Shit life syndrome
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself to a fish-and-chip shop, feeling like a silly city boy in a greasy gritty concrete town. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember walking, late evening, lonely, on a bridge over the railtrack. The entire place felt deserted, metallic and concrete.
I went back to my room and ate the oily chips on my bed. After the first day with an old crusty – but perfectly lovely driving instructor – and a rather large heavy-haulage driver who was renewing a license, we went out for some drinks. Beers. Lots of beer. And they took me to a gay club – of which there are oddly many in Blackpool – because they thought it'd be a laugh. It was actually a massive spectacle for me. It was the first time I saw older men kissing, right there, by the entrance on a old tawdry sofa. I was still on a journey of coming out, so it felt oddly enlightening or validating or something. It was an old-england gay club – the type you hear about in the era of stonewall.
The entire town was like a time capsule to a poorer apocalyptic britain. Betting shops, cheap nail salons, boarded up derelict buildings everywhere! Even the beach was deserted. It reflected the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK. It felt like a shadow of its former self, but somehow, there was a old english magic to it that I can still feel. My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me, but I remember it fondly.
So yeh I think I understand this SLS thing. In places like Blackpool – forgotten remnants - you can feel the depression in the paving stones – the grey withering vitality – swallowing you whole.
I suggested to my friend that we go there for his stag do; and even for the debauchery of a stag do it felt a bit too grim! To the point that I felt guilty for suggesting it.
Coastal towns really are monuments to another time. The houses are beautiful, too - a two bedroom flat in one of the old guesthouses on the sea front with bay windows is a steal in most towns, if you can cope with the town itself.
Scarborough is another one. It was clearly so much more full of life than it is now, but its status as an elder resort is part of its charm. The poverty, so much not.
1. Setting the Scene
2. The Tenets of Clean Code
3. The Enemies of Clean Code
4. SOLID and Other Principles
5. Naming Things is Hard
6. Blackpool's Fading Vitality and the Withering Shadow of Coastal Britain
7. Primitive and Built-In Types[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/u2vu5x/i_thi...
But yes, otherwise all rather run down. The extreme wealth discrepancy was an eye opener.
That they forgot to close down
> the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK
I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous.
Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London?
It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make good places to buy property. Surely, on the whole, they have more natural beauty than inland areas.
Destinations on the South Coast were not affected in the same way though and have remained a popular choice with more affluent clientele.
Bournemouth (middle of the South Coast) took a slightly different path and some of the accommodation was repurposed to house students from Europe studying English. IIRC the contiguous strip comprising Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch is one of the largest non-industrial conurbations in Europe. I moved to Bournemouth in 1988 for work reasons and it always seemed to me like a large studenty-town that happened to be near the Sea rather than a 'seaside town' (i.e. one that is structured around the beach and bucket-and-spade shops). It's also viewed as Brighton's straight cousin. Christchurch, on the other hand, is known locally as 'the last resort' because of the large proportion of retirees in the population.
I also can't resist the old joke that Cleethorpes isn't twinned with any other town but is in a suicide pact with Grimsby.
I must be getting old since Barton on Sea is becoming more attractive as residential destination by the day...
Brighton reinvented itself as a party town and creative hub thanks to Norman Cook and its large student and gay scenes and its fast links to London.
Worthing and Eastbourne became popular spots to raise a family for London telecommuters (two days a week in a London office is viable from there, and property is a fraction of the price).
Margate and Folkestone became artistic hubs, after the last of ex industrial inner London got redeveloped.
Whitstable became a foodie mecca and well-heeled daytripper spot, Borough-Market-on-sea or so.
The Suffolk and North Norfolk coastal towns do a nice line in second homes for the Range Rover and XC90 set.
Many, if not most of these places were pretty desolate in the 90s. Others are still to turn the corner. Hastings is on the way up but still a lot of junkies and the generally down-on-their-luck in temporary B&B accommodation. Herne Bay is still rough as. Lots of South Essex coastal towns are grim and deprived, maybe not as bad as Blackpool but definitely struggling.
Rediscovered, maybe. It has long been a party town, from the Pavilion - a faux-Indian palace put up by a Prince Regent in a previous century for seaside parties - Quadrophenia-era nightclubs to being the gay capital of England all before Fat Boy Slim was born.
It’s also the south coast town closest to London, with a direct railway line. Huge geographical-economic advantage over Blackpool.
It was a wonderful place to be a student in the ‘90s.
Why play on the cold, stone covered beaches on the few days of sun a year when you can fly for a couple hundred UKP to Spain and have reliable sunshine, warm weather, and sand.
Different histories, reliance on different industries, quality of transport links make a huge difference.
Not even all coastal "tourist" towns are doing badly - I live near Burntisland in Fife which actually seems to be thriving, probably because of the excellent location for commuting by train into Edinburgh, combined with nice beaches, great views (of Edinburgh!)...
St Andrews? Elie? Lovely. Methil? Granton? Pass.
Are there examples of “it’s alright” seaside towns above some threshold size?
Hastings kind of the other end of things. A fair few problems but not hopeless/desperate.
Main difference between them being Eastbourne's proximity to other prosperous places and slightly better road/rail connection to London.
Anyone living there with any skills or potential have to leave to get good jobs elsewhere. Typical brain drain and related decline.
A bunch of the coastal towns in the UK offer neither. They have a legacy of things like small fishing operations, which was significantly more valuable in the past when food was more scarce and fisheries were healthier.
Fishing ports which now have few fishers left. Long term decline due to overfishing along with Brexit making it hard for them to sell their catch to markets in EU. Grimsby.
The Victorian seaside mass resorts that lost out to cheap foreign holidays. Blackpool.
Places like Cornwall which are full of second homes and outwardly look very nice but mask deep poverty as there is little affordable housing and few good jobs.
