One million cancel broadband as living costs rise
bbc.com
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I visited my co-worker in the UK, and over some beers, he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this. Also 20% VAT on regular shopping. I couldn't believe it, so he pulled up his pay stub on his phone and showed me.
Family members out here who are working non-tech regular jobs are telling me they had to cut back on turning on their heating at night during the winter. I grew up in Canada, and lived seven years in Los Angeles, but now live in Asia. I don't know how the UK is going to get back to where it was 10ish years ago.
that's quite up-market - you would pay much less at macdonalds.
> he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this
he must be earning a fair bit then 40 to 45 percent is the norm for good, middle-class salaries.
but you are right, inflation here in the uk is getting quite frightening.
On my $172k salary I pay $59k in taxes which is roughly $1k more than I'd pay in the UK but in the UK that includes national insurance while in the US I pay health insurance on top. So while taxes sound crazy in the UK it's not actually different to the US - it's all marginal. VAT is only 7.25% in California but then you have to add 15-20% in tips when you're out.
Also everyone I know in tech over here is making much more than that still.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charting-income-distribu...
So when looking at salary figures, the only sane way of doing it is to control for experience level, otherwise the variance in the explosive growth of the industry will dominate your results.
These folks do not actually earn a great wage because they know less than what many bootcamp grads come out of a 12 week program with, but they exist in multitudes.
I am aware of many events and activities that go on in Times Square, however broccoli consumption was not at the top of my list.
Which is simultaneously in no way defending the mess that is US healthcare.
Employers rarely cover all the health care premiums for you entire family.
Most non-startups will cover 100% for the employee, but if you're not single you'll end up paying quite a bit to cover your spouse & kids.
Not sure how to feel about the existence of luxury grocery stores. I'm sure the people who shop there are happy.
I don't know about the rest of the UK because I haven't been but most non-casual places in London charge an automatic 12.5% service charge. It's the same thing.
Another thing I didn't talk about is annual leave. Annual leave in the US is usually rubbish compared to European countries.
(Sales tax, not VAT)
But you need to also add local sales taxes, so your sales tax in Palo Alto is actually 9.125%
They're post-tax and don't factor major expenses like healthcare, household bills in general are almost double in California, but yeah, the average Californian is probably wealthier.
Even if you double the fries because they're not "large" you're still under $25. Five Guys is batshit insane.
Still, Five Guys is a bit over the top expensive so I rarely go there.
But Five Guys is up at or above Smashburger pricing, so I'm not sure what they're doing.
They do have that weird soda robot, so there's that.
At my local Five Guys in LA, a cheeseburger is $11.79, compared to $9.84 on that site. Ten times out of ten I'd just go to In-N-Out.
> he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this
That's the higher rate for those who earn the most and, again, atypical. https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...
- Edited to correct incorrect US top rate.
Childcare alone in Zone 4 London is £2000 per month.
I'm fed up and moving up north!
VAT is the biggest scam, it's just an income tax under another name. What is a company's income? revenue - costs
What is a company's value-add? revenue - costs
massive eye-roll.
I once asked a real(tm) economist what the difference was and he looked up and thought for a minute and said "payroll tax". Payroll tax is what the US calls social security tax (for retirement, unemployment and the like)
Somebody can just not pay Sales tax and so the government doesn't collect it. But with VAT the seller is incentive to report so they can recover the VAT they paid.
i.e. McDonalds buys 10 burgers and pays 1$ in VAT to their supplier. then McDonalds sells those 10 (now cooked) burgers and can recover 1$ in VAT from the government while the consumers ultimately pay >1$ in VAT for the 10 burgers.
but the amount of tax is based on what activity is being taxed. Sales taxes are considered "regressive" because poor people spend a greater %age of their income, so in some sense it can be seen as an "undoing" of progressive income tax. That's not strictly true, however, because the working class complaint about rich people is how much rich people consume while living greedy lavish lives: which shows that rich people would be paying a lot more of the overall %age of sales tax than poor people (not really strictly distinguishing VAT from sales tax here)
So, anyway, I'm not defending sales taxes here (meaning tax on final sale to consume-ers with no taxes backward up the supply chain). VAT taxes do make more sense in terms of economic efficiency: 10% sales tax on a printer selling for $200 is $20, where the printer cost $300 to make (remember, they're going to sell you expensive ink), and with a VAT tax the tax would be $0 (or would it even be a $30 refund?)...
...point is, VAT tax works out to a high sales-tax-on-high-profit-margin-goods and a low sales-tax-on-low-profit-margin-goods, which is helpful because govt doesn't want to distort the market for low margin goods with high taxes.
However, back to my original point, it simply means that income taxes make more economic sense than consumption taxes, and VAT is an income tax, not a consumption tax.
It is regressive and it's clearly so because someone living, for example off minimum wage, will have no money (or very little money left) by the end of the month for savings or investment. Where has all this money go? It's gone to pay for goods and services. This isn't just for minimum wage incomes but it's generally also the case up to the median household though obviously the higher you go the less you need to spend in proportion of your salary in VAT. And that's the key difference, someone that's on top of the earning category will pay little in proportion of their earnings in VAT no matter how you slice it; because they always have money left for savings and investment! It's true that overall they're going to be paying more VAT but not more in proportion to their income. And this gets even worse when it comes to the top wealth as most of their "income" is through capital gains which tend to be taxed much lower.
VAT is however as you say an efficient tax. But I believe we should consider putting exceptions on certain products (such as basic foods and books) to ease the burden on low income earners.
Also capital gains taxes tend to be embarassingly low in most countries and the excuses given are, imo, quite speculative. As many economists have calculated people don't actually "fly off" until taxation is rather high, times and times higher what we tax either capital or income.
progressive income tax: if you earn more, you pay more, but also a higher percentage, so something like "earn twice as much, pay three times as much"
sales tax: spend twice as much, pay twice as much, a flat tax.
it's not regressive, it's flat. "progressive" doesn't mean the political tendency, it means the tax rate progresses higher with income. A "politically progressive" sales tax, you might say, would change the tax rate on the basis of total spend, but difficult to implement because it can't be properly calculated at purchase time, unless you just want to make more expensive items have higher taxes, but you'd lose the tax efficiency described above for the VAT.
now, it's not necessary to bend our thinking like a pretzel to try to make sales tax include an extra bonus for low income people (or extra burden for rich people) but why not just do that as part of progressive personal income tax?† and as discussed, fix sales tax with VAT... which we should simply call company income tax because that's what it is.
† capital gains tax is interesting to discuss but not here, except to say "don't try to fix your problems with capital gains tax rates by making the sales, income, or VAT taxes crazy"
Of course, they won't actually get health insurance for it, which will cost a family ~$20,000/year. That's about 6-13% of your paycheck that could have been going into your wallet.
Also, don't forget your state income taxes, which will scrape another 0-7-12%.
All-in-all, Americans pay ~26% of their GDP in taxes. People in the UK pay... ~27% (Edit - it's actually closer to 33%) of their GDP in taxes. [2] 'Americans pay less taxes' is largely a meme with no basis in reality.
[1] Just because that gets subtracted from a different line item on your W-2 doesn't mean that you shouldn't count it.
[2] This is the only meaningful apples to apples comparison of overall tax burdens. And it makes the US look really bad, because that 26% won't even get you healthcare. Or cheap university tuition. It does get you 11 carrier fleet strike groups, and 5,500 nuclear weapons, though.
In the UK, there is also National Insurance tax on top of income tax, which works similarly (but is a bit more complicated.) The employer share is 13.8%, which is a hair below the combined employee + employer share US federal payroll tax.
And there is also a 20% VAT impacting the cost of pretty much anything you might use your after-tax income to buy.
> All-in-all, Americans pay ~26% of their GDP in taxes.
Close: 26.6% (2021, provisional), 25.8% (2020) [0]
> People in the UK pay… ~27% of their GDP in taxes.
Not so close: 33.5% (2021, provisional), 32.1% (2020) [0]
> ‘Americans pay less taxes’ is largely a meme with no basis in reality.
No, the UK has a much higher tax burden; the US is significantly below OECD average, the UK a bit above.
[0] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-highl...
And, again, the giant bugbear that is health insurance rears its ugly head on the US side. See the overall 'Taxes as a % of GDP' comparisons.
Edit: I stand corrected about taxes as % of GDP. You are right, that the UK is at 33.5%. [1] Unfortunately, again, that doesn't include the percentage of US spending on healthcare - which is 17.8% of its GDP, with much of it coming out of after-tax dollars, instead of pre-tax ones. (Medicaid and Medicare make up about a third of that - and are, obviously, financed by taxes.)
[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-kingdom.p...
