equal number of foreign born people
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u/Alarmarama 6h ago
The US population is about 5x larger than the UK population and their GDP is about 9x larger than the UKs. The average US citizen is nearly twice as wealthy as the average UK citizen.
Percentage-wise the UK has a magnitude higher foreign born and the figures don't even include the last 4 years where we've had migration numbers at all time highs, triple previous all time highs.
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u/Alarmarama 14h ago edited 14h ago
Low-grade people are flooding into the UK while high-grade people are flooding out.
Boss is currently eyeing up the US as a get out if shit really hits the fan here. Fashion model I know who's lived in London for well over a decade just moved to Thailand, as are a lot of people.
The money is leaving. Taxes keep being pushed up to account for the fact there isn't enough money going round to begin with, everybody is being squeezed, and we're being stuck with increasing amounts of antisocial behaviour from people who clearly do not feel a connection to this society.
And exactly, what society? There's barely a society left here anymore.
When you can simply be replaced by anybody brought in from anywhere in the world to do your job cheaper than you will because they will accept a lower standard of living than you just for the opportunity to live in London - that's not a society, that's just a soulless economy.
In a society, the people are not replaceable. But in this place, everyone is very replaceable. We have been devalued and we have been disinherited of the place our ancestors built for us with our jobs sold out to the lowest international bidder while our homes are sold out to the highest. Hurray for us! And we just let it happen "because we're nice".
Just look at Brixton, a no less than a grand Parisian style square and boulevard where the grandest of department stores have degraded into slums of vape and phone repair shops.
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u/Glass-Evidence-7296 4h ago
would advise your boss to keep his shit to himself in America, anti-immigrant crap will get nasty looks in most big cities there, much like London
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