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Comment by hnbear | Hacker News Reader

Statement from the City of London Corporation which is closing them down:

> Chris Hayward, policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, said the > decision represented a "positive new chapter" for the markets as it "empowers > traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their > long-term business goals".

This is a great statement. Like firing people to free them up to find jobs that better align with their desire for employment.

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We had to destroy the village to save it https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2015/02/it-became-necessary-...

After translation via https://www.bullshitremover.com/:

> "Positive new chapter" = "We're closing this place down".

> "Empower traders" = "Kick them out".

> "Sustainable future" = "Nowhere to go".

> "Financial support and guidance" = "Good luck, you're on your own".

> "Unlock the huge potential" = "We'll figure something out, maybe".

no no > "Unlock the huge potential" = "We have big money with big self serving plans coming in."

tldr from bsremover too:

Smithfield: Big meat market, been there since 1860s. Billingsgate: Huge fish market, been there since 1327, now moving to make way for homes.

So a real state take over, pretty much?

Yes. Canary Wharf is being transformed from a purely financial district into a mixed business-residential district. They want to move noisy and smelly businesses away from the offices and apartments.

Smithfield Market and the City of London are nowhere near Canary Wharf

Billingsgate Market, subject of this article, is on Canary Wharf.

It's Smithfield and Billingsgate.

Billingsgate old fish market is an art gallery now. They moved the actual market to canary wharf ages ago.

If I’m reading the article correctly they need parliament’s permission (“private bill”).

Write your MP.

Christ, yeah - I came here to post the same quote. What kind of horrific shit does one need to go through in life to become capable of uttering that kind of horseshit with a straight face?

If you knew, you’d likely never be able to leave the house. Or could never go home again.

Maybe we shouldn’t be casting stones from the HN glass house, because literally every other startup here has a mission statement that sounds as ridiculous as this

The C-Suite coming up with this garbage is in every industry. You notice it more with tech companies on HN because that's the industry we usually focus on

Arguably, startups should have absurd mission statements, while managers of the city of London should be more sober.

A sober Englishman? Is there such a thing?

Bit unfair. Plenty of sober Englishman. During the week, anyway. Well, Monday to Thursday. Before midday, at least.

Before breakfast. 'spoons opens quite early in the morning for a reason ...

Wait why should startups have absurd mission statements? That doesn’t make sense to me

They shouldn't but they do. Making the world a better place is not what founders have in mind. What they have in mind is "we are looking for an exit and retire young", for nearly all of them. Unfortunately those words are not something they can write in a mission statement so they must be creative.

Not just startups, this cognitive dissonance is everywhere in business and we're supposed to just swallow it. Honestly I've been a cynical prick for most of my adult life and for a while I played along with it but it just does not align with my values and keeping up the pretense is draining.

I mean uh. Come work for us / hire us, we're the best at what we do! Honest! AI!

Silicon Valley made fun of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

Unrealistic goals seem to be a core tenet of capitalist realism. You see the same thing in politics: Trump is going to stop the Ukraine war in one day, Musk is going to cut 2 trillion from the US budget with efficiency improvements, etc... . A couple of years ago my company gave OKRs a go. One of the principles is that objectives should be practically impossible to reach, i.e. if you hit 100% of an objective then it wasn't ambitious enough. It's a surefire way to ramp up anxiety and stress on a team.

I wish they didn't, I have such a hard time figuring out what any of them actually do.

That's the great thing with such an ambiguous statement is that they can pivot at any point without having say they are pivoting. They are in a position to do what ever it is that someone inquires

Mission statements have the main function of obscuring that. It is safe to assume that the more obfuscating a mission statement is, the most likely the business goal is to steal investors' monies while finding another fool to buy the whole operation, ideally someone from the FAANG crew.

Nobody drags YC startups through the mud like we do here.

And they are relentlessly mocked for doing so (as they should be)

Go to business school?

Wall Street eat your heart out; London has a proud and lengthy history of producing corporate psychopaths.

I imagine the people behind this furiously knocking one off while watching the "Greed is good" bit from Wallstreet on loop.

The things people say in the era where comment fields have been removed from news websites (in the name of "avoiding misinformation")...

I’m not sure the comment fields are considered by media organizations or public figures… like, at all. I remember talking to a journalist about a series they were working on, they said the feedback they’ve gotten has been overwhelmingly positive and no one had anything bad to say about it. The comments on their articles were absolutely negative and vitriolic. I don’t think anyone with a shred of influence or responsibility in western society reads them.

To be fair, a lot of comment sections are garbage, and they can be trolled and brigaded.

For an article like this, the negative comments would be aimed at the people in the article, not the journalist. So the article can be a great (muckraking) article, and the comments might also be vitriolic, and everything is good if the rage is well-aimed.

> I remember talking to a journalist about a series they were working on, they said the feedback they’ve gotten has been overwhelmingly positive and no one had anything bad to say about it. The comments on their articles were absolutely negative and vitriolic.

There are two quite different possible interpretations for that fact pattern.

I mean, other countries would kill to preserve such long-lasting heritage, especially one that's in active use and very much a part of the city.

But the English of late are exceptionally good at bending over and showing their rear-ends to new foreign overlords for paltry sums of coin.

Indeed. It is shocking how little money it takes to buy influence in the UK. I reckon I could afford my own MP.

You can afford the PM for 50k pounds and the chancellor of the exchequer for 20k if they're Tories.

You can get yourself a seat in lords for about £80k of donation, still - the threshold is surprisingly low.

> I mean, other countries would kill to preserve such long-lasting heritage, especially one that's in active use and very much a part of the city.

Nah. In China there wouldn't even be an announcement, you'd just turn up one day and it would be gone.