Sure, yes, that's a bigger non-tax expense for individuals in the US. The US having by far the least efficient healthcare system in the world is a huge problem.
> See the overall ‘Taxes as a % of GDP’ comparisons.
Yes, I’ve updated my post to address your wildly inaccurate “Taxes as a % of GDP” comparison, using the most recently published OECD data which shows that you were close for the US, and way low for the UK.
At the end of the day, Americans still pay, and pay more. 26% in taxes, and then another ~11% in non-government-covered (non-Medicare/Medicaid) healthcare spending.
They pay less in taxes, by a wide margin.
They also get less for them, by a wide margin, particularly (but not exclusively) in healthcare.
I do, however, posit that when it comes to determining whether an economy/society/??? is healthy (which is the conversation in this sub-thread), we need to look at all of these 'costs of life/business'. So, yes, the sticker price on the UK looks rough, but add it all up... And it comes out to be pretty similar. As it turns out, providing similar forms of services costs... About the same, across the developed world.
Months to years for an appointment, incompetent doctors and a bureaucracy that puts Kafka to shame.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/04/30/the-nhs-is-in-s...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/02/collapse-nhs-tra...
Yes US healthcare has issues but it's nowhere near as bad as UK.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
combined with ever increasing inequality offers a much better explanation. Inequality is high in the US too but at least they have a lot of growth which means that the bottom 80% or so are at least not getting poorer.
A very significant proportion of US population is covered by Medicaid and if more if you add Medicare. In fact the US government spends almost 50% more on healthcare than Britain does (and that’s only public spending..). The problem is that the system is simply extremely inefficient.
Just look at Switzerland healthcare is privatized to a much higher degree than in the US yet still more accessible…
But it isn't always the case. Where we live the NHS is excellent, appointments are fine, doctors are competent, and we've had no issues with bureaucracy. There is literally nothing I'd complain about, and we have double-digit interactions with the NHS each year.
The only fly in the ointment is the recent nurse strike happened on a day the wife was scheduled for some surgery, so that was cancelled. But I support them in that, and the rescheduled date is less than a month later.
There are issues everywhere, but there's no way I'd swap any of it for the US version. And always bear in mind that negative talk sells more papers/gets more eyeballs than positive.
Very few people in the US have top of the line healthcare (hence, why its “top of the line” and not “typical”), and if you do it costs a lot per covered person, even if it is less visible because instead of a salary deduction instead a large chunk of money that the company is willing to pay for your labor just goes straight to an insurer without being part of your nominal pay.
(I, too, as I suspect is fairly common for HN readers given the demographic tendencies, have excellent healthcare in the US, abd most of the cost isn’t a salary deeuction, but the cost is nontrivial.)
> NHS in the UK is collapsing, but even if it didn't, qualitatively it's orders of magnitude worse than what one would receive in the US through one's employer:
Over 1/5th of US workers (not residents, people actually employed) aren’t eligible for any employer health insurance, and for many of the rest it is quite bad, with very high out of pocket costs if you actually need any non-preventice care. NHS may be worse than what you or I have through our employers, but “top of the line” isn’t the usual experience.
> Yes US healthcare has issues but it's nowhere near as bad as UK.
...if you are part of the relatively narrow elite in the US with top of the line coverage, and for that the US pays more than a time and a half what the UK does as a share of GDP, and more than double what the UK does per capita...while leaving over 12% of adults and 5% of children uninsured.
Luckily, Labour will win the next GE, so they can start to turn this around.
The UK has had the worst pandemic recovery almost anywhere in the developed world. How many other countries have an annual "Winter Crisis" in their healthcare that's extending into autumn and summer?
The Tories have been in power since 2010. They're the common factor in the many issues the UK is currently facing.
Except stuff like food, rent, utilities, small stuff like that.
I'll give you the rest though. The UK is a low-tax country by European standards, and even by developed-world standards, but is above the US quite significantly.
The UK is a bit above average tax burden as share of GDP for the OECD. It is not particularly “low tax by developed world standards”.
> No, the UK has a much higher tax burden; the US is significantly below OECD average, the UK a bit above.
> [0] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-highl...
Rather than contradict the OP's statement, the above document reinforces it. The document only covers taxes identifies as "taxes", which makes the comparison with US apples to organges.
The two huge elephants in the room in the US are health care and higher education both of which are very high cost in the US and both of which have to be paid separately in the US. Whereas in most other countries these are either fully or partially funded by taxes.
For an apples-apples comparison of out of required pocket expenses in the US vs. other countries you need to include health care and education costs.
It is not taxes. It's a contribution to a functioning society. Otherwise, employers would get access to employees with NHS without putting a penny in.
> Otherwise, employers would get access to employees with NHS without putting a penny in.
It doesn't matter how you slice it, the penny still comes out of payroll. It makes zero difference to me if I get paid 50,000, and 10,000 of that goes to taxes, or if I get paid 40,000 and my employer pays 10,000 in taxes. But it sure causes a lot of spilled ink about whether or not its 'really a tax' and 'who pays'.
That’s what taxes in general are, so the second half does not support the first.
> Otherwise, employers would get access to employees with NHS without putting a penny in.
The idea that payroll taxes are a fee that employers pay the State for “access” to workers and that this is a defense rather than a criticism of the scheme is... interesting.
Once again, "payroll tax" is language invented by employers to make it feel like they're being unjustly taxed. Additionally, in the case of Europe, most of these contributions were set up after WW2 because employers were happy enough to collaborate with the occupiers and kept wanting cheap labour without participating in rebuilding nations. So, sorry, I won't cry about them having to pay their fair share.
Which protect the blanket of freedom under which the UK sleeps.
1. Consistently maintains a >2% of GDP military budget, and
2. Is capable of acting independently (albeit less effectively than part of NATO).
It's also one of those countries reasonably able to defend itself without the US.
when Queen Liz set out to sea, half of the planes on her deck were F35s from (and staffed by) the US Marines...afaik the UK cannot provide full air wings for their own carriers
I don’t understand your point about the employer portion — it doesn’t come out of your paycheck, so if you wanted to include it in this calculation, you’d have to say your gross salary was higher.
And yes, the effective federal rate is not the total blended rate paid in the US, but it's not in the UK, either. For example, far as I know, no US region has a sales tax close to the UK's 20% VAT - sales tax is set locally but in most places is around 5-10%.
> In the US, someone earning $155,000 USD...
Later you say
> $20k is a reasonable estimate for a family trying to get decent health insurance independently
So are we talking about people who have full time jobs and employee sponsored healthcare or are we talking about people getting health insurance independently?
That's on the low side. I'm currently taking a break between jobs and thus paying for health insurance out of pocket. For a family of 3 in California, I'm paying $42,000 annually.
That median number also includes people without coverage or with Medicare and Medicaid, which aren’t accounted for that way.
I'm guessing that doesn't include employer subsidies. I pay (as an individual) ~$940/month for health insurance, plus a $600 deductible and $40/visit copays for doctors, $150 copay for emergency room visits and $1000 copay for hospital admisisons.
Assuming I don't need an emergency room or a hospital admission, that's over $10,000/year just for healthcare.
Certainly not by an order of magnitude.
In the US if you are single and work for a well-funded company (e.g. FAANG types) they will probably cover 100% of the health care premiums monthly and your deductibles will be low, so a couple thousand out of pocket is realistic.
Any other scenario though, it's going to be much more. Very few companies cover all the health care costs for the family of the employee. I've paid anywhere between $1K/mo to $2K/mo for full-family coverage while employed, with the employer covering the rest (total cost is over 40K/yr).
Edit: I'm being throttled from posting but response below:
There are a lot of factors that go into deciding the gross pay that an employee receives. What you are doing is muddying the waters to make a point but it just makes it trickier to compare. If you are an employee that is deciding where to live and work, the specific employer taxes make no difference to you -- what matters is your net pay and the services you get for the taxes paid. The rest of the costs, including things like parental leave, time off, and healthcare have already played into deciding your wage.
I'm also not sure why you included health insurance costs for the US total but not the 12-14% regressive UK national insurance tax or the regressive 20% VAT for the UK total unless you're deliberately trying to argue in bad faith. I'm suggesting comparing apples to apples. There's enough to criticize as is.
Splitting it into an 'employer and employee' portion was just an accounting trick to get political buy-in for it. At the end of the day, it's still a regressive 15.3% tax rate that gets slapped onto your wages.
It's more like 35%-36%.
The far more accurate picture is that the local + state + federal spending is going to be around $9.5 trillion in 2023. The IMF has the US at an estimated $26.8 trillion GDP for 2023. Beyond the federal government, the US has two other massive layers of government that spend well over $4 trillion each year.