Also the definition of coastal is different in the UK, an island with nowhere more than 70 miles from the sea. Washington DC is 85 miles from the Atlantic but still populated by the ‘coastal elite’.
Washington is 31 road miles from Annapolis, which is on the coast of Chesapeake Bay; straight line distance to the coast is shorter.
D.C. is also directly on the shore of the Potomac River where it becomes a tidal estuary.
There is a very, very deep rabbit hole here. Because it's late and I have to be up early in the morning, I'll merely point out the entrance [0] and quietly back away...
I know we're not supposed to call Brexit voters thick, but it's difficult sometimes...
As to failure modes, the decline in small and midsize ports generally in favour of huge container ports, Felixstowe etc., also the offshoring of processing either to factory ships (conveniently located beyond the reach of employment law) or distant countries. Quite a few South and East coast places used to have passenger ferry services to Europe and no longer do - Ramsgate, Hull, Great Yarmouth, Folkestone spring to mind but I'm sure there were more.
My parents used to take me for our "exotic foreign holiday" in Blackpool each year (I was from Scotland).
I actually have many happy memories from the time. There was the Doctor Who Exhibition we went to once - nothing even remotely like that anywhere near my home town. Then there was the Blackpool Tower. My parents used to complain about how expensive it was to get in, and I think we only went there once, but on that one trip me and my dad went to see a laser light show set to music (so futuristic!) and also went to a stall that used a video camera hooked up to one of those new fangled computer things that could print out an ASCII art picture of your face (such mind bogglingly advanced technology!) Also the arcades. Again they cost money so it was rare we'd go in, but there was once I was given money to try a grabbing claw machine, and won a pack of sweets. My parents thought I was good at them, and so gave me money to try and win something for my sister, which was a huge boost to my confidence (finally something I was better than my sister at!) Unfortunately I didn't manage to win anything for my sister. It was only decades later that I found out that those machines aren't skill based - there's a dial inside where the operator can control the "payout rate", i.e. the percentage of times the claw goes limp vs stays rigid. (Another childhood illusion shattered.)
Anyway, maybe that was before it got too grim, or maybe I didn't notice because I was so young, or maybe I just thought that was what England was like:-)
One awful thing I remember though was just how filthy the beaches were. The coast was lined with sewerage outlets, so where-ever you swam there would be all sorts of things floating by. Once I picked up what I thought was a funny shaped balloon and started filling it with water and playing with it. I went to show my mum how I could make the balloon bigger by squeezing it, but she just looked horrified and bashed it out of my hand. I had no idea why, but didn't ask, and just kept quiet. I did however wonder what it could have been that was so bad, but the best my innocent young mind could think of was that perhaps it was some form of artificial breast for breast feeding, given it was skin coloured and had a teat at the end. It wasn't until many years later that I realised what it almost certainly was.
Do you work in the ad industry now by any chance?
P.S. It's joke. I adamantly refuse to work on anything adtech related. When I stated "for a more exciting game" I clearly didn't indicate who it would be exciting for.
Nicotine is odourless.
Poverty is extremely harsh on people. And when I was much younger (<15), like many adults now think, I used to think that poverty is the lack of power of buying expensive things. But as I have grown up, I realized that poverty is extremely harsh.
For example, relevant to the submission, is healthcare. Healthcare in India is theoretically free in government hospitals. But in most places the state of these hospitals is horrific, and getting treatment is very hard due to corruption.
But the bigger issue is opportunity cost. People who live based on daily earnings, cannot afford to go to hospitals abandoning their work as they cannot ensure next day's food. So, unless it happens to be someone young, people don't seek treatment at all. And visiting a proper doctor and buying meds take away ~10 days' income. Really unaffordable for poor people.
So, even people in their forties and fifties decide to wait it out, and easily curable ailments get chronic and beyond cure. Women fare worse than men.
Real victims are old people, and nobody bothers to spend money and weeks of their time to get them to treatment. They wither, and die without treatment. I have seen at least a dozen people die like this.
I think, the cause of SLS is opportunity cost. People often die, and more often suffer for decades from easily curable diseases because they cannot really afford either the time or money to get treatment.
I also know at least a dozen people who have something chronic, but get no treatment at all because they cannot afford it.
Would you mind expanding your story of life in your area on that dimension? How does this harshness play out for the people as people, less about their ability to get physical health care, but how does the harshness degrade their lives as humans?
If people have never had decent health care, and their classmates from school haven’t either, then how are they meant to move into something as rarefied as self-assessed mental health? That is something that people with too much time and not enough existential threat get up to.
Buddhism teaches you that while we can be comfortable or uncomfortable, true suffering comes from gripping tightly onto what happened or might happen, and a lack of acceptance for both what’s happening now and it’s temporary nature. You can endure the pains of cancer and imprisonment, the crush of poverty, or the pleasure of lavishness of opulent wealth, but whether you are suffering or not is entirely based on your view of things and how you frame life. The wealthy suffer unbearably just as the most deprived prisoners in the worst jails, and people in abject desolation can be content just as much as a middle class person. Note, a lot of folks confuse this with “giving up,” or being stoic, or any number of confusions as to how a person that should be miserable by your measure could not be.
I know - I’ve suffered more than most, and have a lot more than most, but I’ve not always had what I have and have been deep in some dark dark places without hope. Buddhism taught me to be non attached and content in all those places, and I don’t suffer any more. I used to be anxious, depressed, all sorts of other forms of misery. But once I realized what Buddhism taught and internalized it, even as I draw my last breath whether it’s in my bed peacefully or wracked with cancer, I know I won’t be suffering.
I’m not saying everyone in Myanmar is blissed out and enlightened. Many do suffer, and it’s not a pleasant place for most people, and being a Buddhist doesn’t mean practicing Buddhism. But many people do practice, and they live full and content lives despite the unpleasantness of their situation. This is at odds with what we expect in the west, because our underlying belief system teaches us poverty is misery, wealth is happiness. Truth is, we choose whether we suffer or not, and the temporary reality of poverty or wealth only offers pleasure or unpleasantness. Suffering is certainly correlated, but Buddhist teaches that it is actually independent and the correlation comes from how you frame your experiences and an over reliance on the “self.”
