Has London succeeded at the expense of the rest of the UK?

Thanks!

Oh, wait: <redacted> I used to work with you.

I think what's needed is for builders to switch from a 'build to sell' to a 'build to rent' business model but this needs long term finance to more readily available and, of course, a willingness to embrace new ideas.

I'm not optimistic though.

That's an insane hyperbole.

Also, I don't think that yield from real estate is classified under the "trade" item in the Balance of Payments

Did you mean carer, or did you mean care worker?

As a student living off savings from a previous minimum wage job, it is quite possible to live a comfortable life in London. Motivation and time are most certainly part of the few constraints.

I'd like to add financial wit to that. Most people who struggle also struggle to control their finances in any way and spend irresponsively.

So I think it really depends on what kind of startup your are trying to build. Europe doesn't have much going for it with London ,Berlin and Stockholm as the exceptions.

But just like you can go to LA and pay a third in rent of what they pay in SF doesn't mean that it's advisable.

Again depending on what kind of business you are running.

And that's UK prices not London! Please come to the UK and instead of re-investing your profits give them to a rentier.

So that's a weird mix where the rich lives with the poor, but the middle class is excluded. ( well, from time to time, one of the estate flat goes on sale for between 300 and 400K which is somewhat accessible to middle class, but then less than 20% of the housing on an estate are privately owned via right to buy scheme, and most of the time the original owner are still living in as they can't really buy better anywhere else )

edit: note that for nurse, there are help scheme available via key worker shared ownership ( you buy a share and rest the rest ). So you have more chance to find a nurse living in the center than a doctor.

Also note that the problem comes from the price explosion of private housing over the last decade. 10 years ago, where I was looking, there were estate, shared ownership (50% of 200K) and private properties starting 200K and up. Now, you have estate, share ownership (25%!! of 600K) and private for 600K and up. The salaries are about the same and the level of help to access government assistance hasn't changed much either. So you can progress from poor to lower middle class, but then there is huge gap to be able to afford your place.

If it's that well regulated, why did the subprime mortgage crisis hit us so hard (compared to the countries that escaped relatively unscathed)?

The UK was known to be "light touch" that's why all the banks locate there. No criminal prosecutions were brought from 2008. Lots of US banks put their bad deals through London.

You have no clue what you are talking about.

The City of London is not governed by Westminster.

See http://treasureislands.org/

Finally a fun anecdote about the role of French in history and some thoughts about where language might go in the future, I remember when reading war and peace where the Russian aristocracy's command of French is much better than their Russian, and as Russia is invaded by France, they scramble for tutors to improve their Russian lest they're deemed 'too French' in a Russia at war with France. It reminds me of arab family members who went to French private schools in arab speaking countries, and their arabic is pretty bad because of it. It's kind of funny in that in history the elite were often relatively multilingual and internationally oriented, but the rest (the vast majority) was not, and instead spoke the local language (or even dialect) and was locally oriented. Each spoke the language of their network, one which was relatively large, the other which was local with most people never traveling 50km from where they were born, or communicate with people outside that radius. But with the advent of modern tech, we're seeing dirt cheap long-distance communication networks, relatively cheap transport etc etc, you know the story... and I wonder if that will create language homogeneity in the world on a scale we've never seen before, when the majority of the population starts speaking a more international standard language (like say French was for some centuries the standard international language of elites, only now it's not confined to the top 1%). With the above anecdotes I can hardly imagine we won't all be speaking English/Spanish/Chinese/Arabic/Hindi as our first language next century, and everything else as our second, just like the Russian elite spoke French first, Russian second, and some of my family French first, Arabic second, and I in my professional life (and increasingly personal) English first, Dutch second. It'd take some major conflict to flare up nationalist notions to preserve the hundreds of languages different people now have as their 'first' language, like it took the invasion of Russia for the Russian elite to denounce French culture and fashion and choose Russian first.

Anyway I definitely share your experiences back home in the Netherlands but then I did always pick international jobs. But more generally speaking, there's tons of jobs where I'd absolutely have to speak Dutch, virtually anything client-facing, most B2B comms is Dutch still and I've read a few times on Glassdoor of employees complaining that despite the company being internationally-oriented, Dutch is still used a fair bit and they feel left out of conversations (often non-work convos). That doesn't say much about what you can get away with, if you wanted you could probably speak to 95% of customers, partners and colleagues in English just fine, but it says something about what is expected and happens in practice, which is surprising as the Dutch do speak a ton of English and they even enjoy it (to the extent a big complaint from foreigners is that they can't practice Dutch because if you try a sentence, the Dutch person will switch to English. But that's 1 on 1, if you're the only foreigner in a bar or workplace with 6 Dutch friends/colleagues, Dutch is still very much the norm and that's why it's still a requirement for most jobs. In looking abroad for jobs in say Spain I still feel the jobs I can pick where English is good enough are pretty narrow and I really only have the option of a narrow selection of jobs, same for France, Germany slightly less so but there too. And the further out you go, Italy for example, it gets worse. In London I can land any job - except translation or teaching jobs where native proficiency is really crucial - the difference is pretty big.

Granted, my room is small, and the only real common area is the kitchen. But the only thing I need in London is a bed and a shower, I'm spending most of my time not-at-the-flat. So it feels like the inflection point between location and price.

2) Mind that I was searching for a room, so I haven't looked much into studios, but I haven't been able to find a studio for less than 1000£ for a short let.

Note that there are "studios" which are in fact shared with other people in the same house, so not really a studio.

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The problem, IMHO is, that many educated people still don't see what is happening in real life. They dream the capitalistic dream of never ending wealth -- but capitalism never was crafted to make all people happy and it was even not crafted to make the diligent people happy, but it was crafted to make a few random people happy by taking from the rest.

Capitalism might be the best system crafted by humankind, but it is still a system, that is not sustainable and in today's form it brings us sooner or later back to the dark ages of industrialization.

You can see it first in the developing countries, where communities exist, where big corporations come, take the water sources away from the people and sell the water with big profits to the better of people in the big cities.

Days will come and have already come, that also in the western countries, many people (will) see, how capitalism is destroying those which created the wealth to give even more to those which own the wealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)