I fully understand the difference between taxes and spending, and that spending comes out of your pocket either directly via taxes or via inevitable currency debasement (look at the enormous value loss in the dollar since the rampaging deficits & later debt monetization began after 9/11). The bill comes due, period.
The majority of government spending is on social services. Defense is usually under 20% of the budget.
These are 2022 numbers, so a bit out of whack from Covid-19, but they get the point across. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The problem in the U.S. is inefficiency. The U.S. spends more public money per capita on healthcare than most of its peers. Simply nationalizing the healthcare system would quite possibly lead to lower taxes, and would certainly lead to much lower healthcare spending. We know how to make a system that provides for everyone and we know it will save us money, but we can't do it because that would be SOCIALIST!!!
There's no need to slash the defense budget to make the U.S. government function better. All we need to do is jettison the ideologues deliberately sabotaging good government at every turn.
(I do support slashing defense budgets, but that has nothing to do with saving money. I'd support lighting the money on fire rather than spending it on "national security".)
A married couple with this income pays only 37.5% and doesn't max out until going over 1,359 million, at which point they pay the 43,9 effective.
You have to be a truly massive earner to hit 50% effective in CA.
This increase the total cost of labor which effectively is the same. Of course on the higher end paying a lump sum is way more optimal than an extra 10% tax to fund healthcare. If your income is low.. we’ll it’s a highly regressive system without government support. And with government subsidies it becomes effectively the same just extra hoops.
49% kicks in at £55k at combined NI and Income.
(This all ignores the 14% that's hidden on the employer side)
It's not atypical if it's a fifth of workers.
I still can't believe how cheap the UK is. Big Mac meal near me is £6, cheeseburger is £1, 1kg of potatoes was 20p the other week, two-portion microwavable rice 20p, even a nice matured ribeye steak is only £5, it is genuinely incredible.
In particular, the price of stuff that comes from farmers is really too low in the UK (there has been massive competition in food retail, great...prices are extremely low but cost isn't an issue for 99% of the population...if you go into Tesco, it is staggering how limited their range of products is, the reason why is that they have driven prices so low that food production is often quite unprofitable...the recent trade deal with Morocco was also a real game-changer for food prices, UK farmers can't compete).
And the top rate of tax in the UK is 45%. When people say they pay more it is because they are paying for student loans (which aren't really on economic terms, are often forgiven totally, etc...the reason why we have this system is because wealthy students were getting heavy subsidies from free university education). But what people ignore is that you get substantial amounts of welfare and benefits.
For example, the govt recently introduced free childcare for a certain number of hours. Where do you think the taper would be? Probably median income? £28k? Maybe where child benefits stop £50k? Nope, £100k. You can earn £99k/year in the UK, and still receive benefits from the state. That is why taxes are "so high" (they aren't, taxes in the UK are amazingly low given the size of the state...we have wage subsidy programs worth tens of billions every year, housing subsidie worth tens of billions, on and on it goes, everyone on welfare).
The US suffers from both a high tax burden and poor services. We just tend to nickel and dime our taxes more but it doesn’t really matter if you’re paying 1$ to the feds in income taxes, pay 1$ to use a state’s toll road, or 1$ to a “fee” your town tacks on the water bill.
Looking at total government spending as a percentage of GDP doesn’t show differences in services but it does show just what it all costs.
And yes, it does have everything to do with govt policies because you are getting value back.
It is like saying taxes are high in Nordic countries, ignoring the fact that most of what you pay is returned to you. Saying that doesn't impact demand or the price level is not accurate, and misunderstands (again) at a fundamental level how govt operates.
So what you're saying is pretty wrong.
For example with a 20% VAT, a $1 priced item is really an $.83 item, and to pay for it at a 45% tax bracket would require $1.81 of income.
The numbers themselves are meaningless. Only the total ratio of income required to goods received is important, and it remains unchanged.
In Canada tax rates are similar, although we do have lower VAT. In other EU countries income tax is more aggressive but they have more social benefits.
But your effective tax rate is already 40% at 125k.
This is the point where you "claim" it but say you don't want to receive any payments.
I'm guessing you don't have children because they actually promised to do it in a year. Nothing has changed yet. Also the extra funding for free hours works out at like 20p/hour which is way below what is needed for nurseries to break even on free hours.
I think you're massively overstating how good things are. Are taxes aren't high because they're paying for great services; they're high because they're paying for great fuckups. Brexit, corruption, too-good pensions deals, etc.
Brexit? Zero cost. Corruption? Zero cost. It is amazing that the state is giving massive handouts to people in work, and they still complain that things are terrible. We are giving thousands of pounds per year to people on more than 3x the median salary, and your response is: more money please. We are spending £200bn/year on healthcare, fully universal..."why am I having to pay taxes for this? Things are so bad".
Okay...if you were on £50k, would you support the govt making thousands a year in transfers from you to people on £200k?
One reason why economic policy is so bad in the UK is that people genuinely cannot conceive of economic policy being made for anyone but them: planning, govt finance, monetary policy...every area, it is really quite excruciating.
It's a great deal for the people receiving pensions now because they massively underpaid contributions compared to the total pension they'll receive.
> ...if it is so good, would you have all your contributions paid into the state pension? No.
Of course not, because our contributions now are really going to pay the pensions of current pensioners. We are paying for the previous generation.
> Brexit? Zero cost. Corruption? Zero cost.
What? Ok this is some weird humour!
Demand is not falling so, by definition, there cannot be a "cost of living crisis". Because prices have increased does not mean they are at a high level.
You are acting as if some govt agency has declared a "cost of living crisis" and that is somehow meaningful to reality. I gave you specific examples of the prices of food: you call that "contrarian", I don't see any specific examples in your post however...perhaps you are being needlessly contrarian?
[1] https://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/national/23527220.10-milli...
According to xe.com, that's about US$12-13.30.
So do you also think primary education is also welfare?
Right now, to take my family to one of these restaurants for dinner would cost on the order of $100. At that price, I may as well just stomach the extra $30-50 and go get a nice meal at one of the local independent restaurants. The food and atmosphere will certainly be better.
My in-laws took us out for dinner last weekend at Red Robin and the bill after tip was about $140. (4 adults, 2 kids). That's seriously obscene for the quality of food at Red Robin, which isn't terrible but certainly not worth spending $140 for.
Then COVID hit, and "going out to eat" was pummeled: fast-casual restaurants weathered the storm alright-ish, because they likely already had a non-trivial takeout segment, and were attracting people based on their food. Family dining, who's main selling point is table service, were slaughtered.
The outlook continues to be bleak for them, since they're being squeezed out of the market: cut costs by making worse food, and they cement their laughingstock status, cut costs by cutting back on staff and they jeopardize what little remains of their customer demand, or raise prices and further reduce their value proposition versus going to a nicer sit-down restaurant.
This. I paid ~$130 for dinner the other day, and it taste worse than a meal I regularly cook at home. And I suck at cooking
some data:
I looked at two restaurants in central London. Gordan Ramsey (expensive) and honest burgers. Their prices were 13 and 17 GBP for the regular burger. (16 and 21 USD respectively.
Compared to seattle. If I pick Victory Tavern (which is ethan Stowall somewhat equiv to Gordan) thats a $21USD burger. Little woody's is a $7.50 burger but has no sides. add fries for 3.5 and you are at $11.
Seattle is no London. Yet these prices arent miles apart and I would put little woodys as a cheap burger and America is the King of burgers and Beef production so would expect to see cheaper options.
sales tax 10% Living wage tax 10% 20%+ tip expectation
Everyone I talk to from earning $80K a year to $1M a year are not eating out as much as its absurdly expensive.
Just this week. 2 people. dinner at a reasonable seattle restuarant on a tuesday - not high end. 2 mains, shared appetizer and bread and 4 glasses of wine. $300.
Just went out to a restaurant I would describe similarly (https://www.thebutchersdaughter.com/west-village/). Mains are ~$20, appetizers are ~$15, wine is ~$15. Two mains, two apps, four glasses of wine would be $130, with tax and tip is $180. That is still high for me, but that does include four drinks.
There are, in McDonalds, Burger King, In-n-out etc. What you are paying for is labor and the fast food places are optimized to reduce that specific cost. The drive thru, for example, increases demand per hour and thus lets kitchens specialize more, and invest in more machinery. Ray Kroc, a salesman, loved the 8 at a time milkshake mixer he was pitching so much he bought a burger chain to put them to use.
But inflation, and labor cost increases in the low end especially, mean prices are up now versus a decade ago.
Or better yet, how much is a burger at Dick's now?
The highest income tax bracket is 45%, and you only pay that rate of tax on the money you earn past £125k – you don’t pay that rate on your entire income.