What I saw there was a lot of broken people who have learned to cope by not caring; I call that resignation. Talk to them a little and you'll see they don't appreciate their situation.
Further, Buddhism originated in temperate zones where asceticism works and originated separately because you can easily survive outdoors year round and eat very little (that is not naturally provided) because of low thermal demands on your body. You don’t see very many ascetics very far from the equator.
You mistakenly equate lack with poverty, which is the point I was trying to make more subtly in my earlier comment.
However, I’m not specifically picking on siddhartha, but on Buddhism. Buddhism has seen many people through immensely difficult situations in life, which would cause suffering if you didn’t have a way of framing the conscious experience and it’s impact on emotional and physical well being.
I used the example of Myanmar and Cambodia on purpose - they are Buddhist countries, and while not everyone who is Buddhist practices Buddhist teachings, many do. And it’s impossible to say the Burmese and Cambodians aren’t impoverished and oppressed. Yet many find through Buddhism an ability to not suffer, and lead content and full lives despite. They labor under extreme difficulty, and if you think laboring in the tropics is easy … it’s not. Yet - still, I don’t see the SLS I see in American cities and rural settings, or in UK coastal towns, etc. They’re not magical and mystical beings in burma or Cambodia, they just have access to a way of thinking that enables them to not suffer emotionally from an unpleasant life. They would escape if they could, because Buddhism doesn’t teach acceptance of unpleasantness, but it does teach how to not suffer when things are unpleasant.
It sounds like you are making a different point: that you don’t see anything in the USA like the social/religious systems that have enabled some in SE Asia to transcend difficult conditions.
I would say that Christianity serves much of the same purpose in middle America, and that you don’t see as much “SLS” around practicing Christians as you do in the general population. It doesn’t get reported on much in the popular media though. What would the headline read?
Religious observance in the UK has fallen through the floor since the early 20th century, and is more avidly practiced by our immigrant communities (Muslim, Catholic, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, African Christians) than most "native" Brits.
And yet very few are motivated by Hitchens/Dawkins-style, burn-it-all-down atheism, more of a, "meh, haven't really bothered to think about it" thing. Brits have given up on their own culture out of some kind of depressive laziness, and yet it's often those very same Brits who get angry at immigrants for celebrating their own traditions.
"I hate Muslims because they shut the pub and turned it into a mosque", usually said by an overweight, balding man who stopped going to said pub five years ago because drinking supermarket beer at home was cheaper.
To come back to your original point. People had objectively far shittier lives a century ago, less SLS but perhaps they were just too busy dying of silicosis, industrial accidents or TB.
Interestingly I was reading a teaching on the difference between transcendence and Buddhism. Transcendence was in fact what was being sought after in south Asian cultures at the time of Buddha. But Buddha didn’t teach transcendence and he made a clear distinction. It’s not about escape from your situation by leaving it in some way, it’s about living your situation without attachment to the past or future, about if you want things to be better, then do what you believe makes things better and others like you will be a part of your change you make. There’s several layers in Buddhism, with basic ones being relief from suffering, but deeper ones involve loving kindness and compassion, drawing on the idea that we are communal organisms that thrive on constructive generosity and kindness.
A lot is made of “enlightenment” and reincarnation, and at least in Theravada Buddhism, are mostly metaphorical.
Which brings me to your first point - Buddhism in Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand is Theravada Buddhism which is essentially unchanged from the original compilation in pali. In other parts of Asia you see a lot of innovation and mysticism (and to be fair in Southeast Asia the lay person Buddhism is a mixture of traditional animism and spirit worship mixed in with Buddhism).
Finally you make a male / female distinction. I don’t think this is fair. Women are allowed as much freedom and respect in Buddhism as any organized “religion” (I don’t consider Theravada Buddhism to be a religion, or even a philosophy - it’s more a guide to being a human). In fact in the Pali texts there are quite a large number of females who achieve enlightenment or bodhisattva (people who could become enlightened but opt instead to spend their lives ending suffering for all creatures, often even more respected in life and death than those who become enlightened).
Women are not allowed to become ordained monks though. But they can become nuns, which in theory are equal to monks. In practice sadly many mainstream monks exploit their position, which is not supposed to come with power and influence. In many ways the monk hoods rules about women are much more about the weakness of men than anything about women. Women are generally viewed as more likely to not need such draconian rules as men. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in Theravada Buddhism that elevates men above women in any way whatsoever.
Sadly though the societies themselves are historically patriarchal, and this colors things and male monks are often venerated more than nuns for that reason.
Much of the area was under King Bimbisara who was a powerful and just ruler. Crime was rare. Rule of law prevailed. Economic activities such as trade were booming.
It was one of the best places to be in human history. And not only Buddhism, other rich philosophical schools rose and thrived at that place.
Healthcare wasn’t non-existent, as there is recorded history of doctors and hospitals existing.
Buddhism, and many other rich philosophies could arise at that time in India specifically because India was rich, peaceful, and calm.
Kings and rich merchants paid for huge expenses of a non-trivial number of people not working towards economic gain.
So, despite what should be abject misery by todays standard, how did people attain a lack of suffering in the age of the buddha? By the same routes we do today. Buddha just wrote down a reproducible route.
Buddhism doesn’t offer eternal happiness with magic beings absolving your wrongs and ensuring you live forever with your friends and loved ones. It only offers a way to use meditation to end your suffering, with it changing your reality or destiny. From that alone a major world religion took root. No bribery. No promises. Just a way to meditate and construe our reality. Maybe there’s something there?
What I described, is true for the bottom 30-40% of the people. And many people who'd get treatment for one acute illness will try to suppress a chronic one.
