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[Hiberno-Britannic Politics] Stay Alert Home Alert Stay Household
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I think probably the most likely thing. There are strong proponents of getting rid of the working time directive and minumum wage in the cabinet. I would expect to see them gone in the next year or so.
I don't really think so. People were more than happy to treat the migrants that way. They just need a reason to think that they're better than the people doing these jobs, and I'm sure the papers will be happy to give them one, whatever it may be.
A lot of people on my Twitter feed are saying that paying nine grand for a glorified Open University course is ridiculous, which seems to me to be slightly missing the point that the fees were ridiculous anyway - I paid three grand a year and I didn't get 1/3 of the education that people a couple of years below me did
Well, maybe I did, but that was because of procrastination and booze, not the lectures
They seem to be saying that seminars and tutorials will still be face to face, albeit socially distanced, which is the majority of teaching time in the Oxbridge model anyway
In my uni days, I lived in halls where I'd be exposed to more people than in some of my lectures
It seems like a half measure in those instances
It's one of the (shitty) arguments against UBI. If people don't need to do the really unpleasant jobs in order to live then we'll have (shock, horror) to pay them more to do them to make them attractive! And then where would we be and who would I look down on!? I'm not paying more for X as a consumer or dropping my profit margin as a producer that's for sure!
In the case of fruit pickers though apparently it isn't yet they still want to pay low wages. That's the root of the issue here. The employers want to pretend that fruit picking labour is a buyer's market when it plainly isn't.
Society is one big Pyramid scheme.
Thanks for the explanation, I had no idea.
You’ve got things like the sciences which are going to require you to do teaching labs. Students in Chemistry at any rate have practical exams in the first week so the University has an idea of what skills you’re coming in with.
The 4th year of Chemistry is basically a year long lab project.
In terms of costs I’m pretty sure once you take in to account all the lab equipment, chemicals, support, etc...the University is not rolling around in piles of cash.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/view-and-download-the-annual-report
5.2 billion in assets and according to this last year they ran a surplus of 16 million, which is less than I expected tbh.
Not to defend their financing priorities, but worth remembering cash isn't the same as assets, especially when no-one's in a position to buy it from you.
Also, fun fact: those assets are mostly owned by the colleges, which operate independently from the faculties (though it's really a lot more complex than that). So the bonanza of rent earned by Trinity each year doesn't go into the same pool that (say) lab equipment is bought from. So the university as a whole is incredibly rich but the amount that gets spent on research activities compared to other top research universities in the country doesn't track with that difference in wealth.
It was though until you guys screwed with your immigration system. Fruit pickers were available at the price point they wanted.
Yup. This is the big limiting factor across the entire food industry and why it looks the way it does. In the end basically everyone subsidizes the cost of food or cuts labour standards/pay or something similar somewhere in order to keep the price of food down. Consumers do not want to pay what food would actually cost if no corners were being cut somewhere.
Also every food isn't the same, carbohydrate-rich crops are less labor-intensive than berries or vegetables
Especially the movement of people outside the EU is severely affected by the current pandemic
Pay is generally just poor all around if you're at the bottom. I work full time in banking in a branch. I'm currently having to deal with people face to face despite the pandemic while the people making the decision to make me do that are literally sat at home (because you can see on the many Zoom calls they make us participate in). Despite that, I earn equal to or less than someone sat at home on a variety of benefits, and am earning just above minimum wage, and this salary level is on par for this industry type so its not an outlier. I have to follow a checklist and hand out 4 different documents if someone wants to open a savings account with £1. I will be backchecked, observed, etc because it is so heavily regulated if someone wants to put £1 into an instant access savings account. Yet a car dealer can missell for days, no regulation, promise things and not deliver and gets paid more for getting someone to part with £12k over 5 years with optional balloon payment of £5000 at the end.
Salary obviously informs my buying, because I have to pay general bills, and then as much as I'd like to go in Costco and get a £10 jar of fancy, imported honey, I go with the cheapest option in Tesco so I have money to actually have fun with. What I'd give to be earning as much as that QuestionTime guy who was ignorant of just how much he was earning.
People should uniformly be paid more. Not a year goes by without some executive earning millions plus millions more as a bonus, yet a PM, even a competent one, earns low 6 figures for running a country. My particular CEO gets a million+ salary plus high 6 figures just in expenses allowances. Then you have "golden" parachutes and "golden" hellos. It's just a constant stream of wealth going into the pockets of the few while actual working people use food banks and have to decide between eating themselves or feeding their kids. You could pay everyone at the bottom probably at least an extra 20% while still handsomely paying your CEOs and executives, just not so handsomely that they can afford to have TWO pools instead of one.
It’s astonishing they tried to continue charging it, well, astonishing until you remember who these arseholes are.
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This assumes it's a binary question. It's not "food" vs "not food" and it's just that people don't want to pay more because they can't afford it. Food is substitutable and highly price sensitive. If you push the price of your product up, people will move to other products. Especially in the lower income groups. This creates an enormous incentive to keep costs down, which is then reflected in the structure of the production chain.
Whilst my company at least has everyone working from home, they decided to do these video conferences where the executives thank us for all our hard work, and talked about how it's tough for everyone and that we're all suffering. One was in her massive conservatory. One was in his piano room.
Yes, it's tough for everyone, but this really gets my goat, because its this insipid insinuation that everyone is suffering the same, when it's not true. Must be nice, to have a big conservatory and garden. I have two rooms. Total. It's also an attitude you see on social media, this total seemingly lack of perspective. There's this weird unspoken undercurrent of classism under all of this. Lots of parents complaining about sourdough starters and having to home school kids, clapping for the NHS whilst totally ignoring that most essential workers wouldn't be in a position to not work even if they were allowed to not come in.
And she was like "you know it's really important to have a work life balance. I've converted my attic into an office so I can go there and work, and then have a completely separate space to live in"
One of my colleagues said "what if you don't have an attic on hand to convert Theresa? What's the plan then?" She was like oh well surely everyone must have some sort of spare room? Like if I had nothing else I'd just go and work in my stables and people were like, are you a real fucking human being
That bloke who earns 85k on question time and thought he was below the national average. People just assume that they aren't that far out of the norm, because all the people they know are like that, family and friends and such. People have no idea how fucking good they've got it. And why would they? It doesn't ever get challenged. They don't need to go anywhere to interact with anyone else.
I'm relatively well spoken and a mate of mine at school used to rib me about it, call me posh. A few years ago we were sat in a pub and he said "you know when I went to uni that's when I realised... I thought you were posh. I had no idea. You're not posh at all, you just were raised by teachers who for some reason wanted you to speak in whatever way. But these guys? They are something else, and they think that they're totally normal. It's bizarre." We all know someone who's Daddy bought them a car and a flat when they went to uni and they just had no idea that their family was absolutely loaded. It's a fact of our society.
Also anecdotally, part of my job is collating reports of people ignoring the social distancing rules etc.
These past two weeks have seen a huge increase in reports and generally those reports all involve very large groups of people. Before the lockdown was loosened people were reporting a couple of people breaking to social distancing rules.
Now it's groups of 20 or 30 people.
But were all those groups staying alert?
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