You're forgetting about when it's inevitably delayed or cancelled and you're stuck.
There is this little inconvenient thing called the Russian Invasion of Ukraine that is still ongoing since 1 year, 2 months, 3 weeks and 4 days.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/mar/06/soaring-gas-pr...
From a UK perspective, being able to cook achieves:
a) The ability to buy raw ingredients in bulk
b) You can cook dishes that last you multiple meals (and NO, this does not mean eating the same thing)
c) You can make soups and stocks from bones (all you need is bones, cheap vegetables, cheap spicing, and water)
d) VAT on raw ingredients is either 0% or 5%
e) Raw ingredients are cheaper than processed food
f) Raw ingredients are A MILLION times cheaper than restaurant prices (depending where you eat, you're typically paying up to 300% mark-up on ingredients because the restaurant needs to cover its costs)
I'm sorry but that is oft-repeated nonsense that you have to have a well-stocked large kitchen to be able to cook at home.
You can cook as well in a small "galley" style kitchen as you can in a large one.
Other than herbs, spices and maybe a few bottles/cans of this and that, you don't need to keep vast stocks of anything. All you need to do is engage the brain and do a little bit of forward-planning for the week ahead.
How do you think people who grew up in, for example, communist-era Eastern Europe survived ? They all cooked at home. They certainly didn't have access to a supermarket so they could have a "well-stocked large kitchen". And their kitchens were certainly not large. Yet they ate well, they ate healthily.
> Cooking is definitely efficient at 3 or more people, can have tradeoffs with 2 people and makes little sense if you live alone
This is also utter tripe, again oft-repeated.
In 2023 we are blessed with this thing called refrigeration.
Again, engage brain and plan ahead.
You can make a variety of dishes for the immediate days ahead and put them in the refrigerator. As long as you stick to basic sensible food hygiene, food will be perfectly safe after a few days to a week in the fridge.
Leftovers can go in the freezer. You can equally (and should !) for example put a supply of stocks and soups in the freezer (soups for when you need a quick meal, stocks to add flavour and depth to other dishes).
It's not rocket science. It is simply, regrettably, a skill that has been lost in today's culture of immediate gratification and laziness.
* http://www.worldcitiescultureforum.com/data/number-of-restau...
Don't get me started on Brexit. There is literally NO redeeming feature to this shit show - again caused by rabid right wing Tory assholes - and once again in the news is the UK car industry saying we're going to lose 800,000 jobs due to Brexit unless the gov pulls its finger out.
So - sorry - but don't bang on about high taxes OR your obviously minted higher rate tax paying mate. It's 12 years of Tory austerity that is REALLY hurting people over here. More taxes on the rich would help mightily.
Oh, and a £162m public bill to bury someone who owned more diamond hats that she knew what to do with. Don't get me started on the royal shitshow either.
Sorry to rant but I'm bloody horrified at the state of our country and it ain't taxes that are the problem.
This has been so egrigeous, water companies are literal monopolies that have been braking the law and there are no consequences.
Combining income tax and national insurance contributions, the highest marginal tax rate on your salary is 47%, and that is only on everything over £125k (about $150k).
The vast majority of people are in the standard rate band where you pay 20% IT and 12% NI contributions, a total of 32% on what you earn over the tax free allowance £12,500 and under the £50k higher rate threshold, at which point it switches to 40% IT and just 2% NI.
If you earn £50k you will pay 23% total tax on your salary.
If you earn £125k you pay about 38% total tax on your salary.
The very highest marginal rate he should pay is 47%, if he is paying more then someone screwed up.
In Scotland they have slightly higher rates.
I wish we would simplify the tax and NI system into one set of bands, but that’ll never happen.
Five Guys is probably the most expensive fast food around here. It's not a surprise.
That being said, everyone was complaining about the costs so I agree that for people living there, the costs have gone up. My auntie kept her house very cold and taxi drivers complained a lot too about prices and the insurance system.
Even the cheapest fast food isn’t cheaper than cooking at home anymore, which is very new.
It doesn't help that how its sneakily promoted by TV shows where beat cops, blue collar workers eating burgers and shake all the time where IT engineer like me would balk at such high prices
Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute.
Given how the costs of digital technology are generally on a collapsing trend this suggests significant dysfunction. Reducing the computing experience of the entire population to mobile phones is a severe downgrade, a sort of digital precariat.
UK solved that problem by allowing DSL to be sold as "fiber".
> Mobile connectivity plays an important role but it should be complementary, an add-on to the backbone not a substitute.
I desire fiber everywhere as much as any other guy, but for some, 4-5G and a cellular phone is enough. They don't even know or perceive the difference between mobile broadband and landline.
DSL is not being sold as "fiber". People are being sold FTTC with a description of exactly what is is and what speed they can expect. Weetabix is being sold as fiber?
https://www.bt.com/broadband/fibre/
> Also known as fibre optic broadband, it’s our most widespread broadband. It uses powerful fibre cables to transmit signals to a cabinet on your street, before copper cables connect your home. That’s why you might have heard it called FTTC (fibre to the cabinet).
> The result is strong, reliable, superfast broadband, with average speeds up to 80Mb.
If FTTC is fibre then so is a 56k dial-up or public Wi-Fi. Both have fibre at some point in the path. I think it would be good to give the benefit of the doubt and brand it based on what is likely to be the bottleneck which in this case will be the DSL.
> I'd rather they _did_ upgrade everything to to FTTC, which they can afford, and let those that can fund FTTH pay for it, than leave it as copper wire all the way to the exchange because someone said "FTTH or nothing!"
Fair enough, but in that case call it by what it really is - DSL and not fibre. This allows consumers to make an informed decision and competition to work effectively (so only actual FTTP providers can call their offer fibre and people will instantly tell the difference between that and DSL without reading the fine print).
> DSL is not being sold as "fiber"
It is. They should not be calling DSL "fiber" unless you are also happy with 56k dial-up being sold as fiber, along with pretty much any other means of internet access since there's always going to be fibre somewhere along the path.
> The result is strong, reliable, superfast broadband, with average speeds up to 80Mb.
It is nowhere near as reliable nor fast as true fibre. Also 80Mbps is the theoretical maximum speed - the actual average is much lower, especially on upload speeds despite those becoming even more critical since both remote work and cloud-based services are becoming more relevant every day. There's also no way to tell what your actual speed is going to be without signing up for a contract at which point it will be too late to cancel.
I just re-read the sentence and I find the inclusion of "average" speed redundant and can't help but think it is only there to trick you into thinking the average is 80Mbps, as opposed to it simply being the theoretical maximum. Really scummy.
Latency was through the roof, if you try to plau CS Go you will loose to bots. Weired cal dropping issues on skype/teams/etc. But you do a speed test, and it shows solid 50+ mbps
That was Virgin media. Oh, and upload is shit.
The I moved to a newbuilt eith FTTH and I never looked back. It's a world of difference.
If i need to move I literally reject any home without fiber. Estate agents are always surpised - i. the age of working from home!
Why?
Slow: you can watch HD video ever since 3G came out, and 4G reduced latency a lot
Doesn't scale: that's also a thing 4G apparently addressed. I've never run into capacity issues, just range issues
Depends heavily on weather: never noticed it depending even slightly on weather. I've tested this in heavy rain because I indeed heard that 'straalverbindingen' have issues with this ("beam connection", "directional radio"? Not sure how to translate that word) and because microwave ovens seem to work at 2.4 GHz and water adsorbs this very well, but it appeared to make no difference whatsoever for bandwidth or latency tests on mobile data
Malicious third parties interfering: never heard of this happening to an ordinary citizen, and if you're scared of your government putting up an IMSI catcher, maybe use a VPN
> you can watch HD video
I wonder... do you primarily watch HD video over this wireless connection, or are you watching it via a more traditional broadband connection? In the US, I pay ~$10 a month for wireless data (across two phones), but these phones are on WiFi 90% of the time and we never watch video on wireless.
Even if you have an unusual plan that allows unlimited streaming at that price (without limiting the video bitrate), it seems like it would probably not scale to most people switching to a wireless plan without a price increase.
In the US, you can get “unlimited” data for as low as $25 per month, or as high as $90 per month, depending on what level priority you want (which you assume might make a difference at peak times).
And then there is a lot of bundling going on like Netflix and Disney or international. For example, I pay ATT $45 per line for 4 lines including all taxes, but they include phone calls and data for almost all of North and South America, minus the Caribbean Islands.
> In the US, you can get “unlimited” data for as low as $25 per month, or as high as $90 per month, depending on what level priority you want (which you assume might make a difference at peak times).
Yeah I don't think this happens in the UK/EU. The US system seems really weird and complex in comparison. Those prices I quoted above include unlimited calls and texts to anywhere in the UK.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/oaophe/data_pri...