People of course don't realize that they are very miserable. They take this as a given. You have a curable chronic illness that requires spending weeks in a hospital and 3-4x of your monthly income? You just choose to die slowly with locally sourced meds that suppress the symptoms. People become sad and gloomy, but are not totally lost unless they happen to be very young. Young people do get treatment.
If there is no illness, they just go by regularly with their lives. Domestic violence towards women is rampant and very common among the very poor. Negligence towards old people's health is comparatively more common. Child marriage is still common.
If you are asking if they become gloomy like Dostoyevsky's characters, then no. They are far away from that. They spend disproportionately in religious festivals. Although Hindu, their worshipped deities are not mainstream, for the lack of a better word. Poor Muslims fare worse. Muslims spend big, too.
They are happy, regular people. Very pious, except when it comes to corruption. Poor or rich, ~99% people will take the opportunity of corruption if they have the chance.
And the poor are less sensitive to social stigma.
But, I have seen a large number of people uplifted from poverty. Indian economic growth is not a dummy one. There are visibly much less poor people that there were ~15 years ago.
I live in an old neighborhood (thanks to remote work trend when I entered the job market in 2021). The neighboring locality is of poor people's. If you took a walk there (we all have amiable relationships and don't live in segregated manner), you will see brick houses (pucca), motorbikes, well furnished houses. If you took the same walk 15 years ago, you would have seen much more poverty. People are uplifted out of poverty. No doubts.
India is still power bipolar. Poor people have no power. And a powerful person (mostly politically) can get what you have. This, too, people see as a way of life. They don't know better. So, big fish eats small fish is still very true in India- unless you are a white collar middle class person.
Edit: these people are very patriarchal, don't believe in personal liberty at all, so, modern values that we hold dear are absent.
I belong to a old, upper middle class family, and can live my way, or otherwise I would be fighting to escape this place as soon as possible.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder?wprov=sfla1
In the case of UK's SLS, it's more that the (in many cases) treatable medical conditions are the end-stage manifestation of something else. And the NHS still, for example, expects people to modify their lifestyles to manage the worst effects of Type 2 diabetes; inherent to SLS is the fact that people with shit lives find such lifestyle modifications impossible.
From what I can construct, it’s referring to people who are able to meet their basic needs, but are slowly destroying themselves in ways no doctor or medicine can fix. They appear to be able to help themselves, but don’t, because the weight of it all is too much. They could quit smoking, or quit painkillers, or quit sugar, but they just don’t, and it’s because they feel hopeless. The cards are stacked against them, they’ve practically given up, and - critically - given their circumstances, who could blame them?
For example, usually we think of depression as irrational, abnormal, and so antidepressants are a way of correcting your thinking. Except, for someone with “SLS”, maybe depression is actually a perfectly appropriate response to their life circumstances rather than temporary aberrant neurology.
What I didn't write explicitly, but vainly assumed that people will read between the lines.
The people I describe also suffer from SLS exactly because what you say.
Their lives are full of bad practices like alcoholism, not seeking medical health, choosing cheap and unhealthy choices whenever possible. Because of the weight.
You described it well. I assumed that people will get it- SLS is a result of helplessness at the extremes.
Another commenter wrote about the role of religion. I also think it plays a somewhat positive role.
At least in my state, days of Brahminical oppression are over. And the role of religion and social rules are positives.
It's a reduction in the margin for error that we require to exist.
Entropy is always grinding away at our attempts to order, to organize. Which is a requirement for us to exist for any meaningful duration. Poverty is the lack of a buffer against that force always trying to break down aspects of our organization.
If you lack poverty, and your car tire ruptures, you can replace it in order to continue getting to work every day. In poverty, entropy wins that battle, it grinds you down. Now you can't even get to work to try to make ends meet. Every aspect of poverty is similarly encompassed by this principle in action. Would you like nice vacations out of country for rest and relaxation and or new experiences? In poverty you face the daily erosion of entropy, unabated. No break or stimulation for you. Want access to the best medical specialists in the world? In poverty, you won't get it typically. Entropy is trying to kill you (not with homicidal intent, just inadvertently as it grinds away at order), with affluence you have a far better chance of surviving serious medical events (with or without universal healthcare).
In the poorest nations, the buffer between people and entropy is almost always very small. That usually covers food security, political stability, human rights. Affluence almost always purchases access to enormous entropy buffers, including access to nations with superior human rights, superior political stability, and so on.
A previous Prime Minister had been quoted 'A pound spent in Croydon is far more of value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde', Croydon being in London and Strathclyde being an administrative area in West Scotland that ceased to exist in 1975. The quote was from 2012.
WFH has allowed me to continue working from rural Scotland, to be honest I thought COVID would radically transform society's thinking and our requirement to be in high GDP areas for certain lines of work. Doesn't seem to have had quite the impact it was supposed to.
"Both Croydon and Strathclyde are shit places, but Croydon is a little less shit. By spending that pound in Croydon we can hopefully avoid it becoming Strathclyde"
Scotland isn't included, so I can't compare Strathclyde, but Blackpool's average is 5,900 — and includes 8 of the 10 most deprived places in the country.
Only one bit of London (part of Haringey) makes the top 1000. Only 106 bits of London (out of 4685) make the top 10%.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-...
1) Why did you think that?
2) Why do you assume that people are only in "high GDP areas" for work?
Personally I moved from rural New Zealand to London and I work 100% remotely.
/added
Also, I prefer a rural setting, no doubt others do too. Cost of living is lower also.
The others live in a seaside town in devon, a Wiltshire village, a Shropshire village, and one lives in a small Derbyshire town.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22860/london/population
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/pop...
And perhaps because those people are capable/willing to emigrate are possibly more likely to contribute to the economy, there is a net gain for the whole country. Clearly there are reasons why London itself is highly diverse with its international arrivals.