I would be surprised if UK/EU did not also have it. Surely, it exists for certain levels of politicians/government/emergency services. Seems like a short throw to then extending that implementation to capture as much revenue as you can by implementing price segmentation strategies like in the US.
Also relevant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QoS_Class_Identifier (to know what QCI stands for)
> Under these rules, blocking, throttling and discrimination of internet traffic by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is not allowed in the EU. There are 3 exceptions: compliance with legal obligations; integrity of the network; congestion management in exceptional and temporary situations.
> All traffic has to be treated equally. For example, there can be no prioritisation of traffic in the Internet access service. Equal treatment still allows reasonable day-to-day traffic management according to objectively justified technical requirements, which must be independent of the origin or destination of the traffic and of any commercial considerations.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/open-inter...
For the time being the UK is still aligned with EU law on this but there's lobbying to make things more like the US:
https://cei.org/blog/how-the-uk-can-reform-can-improve-inter...
> congestion management in exceptional and temporary situations.
I presume the US mobile networks are primarily selling higher priority that applies (since it only needs to be applied) in exceptional and temporary situations.
No, I'm just saying it's been possible ever since 3G rolled out, and tech has only gotten better since then. The person I responded to said that mobile data can't be used as a replacement for a landline, but in practice, 99% of us use the airwaves for this already. We call it Wi-Fi. A lot of mobile towers also first beam their traffic to another tower before your packets meet a fiber.
Of course (as a general rule), the sooner your signal gets to a fiber, the better it is for your connection speed and reliability, but mobile data (with good signal strength) is clearly fine for most purposes. I am waiting for the day where people realise this and mobile data scales up and gets too cheap to meter in the same way as today's landline connections don't charge per gigabyte (I'm ignoring the existence of Belgium here; pardon me, belgians!). For now, having a landline dug to your home and work plus paying for mobile connectivity is cheaper than going mobile-only and getting a practically unlimited data bundle. A lot of rooms are also sandwiched in a way that outside signals aren't as reliable as a local WiFi. I'd be surprised if the former is still the case in 15 years, and the latter in 25 (thinking of something like a femtocell here).
I agree with this and all your other points. Surely it is cheaper to a put up a few mobile masts than to dig and install cables everywhere. In fact, this is the exact reason the government is using this strategy to get internet to rural locations rather than using cables.
The reason you’re seeing that happening is because most states ban electric companies from also providing internet.
I live in a rural area. My state doesn’t ban this. My internet comes from my electric company.
Those “radios” you put up are far more likely to fail than glass.
You’re also, in the context of the macro population, not using as much bandwidth as you would if people stopped relying on physical connections.
The weather dependency depends on your distance from the tower.
That’s not what I’m talking about? I’m talking about a coordinated jamming attack on cell towers in an area. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it’s something that the intelligence community is unaware of as a possibility.
If the majority of the population only had cellular comms, the chance of this attack goes up to devastating effects.
Digging trenches and maintaining lines is not a collapsing trend.
>Reducing the computing experience of the entire population to mobile phones is a severe downgrade
Probably not. Most internet traffic is TikTok, Netflix, adware and people yelling at one another. The useful bits are exceedingly narrow.
I had a Disney+ sub which I hardly used so I cancelled it along with several others I kept out of sheer inertia.
I ditched my landline phone and pay just under £15 a month. Works fine. Easily saturates the wifi card on my old Thinkpad at the same time as her indoors is watching Emmerdale over the same connection.
Happy customer (at the moment, mergers in the pipeline).
The math gets even more dramatic if you have multiple people living in the same place. Broadband price gets divided by however many people you have there, higher cost of an unlimited phone plan get multiplied by the same number.
Yet the fiber costs at least 50 Euro/month. So it only makes sense to get broadband if it is shared by 4 people.
But that's comparing fiber to 10Mbps cellular, and even with 2 people the fiber is dramatically faster and only €20 more expensive. If you can live with 10Mbps then there is presumably some broadband option at no worse than that speed for less than €30 and then you're already ahead with 2 people.
And most people aren't going to be happy with speeds that low, but then you'd be paying more for each cellular plan.
Based on personal experience 10 MBit/s is enough for video including full HD options. In fact it worked better than 100 MBit/s that was shared with several users and when somebody was downloading big gaming files.
Between line rental and dsl costs you'd struggle to get it that cheap through a landline, even ignoring the fact you still need mobile data.
The problem with Three's network is that their 4G can be really bad in some areas (eg: parts London). I can't use them inside my flat because it's almost unusable during peak hours. On the other hand, if their 5G is available, speeds can be really good. It's common for me to get 100-900Mbps when near one of their cell towers.
Have you actually tried to use this?
I can't remember the last time I used free WiFi and it actually worked as intended. It's always some combination of slow, broken, intermittent, and needs you to agree to terms and conditions too long to read.
If I'm paying for a home BT internet connection, I get free BT WiFi, which hugely off-sets my cellular data usage. As a result, I pay just £9.50 per month for my phone plan on a rolling contract with Virgin.
I have. Most establishments have decent WiFi which is easy enough to connect to because they want you to sit there all day and keep buying $5 lattes. Once in a while you get stuck somewhere the WiFi sucks, but that only matters if you're transferring enough data to care, and those two things rarely overlap. So a couple times a year you have to pay $3 to transfer a lot of data over cellular, which is way less than what you're saving by having a cheaper plan.
Although I will say that WiFi terms of service are a blight that should be prohibited by law. Nobody reads them the same as nobody reads the Facebook terms of service, and all 99% of them say is a hundred paragraphs of "don't break the law" which is already implied. All the terms of service do is interfere with what should be a protocol where an access point intended to be public announces itself as such and then any device in range which is still on cellular automatically switches to it with no configuration required.
Unless you're one of those people who don't need internet to survive, then this is nonsense. Wifi is far from everywhere and I'm not going to manually connect to wifi just to check if my date is running late. Is this the 90s?
Which it will have done automatically at home and at work and anywhere else that you actually frequent, so having to do that is rare.
Um, I live 2km from the Google headquarters and I have zero cell reception in my apartment. That's the state of technology in 2023 for you.
Yes, I need broadband and Wi-Fi to do anything at home.
It isn't necessary for everyone to be able to do this to get headlines, and logic, like this.
This also assumes that people don't need to transfer significant quantities of data on a regular basis for whatever reason.
This article is about people living UK, which a much smaller country that has much better mobile coverage.
The reality is mobile data can cover your minimal internet requirements in the UK.
EDIT: I am in the US, and I've just realized this is a UK-oriented article. Nevertheless, the point might still stand.
Yeah, that's kind of the issue. That, and latency.
Sure. The "for what it is" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though. See also: it's rather expensive for what it is.
I'd love symmetric fiber for $50, but 'for what it is' isn't doing much lifting at all.
A single HD video stream (1080p) can require 8 mbps. Trying to consume multiple of these, especially with a realtime protocol like WebRTC, is impossible on an ADSL connection.
My current setup is ADSL. I am trying to replicate it elsewhere.
As a subject-matter expert on "things I like", let me assure you that I am indeed very happy with it.
This is also true about nearly every other country that exists or has existed throughout history. US is notable for being, on average, much more competitive and less corrupt.
(But it's heading in the wrong direction, and that's only on average. Many countries have caught up, and a few others have surpassed it.
Corruption of markets happens because of no regulation or because of too much regulation. I personally think where to draw this line is an art and very difficult in an extremely polarised country like the US.
It's still pretty good on the corruption index, although getting worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index.
It's $50/mo (IIRC) if you have mobile phone service with them. For me, the worst part was that they want you to mount their 5G device on your window, and I'm in the city and have only a few windows. It's not an ugly device really, but I don't want to glue a big device to my living room window.
Why would you want DSL? In my area, Verizon's DSL is 3.1Mbps which really isn't good for much and costs $75/mo ($40 for the DSL and $35 for the required home phone service with it). You also have to pay $3.50/mo for the router or buy it for $100.
Verizon stopped expanding Fiber for the most part which is a shame. AT&T is doubling its fiber deployment in their markets.
Do you have a cable provider that's your broadband provider? Verizon is generally only offering 5G Home Internet in areas where there are other broadband options so it seems curious that you'd be interested in DSL over a cable connection offering 100x the speed.
I mean, this contributes to my point: it's only "cheap" if you buy into their plan and also upgrade your phone. For a variety of reasons, this isn't a good fit for me, and I'm beginning to suspect there might be a small-but-respectable market of others who resemble me.
1: so rough that I wrote a script that power cycled the modem every time it disconnected, since that was faster than waiting for it to recover. I haven't used that scheme for months now though since it was no longer necessary.