Beyond an economic gain/crutch, does it really benefit members of the same country hundreds of miles away, other than being subsidised by the spoils?
WFH does provide the opportunity to provide a service without living there, though.
Just look at HS2 - everything north and north east of Birmingham has effectively been cancelled, leaving yet another "national" infrastructure project serving only London.
This Government, or the previous one, or the previous one, ad nauseam, continually fail to invest in the north, and north east. In fact the last major national infrastructure in those regions would be the building of the motorways. (edit) And just look at the North East, Sedgefield had Labour PM Tony Blair, Hartlepool had MP and cabinet member Peter Mandelson, and yet the investment there during that 15 year period was negligible. It's a London-based Government thing, not a political thing.
If you're not "close" to London, you're going to be poor by comparison.
Bringing Newcastle closer to Leeds by faster road and rail, and hence York, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and the Potteries, would hugely increase economic productivity in the North of England.
I too hope that WFH will redistribute the wealth around the UK.
I hate the fact that we have an idiotic adversarial political system. Which ever party is in power is invariably hamstrung by the opposition voting the other way just 'because', is pathetically childish. The best time to build infrastructure was yesterday.
As the other comment has pointed out, this is irrelevant: in practice, as with Brexit, a majority of 1 can let you do almost _anything_ in the British constitution.
No, the real constraint is either internal opposition - party infighting - or what the newspapers will hammer you for.
Many of the UK's most depressed towns voted for Brexit, seemingly in the belief this might mean funding diverted towards them. It did not, because why would it? Nobody cared about them before, nobody cares about them after. Only marginal constituencies matter.
It's not like their local MP is going to help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackpool_South_(UK_Parliament... was sacked from the party after a bribery sting https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65193097
> Bringing Newcastle closer to Leeds by faster road and rail
"Fun" fact: Leeds is the largest city in Europe that doesn't have a metro, tube, or tram system.
> Sunak said: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure areas like [Tunbridge Wells, Kent] are getting the funding they deserved. We inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”
Thanks to my career in tech I broke out of that and moved away, but I've definitely had my seasons back at home where I get sucked into the Shit Life Syndrome around me.
I had some post-Covid health issues and spent a month back in my hometown to recover. But after a month I couldn't stand to be around so many struggling people while I was struggling myself.
So I went back to my cosmopolitan life and surrounded myself with people who are doing well.
I still have my health issues, but surrounding myself with people who are doing well has been much more tolerable for me than sitting stuck in Shit Life Syndrome in my hometown.
I don't know what the solution is for places that have SLS, but for individual people, the best advice I can give is, to the best of your ability, surround yourself with people who are doing well.
I don’t have a real solution either, but it seems like it would either need to involve a managed wind-down of towns in gradual, permanent decline, or somehow propping them up in perpetuity.
Some towns may just not make sense anymore. But for one reason or another, whether the problem is disappearing economic opportunity or changing climate, there’s no way to cleanly move on. There’s some discussion of this concept now under the moniker “managed retreat”, but we still need to figure out how to avoid stranding the most vulnerable.
One day maybe.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36
I won't hold my breath, but it's a nice thought.
I hope there comes a day when using the money hoarded by the rich and influential to invest in the public, does not depend on the rich and influential choosing to do so out of a desire for maximal profits, or even benevolence.
One day maybe.
TBH, I doubt it. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your values. Heck, I'm even called 'woke' by most people around me. Yet I understand that in this day in age, thanks to cryptocurrency, money is and will be a private matter. No government will be able to confiscate your wealth, at least to the extent that your wealth doesn't depend on assets related with the government (e.g. real estate is related given that you need to pay taxes to maintain it).
You pay tax because if you don't some large men will come to your house and make you pay tax.
this isn't a knock on the system; without some sort of centralised governments things tend to fall apart and then recreate themselves again. Even in the most lawless places someone steps in to perform the role, and usually they're much worse than a legal system with checks and balances.
"Power concedes nothing without a demand." - Frederick Douglas https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-fred...
"the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land." - Moses Finley
Although arguably rich and influential are investing in the public; the UK government spending makes up about half the GDP and the wealthy are paying what I gather is a 40% income tax.
Rates are actually even higher between 100-122k because although the income tax rate is 40%, ie 5%pts lower, the zero-rate band ("Personal Allowance") is simultaneously withdrawn by 50p for every pound earned - meaning effectively the rate is 60% and employees get to keep just over 33% of each additional pound the employer spends on salary and payroll taxes.
On the other hand, if you can take all of your money in capital gains, you'll be taxed at a top rate of 20% (or 28% for real estate and carried interest), with no payroll taxes. So the system heavily incentivises risk taking.
If you’re going to make the (extraordinary) claim that there is a “child tax” you’ll need to provide a link to a primary source.
Unfortunately with a political system wholly owned by the wealthy (US), I fear that there may be more truth than I want in my father's admonition that things will never get better in this country until we have another revolution. I've been around a bit and so much of today seems to be a rinse and repeat of the issues I experienced when I was young - not the world I wanted to see for my daughter. Hopefully the next generation has a stronger backbone - mine and the couple after seem to have surrendered our dreams to greed and consumerism.
There's an interesting dog-that-didn't-bark: the word "meth" does not appear. The drug is still not common in the UK[1]. Blackpool has precisely the demographic makeup where, if it were in America, it would be flooded with meth dealers and addicts, and become magnitudes worse than it already is.
I dread the day that drug finally makes landfall here. It will sweep through our urban underclass like the Black Death.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdd8/uk-british-dont-use-m...
I'm not a believer in gateway drugs generally, but the prescription opioid hell that exists in the US never really took off here. A problem yes, but not a society-wrecking scale. Mostly because doctors are much less free-and-easy with prescribing the stuff, and can't easily be bribed by drugco's to do so as they were in the US.