I can only infer what happened but they really didn't want me to be without a regular phone line so I determined that was their legal weakness. The only way companies that large move like that is if something threatens their status with the local government. A call from a resident saying the company wouldn't install a phone line is a big no-no in my understanding.
If you ask for phone service, Comcast will sell you a "landline" that just consists of a combo box cable modem and VoIP ATA. You can buy it with internet access or without, and they still give you the same equipment. The ATA part gives you an analog phone line to connect to your house phone wiring, but everything outside the house runs over existing coax infrastructure.
Maybe I'm not asking the right questions? It seems exceedingly difficult to get services over actual copper.
Throw in Brexit, cost of living and most normal people are fucked.
I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened. NHS is struggling. Pay rises are around 0% for most people I know. Food inflation is around 16%. Foodbanks are struggling to feed families.
Companies are making record profits, these are distributed as dividends to shareholders (the rich) who then go on to buy more shares or other assets (e.g. houses)
Where I live most houses are Air B&B for a lot of the year, this has destroyed most villages by the coast. House prices have doubled or more. So a lot of those families have moved into towns, forced to rent rather than buy. Tons of money that used to go into mortgages (investments) is now funnelled to rich people who own the housing stock.
There's a lot of crazy stuff going on. The UK has a shrinking middle class. The middle class used to drive the economy. The rich poor divide is breaking the country.
A better TAX system would fix most of the problems. But our government is not interested.
The house 2 doors down was last sold for £80k about 20 years ago. The house over the road that has just gone up for sale is asking for £300k. I'm lucky that my salary is over the median, but a 3-bed semi detached is like 10x the median salary (£26k). The same sort of property that my parents generation bought for 5x the median salary back in the 90s.
Rich folk are investing in housing and renting it out. It's crazy.
7% a year assuming they spent £0 (hint: they didnt)
The houses here used to be affordable for a middle income person or family. Now they aren't, that's the issue, not the sticker price.
edit tldr:
At the same time houses have gone up in price, wages have stagnated, rent has increased and inflation has increased. So we earn the same, pay more for rent, utilities and food, and have to save more (10% deposit is usually the minimum).
Some data:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
Growth in employees' average total pay (including bonuses) was 5.8% and growth in regular pay (excluding bonuses) was 6.7% in January to March 2023.
(That appears to be on an annual basis.)
UK: 747
Wales: 600
North East: 625
East Midlands: 700
South East: 841
London: 904
There are some multinationals who escape taxation, but even if that were perfectly addressed it wouldn't solve the UK's issues. Tax receipts are already close to 40% of GDP, these are record highs, frankly there are few countries where going over 40% is both possible or sustainable. (The US is at 25% for reference).
House prices are high because for 15 years mortgages were basically at 0% interest. This didn't actually make housing more affordable through cheap mortgages, if just inflated house prices. The endless schemes to help young people buy property just makes this worse, as the schemes are just built into the price.
Lastly, and this is usually hard to hear for people of your persuasion, you just can't add 500k-1m NET people to a country and expect housing to be just as available, and the health service to not be under massive strain. It's a physical impossibility. YES, I know many immigrants work in the NHS. That is not a valid rebuke to the problem. 1m net immigrants last year is 1m more people who need health services. The NHS has received massively more funding since covid and just can't cope. I'm not against migration, but the sheer numbers need to be talked about. You can't keep a sustainable country at these levels.
Finally, the UK has relied on financial and advisory services for decades as the core of its economy. This seems to be working less and less, tech is taking over. the 80-90s were about finance, since then it's been about tech. Slowly the country is falling behind.
This is a chronic issue in almost all of europe, but at least there there is high end manufacturing, and eastern europe has tonnes of catching up to do which grows the economy.
> * Net migration was unusually high in 2022, as several factors came together at the same time, including the war in Ukraine"[1]. *
Even so, the net migration numbers were nowhere close to 1 million. From the same source as above,
> * With this caveat in mind, estimates from the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022. *
You suggested that the UK adds 500k-1m migrants every year, but the actual number seems to be pretty much at the bottom of that range. The number of students coming to the UK has also increased significantly (it does contribute to increase in net migration stats).
The ONS still predicts (with a considerable amount of uncertainty I'll admit) that the net migration numbers will fall significantly in the next 5 or so years.
1. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
That’s still almost 1% addition to the population every year.
Even if that means 100k families, you still need an extra 100k houses or flats ideally per year. That is impossible, even with super efficient planning laws.
Table 244: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tab...
You absolutely can have this level of migration, but you need to build the infrastructure to support it (homes, schools, hospitals etc).
Relevant statistics on number of dwellings are here [1], and they seem to fit the population increase, but I don't have time to find similar statistics on school places, hospitals etc.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
Isn’t that the point the above poster was making? If you don’t build the support, then you cannot handle the influx of people.
Immigration without augmentation results in lamentation.
I don't mind what arguments people make when they provide some evidence to support them, but the commenter wrote "physical impossibility" when it took me 2 minutes to find statistics to the contrary for their first point.
Most of Eastern Europe is expected to overtake the UK in terms of living standards in the middle of this decade. Parts of it already has.
Brexit was just a fantasy of better days to come that was actually pretext for a right wing power grab. And what do right wingers ultimately want? A world of red in tooth and claw capitalism with themselves as the permanent winners, right up until they are hit with one of life's unexpected curve balls then they come crying to the state to save them.
Fuck the tories.
You know, it's not different in ANY of the empires, past or present. Look at Russia and it's just a couple decades of further decline, but the same thing.
If hackers and nerd idealists are worth anything, it's for trying to solve all this against a background of constant push-back. I sometimes wonder if the most important thing I could possibly do is try to depict this larger picture in such a way that people got it.
Thinking about this, it actually reminds me of season 2 of Clarkson's Farm. He might not be what you think of when you think of a prototypical hacker, but Clarkson actually is one. In the series he constantly found loopholes to evade the tyrannical council although they sadly ended up winning in the end. Although it makes you think that if someone with his influence and resources can't find a way through the bureaucratic minefield to open a restaurant in an disused barn in the middle of a field on his own property what hope do the rest of us have.
Might be like trying to guide chaos. Get beyond the Dunbar number and you're in trouble.
I very seriously doubt that US or even the UK will look like Russia in a couple decades. Russia was historically a backwards agricultural country, that went through breakneck centrally-planned industrialization during the Soviet era, which ultimately collapsed under its own mismanagement, corruption and stupidity. Now they're just playing in the rubbles, getting most of their money from selling vast Siberian mineral riches. Whereas US/UK for the past 200 years have been at the forefront of enlightenment, industrialization, innovation, scientific discoveries, creation of complex and extremely well performing businesses etc. All that is constitutes an enormous capital that can't be just pissed away in a couple decades.
As someone planning to leave and never come back, can you give me a brief overview of some of the shit I might not know about that I'm going to have to deal with?
I should have moved my UK phone number to a pre-pay plan on a premium network (O2, Vodafone etc), I left it on a budget one which cancelled it with very little notice.
I can't elaborate too much but high skilled and family reunification pathways are still open, but the tests and documentation are more onerous than before brexit.
I used to live in the countryside, the 90s had a background of rapid improvements in schools and hospitals. 2000s full of out of town megashops killing the high street. 2010s public service cuts. 2020 stuff just not working.
The scale of the housing price problem is difficult to behold.
https://www.plumplot.co.uk/Norfolk-house-prices.html has the house prices
https://www.adzuna.co.uk/jobs/salaries/norfolk is the average wage. The average house price is 10x the average wage. but thats not evenly distributed. if you live up in the northern part, the average house price is 100x times wage.
The UK was already extraordinarily unequal in the 2000s, however inflation, benefit "adjustment" and general failure in policy.
I really, really, _really_ doubt that's the case. That'd need salaries to be <£10k and house prices of >£1 million.
Why would not working result in higher pay? Especially in a field where the product is increasingly seen as a luxury that costs as much as a downpayment for a house and ultimately not a essential requirement for employment.
As a lot of people can access further education, they take the opportunity even if it isn't necessary for employment. Most students work whilst studying, even with a student loan, because the loan almost certainly doesn't cover their rent, food, transport and textbooks for example. Most young people you see working in hospitality are probably in university studying.
What's the alternative to make ends meet for students? OnlyFans?
In certain fields (e.g. medicine, academics) there are huge centers that represent the majority of jobs for a region. Specialized workers here find it harder to job hop, as there are fewer opportunities.
Striking provides another means to better pay. Say you value my work at $40/hr, but are currently paying my at $20/hr. In domains where employees don't have much recourse to just go find another employer, strikes provide a good mechanism to call the bluff of an employer. If they really only value your work at $20/hr, they'll not be willing to pay any more. If they do value it more highly, striking makes it so they have to choose between making concessions or losing work they value.
Hard to swallow for union types but it’s how I ended up being paid significantly more and having no issues buying a house.
In an environment where your employer knows you don't have any options, there is no incentive for them to pay you any higher regardless of how much effort/value you provide.
If you have no recourse when they value your work at $40/hr, what recourse would you have when they value your work at $60/hr but still pay you $20/hr?
Being a more valuable employee works great in combination with exercising leverage over your employer (quit-threat, striking, competitive labor market), since those threaten to take that value away from your employer if they don't play ball.
I very much wonder how they expect "normal" people to survive. It looks like you need to fall quite far into the highest tax brackets just to be able to rent something decent in London, and buying is absolutely out of reach.
Ironically enough, part of what makes those areas desirable is various businesses (such as food service, etc) that rely on low/unskilled labor to function, against which a war of attrition is being waged on. That war is being won and as a result a lot of those businesses have now themselves failed - I've now seen multiple repossession notices on closed restaurants/shopfronts and more and more vacant commercial property, and the high street never really recovered since the pandemic.
As far as I'm concerned I am considering leaving this country once my current lease expires unless business picks up significantly to offset the increased costs (doesn't look likely from what I see). There is no reason to pay the money I am paying here if I can get better food, climate and general quality of life for the same (or even less!) money elsewhere in Europe.
We very much shot ourselves in the foot in that regard.
Sure. And you should probably do that. But then a lot of other people are of the opinion that they can ignore food and weather and come to Britain. Net migration numbers in recent decades have not gone in favour of your line of thinking?
UK high street is being attacked from multiple sides, from apparent lack of labour satisfied/pressured into low wages, to having their access being cut by the latest LTN measures around the country. Rental market is getting squeezed hard by the latest measures that will only make the situation worse, esp for London (I'm lucky I've escaped that place when I could). Current/incoming gov't is drunk on high taxation and more and more regulation of every facet of your life and business. But I'm still unsure my business/work would fare better in any other european country (forget Brexit, it doesn't have much to do with any of this). The malaise is everywhere.
Some of them are pretty surprised at the state of things when they get here. There was a report in the BBC that a lot of Ukrainian refugees find the education system and housing conditions an absolute joke compared to what they had back home.
Housing sucks though.
As a labor camp, Britain is very nice and efficient. Depending on the job, their country of origin, and whether they are able/willing to evade taxes, it may work out that a couple years of suffering in shitty conditions will yield a decent nest egg to enjoy back home. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a nice place to live and build a future in. I wonder if there are stats on the average length of stay of those immigrants?
I have no idea how people on average salaries - even average London salaries - can afford to stay much longer.
For whatever reason, people deem it worth it to pay such high rents to remain living in London. London's population is still growing, albeit slower than before the pandemic.
Britain should unironically learn to code.
We’re here quietly - all working for American / multi-national companies. Just little of the Silicon Valley startup culture here in the UK.
We also have good Computer Science courses at universities. Research at these universities is also decent.
And in Silicon Valley you don't have to go too far before you hear a British accent.
How much of this is VC-funded "growth & engagement" crap that has no sustainable business model and will go out of business very soon, if it hasn't already?
London alone gets more tech investment than Canada, Australia, and New Zealand combined.
In fact, Britain is kinda the poster-boy for the thesis that "learn to code" is not a universal remedy for economic malaise. A large percentage of the population simply can not, and will not, work with computers at a level worth paying for.
I know that plenty of people are doing alright and, in my opinion, this group is vastly over-represented on HN. The food bank usage stats suggest that the living conditions of people across this country have been getting worse for a while now, and while the pandemic and inflation have exacerbated this problem, they did not create it.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/382695/uk-foodbank-users...
2. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/food-bank-demand-and-th...
3. https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end...
"This country is much worse than it used to be, I'm going to emigrate soon"
Except in the UK, they're going to emigrate to Canada.
The UK does have some uniquely local problems to deal with, but they're overlayed with a global downturn as well. It's easy to attribute the whole thing to local problems, when in fact a big chunk of it is global. The issues seem to mostly be the same - the massive house price inflation that's sucking the joy out of life for everyone under 40.
I do agree that many of the problems are the same, but the UK is facing both the global issues and a case of repeated political footguns.
Everyone knows the issues of their home country pretty well - but it's harder to get a real "feel" for issues of other countries without living there.
The best indicator you can find is net migration flows (those people who move from the UK to Canada/USA, and have the opportunity to return, do they?).
As an example:
https://www.voxi.co.uk/for-now - £10/month unlimited calls, texts, data for 6months - then you go onto a £10/month plan but without the unlimited data.
We also have social tariffs for broadband too:
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/compare-broadband-deals/br...
Seems like a bigger issue is people not knowing about these tariffs.
I'd like to add, I firmly believe everyone should have government provided "basic" internet that's at least 38Mbps or something similar. I really do hate what the government has done to the UK over the last decade so I'm not on their side or anything.
Most people living in cities and even most suburban areas have great coverage, so why bother paying for a landline?
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/wales/about-us/about-us1/m...
Capitalism has succeeded then.
The gig workers I know do it because they like the money, it's the best money available to them. So I don't know about the "poorly-paid" part, there's so much demand for gig work people complain they can't find enough of it.
Almost as if COVID caused a huge redistribution of money from the poor to the wealthy.
Tougher time absolutely, but almost all the visible small businesses in my area survived lockdown.
Spend $800B so the poors can eat? Hand-wringing and pearl clutching up and down the air waves. Just think of the inflation!
Spend $3000B to pump real estate values? Complete silence, relatively speaking.
This experience made it very clear who was in charge and who wasn't. These are US numbers, but I tend to suspect the same story repeated itself all around the world.
I had been waiting to time the market, I ended up only buying 30% down rather than the 50-80% down I was hoping.
What happened in 2020 changed my understanding of markets. Politics>Economics for politicians.
The poor still spent most of their money, the rich did not buy more yachts and expensive meals and attending "charity" galas etc. so what would usually be a circular flow became a direct increase in the wealth of the rich and direct decrease in the wealth of the poor. The inflation we see now is going to remain for a while but in the end prices over the next 3-5 years will nearly double and wages will remain the same.
The rich just increased their wealth and the working person got dramatically poorer. Poor people in the UK can't even afford food and Internet but at least the rich have never had it so good. Tax the rich.
Mind boggling system failure when you can have smartphones for 100bucks but not enough income to pay bills and food regularly.
I had agreed to a price of £x per month. After 2 weeks, I hadn't even had my first bill in, I got a letter saying the price was going up because of inflation...
2 weeks!
You sure? In NL it's just inflation, anything else means you have the option to cancel. Seems odd that they could specify an extra percentage in their terms of service just for the heck of it, not because of increased costs or so.
Though, in practice, you're with a carrier for a reason (either best quality or lowest price) and the competition also raised prices per inflation, or at least close enough that it doesn't tip the scale, so there's never a point cancelling a contract prematurely. Maximum contract duration is 2 years anyway iirc.
I switched to 4G and got 40Mbps symmetric using a Mikrotik SXT-LTE on a pole at about eaves height aiming at a mast about 5km away. It was cheaper than ADSL, too!
I think a lot of people on here are in the US where you get absolutely fucking *rinsed* for mobile data. Here in the UK it's cheap as tap water.
I'm aware this is just an anecdote and n = 1 implies infinite variance and what not, but it's amazing seeing countless people have such a good cellular network they can just ditch broadband subscriptions.
As others commenters have noted, the rich/poor divide is getting wider. On one end you have people canceling broadband, and the other massive privet fibre startups servicing affluent areas.
The country is broken.
The physical network should be government-managed and any providers can pay for layer-2 access between any 2 points. This will prevent wasteful, redundant infrastructure.
They have had to make some of the underground junction boxes bigger to fit all the kit in.
My only thought is that they hoped to get their kit in quicker than BT and get brought out. Clearly the aim of these regional companies is to eventually be acquired by larger national ISPs.
But they have to provide nationwide coverage at uniform pricing. So private companies can provide parallel service in dense urban areas for less.
By 2003, the FCC basically gave up. They ignored Congress & said, yeah, fine, broadband is exempt, because it's kind of expensive. Their Trienniel review dismantled UNE/LLU. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-03-36A1.pdf
So now America has nearly no competitive access to broadband.
I don't give a crap about download. I work publically and support my work using YouTube. Every week I'm uploading 20 gigs or so of video, MINIMUM, and if it dropped I'd have to start over. I'm uploading 4k ProRes because my competition is at that quality level or better, and I won't stand out if I look like crud, and what I upload is going to be recompressed no matter what.