I used to date someone from a small city in Northeast United States, and when I visited and met her friends and extended social network, this was the impression I got. The ambitious and privileged ones aspired to leave and never look back, while others remained to make the best of their city while taking care of aging loved ones. Half of the people I met had some awful family story (alcoholic and/or abusive parents, drug-addicted siblings, father in prison, etc.) Job prospects were dire. Monuments to that were abandoned and sometimes burned down factories that lined some of the streets in parts of the city. It's all very sad.
Makes you wonder if there’s a conspiracy to stop those of us in the UK watching it even though we know how awful it is at times.
Both of them doing a remarkably good job in the circumstances, but the front end doctor's job is to figure out which specialist you need or send you home with basic painkillers or antibiotics.
And the specialists deal with their area, as such perhaps more concerned with the body part or system rather than the patient and their circumstances.
Not a good fit for complex cases or those whose root cause falls outside the scope of strictly medical.
I see the pattern that people are too busy with their lives to realistically start thinking about how to come out of it.
But I don't think that will ever happen, because it lowers power of other people. If you have someone that is too busy with the life (job, maybe children, etc.) you get cheap labor that and work force that is just above slavery.
It would also make stuff like involuntary (if there is a voluntary one) prostitution, cheap apartment cleaning, etc.
But then the power that people have over other people would be severely cut, so short of a revolution giving people the power to get out of a shit life isn't likely gonna happen.
People having the means to have meaningful lives or simply things they want will reduce that power.
Of course it won't remove workforce or reduce productivity. That's been proven in many studies. The opposite is true.
But it also means that if you right now have some kind of workforce that ruins their physical and/or mental health for you they'll at the very least ask for adequate compensation. The reason is that people do strive for more. So even if they have enough to come by they will want that car, that vacation, that travel, that iPhone, etc. So they'll work. But they are less likely to damage themselves in the process, if they have air to breath, to think about stuff, or bluntly to have options.
Your solution would just drain the area of any remaining talent. The remaining people would be the elderly, disabled, and stubborn--and SLS would be even worse.
Post Thatcher, the safety nets have been allowed to fall into disrepair if not discarded entirely. Modern Britain is not a place to grow up poor in.
edit: looked it up, it is 2002 actually.
One spends £20 a day on tobacco, the other drinks himself into intensive care whenever he has the opportunity.
I have a friend who lives in the same building (it's like an old folk's home but with independent apartments and on-site care). The 'managers' of this council funded facility have the authority to refer anyone to a food bank and they have told my friend several times that he only has to ask. There are 60 residents in this one building and only know 6 of them to speak to, so go figure.
But mostly: If there are people depending on the food banks to get food because of their addictions, isn't that a sign that (at least for these people), food banks very much are neccessary? Unless one assumes that people would change their spending behaviour under enough pressure, but from what little I personally know, that would very much just be an assumption.
I think you know I was making a valid point initially though. I was giving an example of how readily available these schemes are to people who don't really need them. There is a perception that people have to qualify for such help when, in reality, they just need to know the system.
You may say there is always going to be minor abuse of such schemes and I will just say that I think otherwise.
"Ben je bijvoorbeeld alleenstaand en houd je minder dan € 300,- over voor eten en kleding? Dan kom je in aanmerking. Die € 300,- is ons normbedrag voor een alleenstaande zonder kinderen."
https://voedselbankennederland.nl/ik-zoek-hulp/rekenhulp-voe...
https://abc11.com/sarah-oconnor-connor-terminator-killer-rob...
A while ago I was dealing with a lot of shit in my life and I wasn't coping well, so I engaged the mental healthcare system. I tried telehealth therapy and was told 'your needs are beyond what telehealth can handle, good luck'. The number of times I've been told 'good luck' by a mental healthcare provider as they're dismissing me makes me feel sick.
Psychiatrists were no better, they only want to talk about medication. There's no time for discussion of anything else.
Group therapy was a joke, no matter how much I failed at being a responsible adult I was told that I'm doing my best. Well, if doing my best means not being able to hold a job or support myself, then it's not good enough. In the animal world, individuals that are too depressed to support (feed) themselves die. Things aren't much different for a person living in the USA.
I engaged the mental healthcare system because I started failing at life and wanted help succeeding again, but instead of making me a person able to succeed I was told to reframe my failures as successes. Maybe that works if you have wealthy family to fall back on, but for the rest of us being able to earn a living doing productive work is vital to wellbeing. Telling a poor person that it's ok not to work because of their mental condition just traps them in a shitty life forever and they will never be able to be happy regardless of how many prozac they take.
The fix is as simple as looking at Maslow's pyramid. Make it so no one is worried about having a warm bed or enough to eat. Give opportunities for meaningful work that earns money and contributes positively to the world. Make it easy to become part of a social hierarchy and positively interact with other people. But all that isn't feasible, so let's give people pills to fix 'shit life syndrome' while leaving them with a shit life and no hope of improving it.
Seems like it's not paywalled.
FWIW Blackpool looks like a heck of a lot of seaside places in the UK. Whatever problems are described in this article are problems all the way around the coast.
Visit a seaside town here and it often feels like you're back in the early 90s. There's a certain style that hasn't been updated. Arcades, chip shops, betting shops. Ok the betting shops look modern.
A lot of high streets in nice towns are even starting to look like they're made entirely of charity shops and betting shops, and starbucks/costa.
Hobart is the largest town on Tasmania, so presumably as well as tourism it is also a regional focus for industry and non-tourism services.
Blackpool is 25km from Preston (same size), a little further from Liverpool and Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield (all large cities). The industry and services are in the other cities.
There are a few seaside towns that managed to hold on, such as Brighton. They're mostly in the South where the climate and sea temperature is a touch more bearable and you can feasibly go there on a day trip from London.