Don't tell me about download. I'll just sit reading Hacker News if download's a problem (evidently!). I depend on upload, not download, and I rarely even see it referred to much less touted.
I abandoned a brief dabbling with Starlink before even getting an actual dish, because it didn't look like I was going to be able to trust upload bandwidth to beat what I've got with my symmetrical, reliable 12M. It matters.
Stayed at an AirBnB once that had fiber. I had >100m upload. It would make stuff possible for me that I just can't do currently. Granted, taking advantage of that requires thousands in investment, but what real business doesn't?
Did you know you should get 5000/5000 if you have a lot of smart home devices? hahaha
Last I checked Comcast Xfinity Mobile was one of the kindest soft caps, offering 1.5/.75Mbps down/up.
I think maybe there has been some shift recently around these incredible limits (5.3 minutes/month of full speed use is 0.0001% utilization). Xfinity went up to 50Gbps. I think some plans now "deprioritize" rather than outright limit, which is interesting, but there's such utterly non-existsnt data, such inability to shop & see what to expect.
Country Mean Mbps
France 120.01
Spain 115.61
Netherlands 113.98
Malta 107.70
Monaco 100.26
Belgium 91.74
Portugal 91.61
Norway 88.80
Sweden 86.76
Germany 72.95
United Kingdom 72.06
Ireland 70.42
Switzerland 63.20
Finland 56.28
Denmark 52.57
Italy 46.77
Austria 45.56
On the other hand, being an L1 fibre provider requires a point of presence in the every location where your customers' fibres are terminated because packets are not fungible. Of course, you could expose L2 access by mandating that an independent party such as OpenReach own that fibre terminating equipment and then have them interface with ISPs in an IXP, which is what I assume you're suggesting. That works. Technically. It worked for LLU to privatise BT's existing network, and resulted in a huge reduction in prices to access the existing network.
On the other hand, it was pretty useless for innovation. Nobody had any incentive to build any new infrastructure, so it just languished. My OR connection is still 30Mb/s, rather than the multiple private 1Gb/s+ providers in my area. Plus OpenReach takes weeks to set up a new service and are useless at fixing faults. Even now, OR fibre, in the few places you can get it, is limited to 115Mb/s upload, and it's expensive, whereas the best private fibre company near me is 3Gb/s symmetrical for £50/month. If as an independent ISP renting L2 access from OR, if I want to provide better bandwidth than OR is willing to sell, there's nothing I can do.
Fibre is tiny and easy to install, relatively speaking. There's not much additional cost to having multiple redundant fibre providers covering a street. I do wonder if there's something we can do to find a middle ground, like open access under-road trunking, or having a right to buy the fibre installation from an ISP and port it to another provider.
I currently have FTTC. I'm either going to switch to fibre with the regional ISP or cancel my landline and change my FTTC contract to just rent the copper pair. Will use my mobile phone for voice calls.
> These were available in 99% of the UK and started from £10 per month, it added.
This language sounds a bit more like advertisement than what I'd expect from a national regulator.
Also, almost of the social tariff plans (plans for people receiving significant poverty-related benefits in the UK) are at £10 per month - https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice....
Also, broadband in the UK is not very expensive. 130 Mbps from Virgin Media is £26 a month with no set-up or rental fees. The £10 difference between the avg social tariff and what you can get on the high street is inconsequential in the context of the cost of living crisis. Heating is several hundred pounds each month for a typical apartment, food is another several hundred for a couple of people, unless they eat very low quality food, and renting a room is another several hundred in most cities, can go up to a £1.5k in London. If you have a family, you probably won't feel right living in a room, so your housing expenses will be much higher.
I mean... there is value in jumping through some hoops to save £10 a month. But it's not really anything to write home about. I can understand why people would rather save £25 and cancel if they struggle to make ends meet and don't use broadband besides what they can get on their phone + hotspot. Or share a WiFi password between rooms/flats.
You are bang on about property costs. You notice how instant action has been taken by regulators to blame telecoms companies. Where is the action on planning regulations? Trying to reduce bills through this route really makes no sense.
Also, when I said “significant”, I meant “not insubstantial”. I don’t mean benefits for those severely affected by poverty. And “poverty-related” to my mind includes “poverty-reducing”.
Probably it could have been phrased better seeing that it wasn’t clear what I wanted to say.
And as much as I love that the NHS is a thing, it's not a reasonable comparison. No one I know who has a choice uses NHS services apart from emergency medicine or surgery. Everyone I know who can afford it has private health insurance anyway.
In general, everyone I know in this country either has serious family money or is downright poor by American standards. There really isn't much in between.
TO BE FAIR: it's generally much more pleasant to be poor in the UK than it is in the US. NHS is miles better than nothing, which is what many Americans have to deal with.
> The median London wage is something like 30k GBP / 40k US. In New York (where I lived before London) that number is ~70k, and the costs of living are pretty comparable.
Couldn't be bothered to verify the numbers, but even if they're true: you've compared London to New York. The vast majority of Brits and Americans don't live in these two cities. I'd argue that these two cities are not representative of the rest of the two countries.
> Everyone I know who can afford it has private health insurance anyway.
Have you considered that your sample is biased? It's akin to looking at the top 1% of earners in the UK and concluding that nobody uses the NHS.
> It's generally much more pleasant to be poor in the UK than it is in the US.
For some definition of "poor" this means that it's much more pleasant for the _majority_ of people to live in the UK than in the US. This seems to contradict your prior claims.
UK: Median household disposable income in the UK was £32,300 in the financial year ending (FYE) 2022, a decrease of 0.6% from FYE 2021, based on estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Household Finances Survey. [2]
I think the GP’s claims are true (the UK is poorer and many people don’t realise it). It used to be a bit less obvious when GBP was strong so you needed to look at things like PPP (or like, how good the tumble driers are) to see the difference.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
In addition, I might come up on a 'quit broadband' stat, as I sit here with my 5G hub. I am just using a different medium.
Good cellular service costs in the neighbourhood of $40/month and the amount of data you can use is going up gradually; currently I see 20-25GB advertised. That's plenty for "needed" internet access - not the leave video running part - and if you need your laptop online you can just tether it to your phone.
So it's perfectly rational, if short on cash, to get rid of the home broadband. Can't get rid of the cell phone anyway since you've likely gotten rid of your landline phone already.
if you live in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or Quebec. It's about double that in the rest of the Country.
BT are no longer providing PSTN service. The existing copper infra will still be used for DSL services. Gradually these will get phased out and replaced by FTTP, but there's no real rush to do that.
Many less well off folk have annual or multiyear deals (which include handsets) so the cancellations would come at end of term for most.
I suspect the issue at hand is that a fast growing number of people simply can't afford non-essentials, and in the process of deciding what's absolutely necessary and optional, access to the Internet may not be a necessity when rent, food and energy (including fuel) consume every penny you earn (or, more than you earn, there's a increasing trend of short term loans being taken out to pay bills, which will come home to roost).
There is a saying that if you don't have money you need connections, so as it gets tougher, communication becomes critical.
In particular missing a message from your bank alerting you of a operation that could get rejected, getting mail from social service of paperwork you need to get in order, alerts for tax deadlines etc. are essential.
On the other end of the spectrum, keeping in touch with your buddy's friend who's a garagist and can fix you in a pinch, keeping an eye on your elderly in case they fall short of something, answering the call when your neighbour needs you to see their kids for an hour or two as they have an emergency is also critical.
I use one when I'm working in/visiting England, as it's usually just a month at a time.
because they use their mobile devices for absolutely everything
are landlines next!?
How do peolpe function with just phone?? omg
> Citizens Advice said its survey of 6,000 people suggested
big difference between the title and a survey of 6000 charity customers.
Even if the 6000 people surveyed are selected from those who seek help from Citizens Advice, there are ways to make reasonable inferences from that.
> Walnut Unlimited surveyed 6,000 UK adults online including a total of 1,215 people in receipt of universal credit between January 9 and February 8.
https://perspectivemag.co.uk/one-million-cut-broadband-acces...
Citizens Advice data from an online survey of 6,000 UK adults plus a boost of 243 respondents in receipt of Universal Credit to make a total of 1,215 respondents in receipt of Universal Credit. Fieldwork was conducted by Walnut Unlimited on behalf of Citizens Advice. Fieldwork was undertaken between 9 January - 8 February 2023. The figures have been weighted and are nationally representative. The figures for the Universal Credit boost are weighted to be representative of the demographics of those receiving Universal Credit.
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/about-us1/media/p...
So the actual cancellation figure would be around 3%. Sounds reasonable.