Arguably, what's happened to seaside towns in the UK is really just a more aggressive version of what's happened to all smaller towns in the UK. The UK economy has become more centralised, particularly in London but also in other major cities. Towns have little to offer the modern British economy, as the engines that kept their economies ticking over moved to China and India.
Basically, they are victims of globalisation, both in terms of easy travel and also free trade.
[Un]fortunately, the UK government keeps them just afloat by pumping tax money into them via welfare, pensions and healthcare spending. Which arguably prevents them from completely failing, but possibly reinventing themselves to be more useful and relevant to the modern economy.
The most severe deprivation in Blackpool is highly concentrated in a narrow strip just behind the seafront. The contrast is quite astonishing - Blackpool as a whole feels quite run down, but there are pockets that feel truly post-apocalyptic.
When industry and commerce located its bureaucracy within towns, this provided a social backbone. The small factory owners, trucking business owners, bank branch managers, who together with clerics, family doctors and teachers made up an established middle-class. The women usually didn't work, and had time to maintain the social fabric.
Most of this commercial, management, admin work now happens at regional, national or international level. Such professionals as there are are often on fairly short term rotations. If you're a young graduate, why on earth would you stick around..?
I (maybe obviously) know nothing about UK, but if there was a Blackpool-like town that's just like Blackpool, but inland, wouldn't that town be even less desirable?
Just like Detroit, there are a new breed of hipsters, priced out of middle class areas, starting to gentrify some areas again, for example see somewhere like Margate. But it's a slow process...
Other than last year, I can't remember a year in the last 2 decades where going to the coast wasn't such a massive gamble.
Even I have given up and decided to spend a week in Turkey.
Whitstable, Padstow - food & drink.
Margate, St Ives, Folkestone - visual arts.
Aldeburgh - performing arts.
Burnham Market, Salcombe etc. - conspicuous displays of wealth.
Rock - underage drinking.
Brighton - partying hard.
etc.
Last time I was in London (early March, though many years ago) it was pretty bloody miserable too, but it seemed to be doing well enough despite that! If any given day being well be suitable for hanging out at the beach is a gamble that would seem like an argument for choosing to live near it, where you can easily make spontaneous trips when the weather suits. FWIW our most recent mini trip away was to a coastal town in Victoria in the middle of winter, where the weather was never going to be beach-suitable, other than for the dog (who loved it of course). And of course the die-hard surfers. But it was still a very pleasant getaway, with plenty to do and see, and several places we visited were booked out.
Would more time by doctors solve this problem? I expect not. People suffering from SLS need case workers, and training, and mental health workers, and something. But they probably don’t need doctors performing this task. It’s a hard problem to solve.
There’s an expression “they need Jesus” that I think fits, but not in a religious sense. People need help, but it’s a wicked problem because they really need a social support network. I’m not sure what the secular version of church is, but I think people need it to break out of a downward spiral by not having friends and family to help make good decisions and support when needed.
Sarah O'Connor is an FT reporter
Sarah O'Connor writes an article about a human dying from a factory robot
In the Terminator movies, Sarah Connor leads the resistance and her son is the leader of the future resistance. The machines try to kill her and her child. The whole movie is about robots killing humans and Sarah's efforts to save humanity from robots.
Sarah O'Connor the FT reporter appears too young to have watched the movies and/or remember the movies (1984, 1992) gets deluge of Twitter engagement given her article and her name.
For whomever hasnt seem the original two Terminator movies, the are absolutely huge culture moments for robotics and AI. Part II is also a cautionary tale about scientists who dont think about the effects of their work.
Funny that the FT should complain about some of the evil effects of capitalism, too bad they’re only using it for white-washing, as in: “see, we’re the good capitalists! we care!”
I won't pretend to know the solution, but either capitalism in general or the capitalism we currently have, with for example its misaligned incentives, exploitation and death traps people live in, sure seems to be a huge part of the problem.
Really though, anything north or east of and including Bristol is pretty depressing.
I mean, this is one if the top reasons people want money right? At least they have NHS in the UK, in most of the world and most of human history people either adapt or die.
The only problem I have with this is the name, it isn't shit life, it is poverty. It's not like rich people with alcoholism or depression maker the cut for this supposed syndrome. Not calling it poverty allows policy to be centered around anything but giving people cash.
Give the addicts, the hobos and and the mentally unstable cash and good information/guidance on their options.
This actually made me rethink of socialized health care and other social programs in europe because in tech at least the salaries are horrible there, it seems the line of thinking is that the government should take more money from everyone and support social programs to solve all kinds of issues, which until now I thought was a good idea but it seems it isn't just more taxes, the salaries there and job opportunities are not good. Even on HN you hear about companies in tech struggling because of the investor mindset there.
My new opinion is that while I support socialized programs to care for those who can't care for themselves, it does not absolve policy makers' responsibility to make that support in form of better income and opportunities as much as possible and even direct cash and tax credits, not more programs and bureaucracies but more jobs and better paying jobs and more rewarding jobs with job security.
These problems taken together are worse than the sum of their parts. In an age where help is targeted, individual, and only given when the outcomes are measurable, shit life syndrome is a reminder that social change has to happen at the level of society, in a holistic way which may be really quite hard to measure. It is a gauntlet thrown down to policymakers who are straitjacketed by SMART objectives and neoliberalism.
What a weird take, we should avoid naming things because checks notes they’re obvious???
> Give the addicts, the hobos and and the mentally unstable cash and good information/guidance on their options.
That’s some next level captain obvious knowledge that you never give cash to hobos and addicts if you want to fix root cause of their problems, how could you not know that?
Because studies keep showing a no strings attached cash support is the best solution. They are not children. And you are making my point here that they are trying to do anything but solve the problem.
"You are poor" is not a medical diagnosis as much as "You are human" isn't.
I don’t think the wealthy or whatever are exempt from SLS, but you do tend to find more abuse and other factors in communities crushed by poverty.
But overall it reads to me as SLS is essentially “things are so bad they compound on each other, further perpetuating a downward trend in quality of life, affecting everything around them including their health.”
I don’t think there was an implication this is unique to the UK, but it is interesting to note even with the NHS there’s a sense they don’t have the resources to address the scale of the problems they’re seeing.
Basic income might help, but it also might just mean a marginal increase in life comforts to prevent the most extreme poverty but not enough to move the needle in something like this. At its core it sounds like an issue of lack of education, opportunity, hope, and mental health.
When you're somewhere that's more mixed by class, it's maybe easier to see your way back out of poverty in a way that you can't when you're never seeing anything else.
On the other hand, it’s possible to be materially very poor, but totally happy. To see life as full of abundance, good purpose and to find joy in it.
Places become poor for different reasons: shifting economic realities, fall of the previous civilization (eg USSR, which is my experience), etc.
Places remain poor when people feel trapped inside vs consciously deciding to call the place home.
Given that most (if not all) enjoyable things in life involve some kind of a fee (however small), that’s hard to do.
Notice that when communists are discussed, the same sayings "communism has killed millions of people".
Well, so has capitalism. Probably even more than communism. Except, capitalists always rephrase this to point blame towards the individual.
Homeless rising? Should have worked harder!
Don't have medical? Should have worked harder!
Medical privatized and going to shit? Should have worked harder!
It's the same tired refrain, blaming individuals for system based problems. Maybe, just maybe, capitalism is kinda shit?
There’s a communist version of every tired refrain you listed (but with more jail time and gulags), so I don’t see how it’s solving anything.
Maybe life in general is kinda shit sometimes?
I'd call myself a neoliberal (for lack of a better term), but I agree that the OP's comment is naive and is the kind of things that almost always comes from people who have never experienced actual scarcity or desperation for more than a second of their lives. But the idea that any form of communism can be put forward as a general solution to scarcity would be amusing if it wasn't so common.
Capitalism is shit, but it's shit for the same reason that every communist system ever instituted ends up shit. Because every system is vulnerable to exploitation by a small group of well-positioned individuals, and if those individuals are shitty (or become enthralled to a single shitty individual) then your whole system turns to shit under them.
Communists (and libertarians) seem to only learn enough history to speed-run through all the same mistakes... It's the same mentality of people who design a new framework/language believing it solves a bunch of problems in existing languages/frameworks, while naively ignoring the problems that those existing bloated languages/frameworks had been designed to solve... usually problems of scale, fault-tolerance, and reliability.
And to be clear, there isn't anything wrong with designing new languages, or frameworks, or economic manifestos. These are all good exercises that more people should take on, if only to learn for themselves how difficult and complex they can be and to disavow themselves of the notion that who came before must have been corrupt and/or stupid.
Imo, there is no "one size fits all" framework for good governance and we'd be better served by talking more about design patterns, anti-patterns, best practices, potential vulnerabilities/exploits, and how well each system we've seen implemented implemented their solutions... is the pattern itself bad, or the implementation? Or maybe it's a fine pattern that is just really hard to implement and doesn't scale reliably because of certain properties of the underlying language we're using or the machine architecture we're deploying onto?
Oh look. The name callings begin almost immediately. Isn't there some badly applied rule here on HN about insults?
Anyways, I never said I was communist either. One can critique capitalism AND communism both. And this is about capitalism and the abdication of any responsibility of the capitalist rules that cause poverty. I just find that capitalists can never actually talk dispassionately about the sufferings their system costs. It's always the "best-est-est system the world has ever known".... except for all those thrown away by capitalism. However capitalism does what it's best at, is by externalizing those human costs and blaming the individual for systemic choices.
Then again, that externalization is what is going to get our world baked, literally. (Climate disaster, not cannabis)
Try *being* homeless, or permanently injured, or born in the wrong family, or in a location that has high unemployment and no way out, or hunger, or countless other reasons. All of these can be solved with various amounts of money.... but by being in poverty (or "shit life syndrome"), they do not have.
And to the point, read the linked article. It mentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder :
Social murder (German: sozialer Mord) is the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression. The phrase was coined by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 work The Condition of the Working-Class in England whereby "the class which at present holds social and political control" (i.e. the bourgeoisie) "places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death".[1] This was in a different category to murder and manslaughter committed by individuals against one another, as social murder explicitly was committed by the political and social elite against the poorest in society.
(As an aside, communism ala China and USSR, etc all traded shitty capitalist dictator for a shitty government dictator. I don't count that as a win in my book either.)
EDIT: I'm not going to spend a comment to refute a poorly constructed No True Scotsman fallacy. Sure there's 'less bad capitalism', but that's not the article subject, is it? And it's obvious we're not talking about the willful choice to eradicate Finland's homelessness like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197785 ... Which are choices NOT to implement... Hence Social Murder.
The economic system in the US isn't straight up capitalism. Each locale, county, state, is different and many aspects of society are not strictly capitalist. Plenty of govt regulation and intervention goes around.
Plenty of well functioning developed countries have similarly heterogeneous mixes of economic styles, with social or private healthcare, housing, income, utility, business regulation, etc.
> Oh look. The name calling begins... I never said I was a communist...
Try reading to yourself, and recognize that you literally opened this thread by accusing the OP of being a neoliberal (he never said he he was!) and disparaging their cognitive ability based on your assumption of their ideological belief. You then follow up with a defense of communism, but then make out like I'm the one jumping to conclusions by assuming you're communist.
You can read 19th century political philosophy till your hair is grey, but I think you may have some pretty important philosophical (and personal) truths staring you right in the face here.
Also, it doesn't seem like you read my reply beyond that first line because I also said that OP's comments usually come from people who have never experienced actual scarcity, I agree with your sentiment, just not on your conclusions. Every form of communism seems to have also implemented their own form of social darwinism, it's just that the "undesirable group" and the means for removing them from society are different.