Tokyo famously redeveloped their fish market, and that was far more of a piece of popular heritage than either of the markets mentioned here.

This is no different from what happened to Covent Garden 40 years ago, and no-one sane wishes we'd kept that as a fruit and veg market.

Quite simple for the psychopath is nothing, nada, zilch, nil, nix.

Sociopath, well. The world is cruel, including for children.

Sounds like an AI trained on decades of lies.

Five weeks in any major corporation outside of IT, and you will be spewing that kind of talk like a machine gun. It's mind-numbing. Avoid the suits as if they were spreaders of the plague, because their brain-rot is not much better.

Im sure schools like Eton have special courses just for this.

https://chainsawsuit.krisstraub.com/20171207.shtml

Who doesn’t love corporate bullshit?

I love the journalist who puts these quotes at the end of the article. Great journalism.

Journalists take glee in letting the fools expose themselves.

the ruling comes from up-on-high the mayor of London who does have some oversight over the city of london, and the transit of traders that utilise the market.

Gotta hit those eco numbers.

The Mayor of London doesn't have any power over the City of London Corporation. They are completely separate authorities.

The Corporation is essentially a unitary/borough-tier local authority, overseeing the "square mile" centre of the city, and has a council of elected councilmen. It provides housing, education, social services, street cleaning, markets etc for a small area of central London, and has existed since time immemorial.

The Mayor's remit, which has only existed since the year 2000, covers the whole 600-square mile area of Greater London, and provides strategic services like transport, strategic planning, fire and rescue, and the metropolitan police.

The Mayor of London wouldn't have had any involvement in this at all.

Not to be confused with the Lord Mayor of London.

I think a lot of people who don't know much about London are surprised that the City of London is quite small and not what people generally mean when they say "London".

AKA "The Square Mile"

Fun fact, the City of London is the last local authority in the UK where businesses as well residents get to vote. Businesses can appoint one voter for every five employees up to 50, and then one per 50 employees after that.

Do you know how that adds up, what the ratio of business votes to residential votes is? I imagine many more people work in the city than live there.

there are more business votes, but practically very few people actually use their business vote

as a business voter I went to my ward's annual meeting (wardmote), they were surprised to see a non-resident there

nearly the entire thing was about issues residents care about (late noise, cycle paths, petty crime, etc)

that and their amazing new plans for billingsgate/smithfield

the other are a couple of other things to remember about City ward lists:

    1. employers have no involvement other than picking their voters -- it's up to the individuals
    2. due to the allocation rules: micro-businesses have most of the votes, so small food vendors have significantly more votes than all the large businesses

Fun fact, comments like this give me the impression this place is turning into reddit.

this is actually a common misconception, since the GLA controls the LLDC, TFL, and LFC it has enormous influence on the square mile.

Significantly as I noted in my original comment the transit from outside the CoL into the market, but also directly.

I came here to specifically comment on this statement. I've never heard some much spin in one statement.

The reality is that almost no one makes any good money in the food industry. For a lot of people in that industry, if they tried to find jobs that better aligned with their skills (except in food), they'd likely be better off. A lot of people take jobs in terrible places and get complacent, maybe far too complacent.

A healthy economy is one where money, people, skills, and intellectual property has high velocity, meaning people quickly reorient their productive capacity to where it's most useful.

Well, this would all be true if the UK wasn't going through a lost generation economically. Serves them right for Brexit!

> A healthy economy is one where money, people, skills, and intellectual property has high velocity, meaning people quickly reorient their productive capacity to where it's most useful.

Everyone is an interchangeable cog!

> Serves them right for Brexit!

Brexit wasn’t a unanimous vote. There are people suffering under the Brexit decision that couldn’t vote at the time.

Our horror to the capitalist economic calculus of this world does absolutly nothing to make the world less ruthlessly capitalistic. In fact, we've seen that all attempts to overthrow capitalism (i.e. communism or SJW liberal wokism) have done nothing but entrench and strengthen capitalism and indeed, strengthen its uniquely worst parts of it.

You should look into Mark Fischer as an example of someone who tried to see just how evil it is in its full glory. Look at what happened to him afterwards. That's what happens when you think about it too much.

Unironically, swim with the fish or you'll get eaten by the sharks.

And a lot of them are suffering who definitely could have voted, but decided not to.

And a lot were straight out manipulated, including by foreign agents (Russia).

Democracy is a system of government. It asks people to vote on important decisions (like brexit) and to choose leaders to make day-to-day decisions on their behalf.

It is, of course, the system favored in the West and evident touted as the "best system".

Being 'best' of course does not necessarily make it good. Large groups of people are easily swayed based on fear, anger, perception, rhetoric and so on. The implications of each policy are seldom evaluated in the cold light of day.

So yes, the British voted for brexit- that is democracy in action. Majority Rules - so whining about being in the minority is irrelevant - the system is literally based on "majority rules".

Same thing in the US now. A president has been elected where he has specific points of action. The majority voted for those points of action. The people have spoken. Those policies are not secret. They have been publically explained to anyone who cared to listen.

It's not necessary to blame foreign agents. The decision lay with the electorate, and the electorate have spoken. It is the very core of democracy that those votes be respected and acted on. Uou want to leave Europe? Fine. Is it monumentally stupid? Absolutely. But democracy does not require "good" decisions, only popular ones.

And before the US folk get smug, tarrifs are coming to drive up prices. That is quite literally what the people have voted for. I have no doubt this will reinvigorate the local manufacturing industry. The next VC target will be steel.

Your argument only works when politicians don't lie, when they're sincere, when people are not getting deceived. It is unreasonable to ask of people of low and moderate intelligence who lack time cause overburdened with work to do proper research in a world of fake news (read: propaganda) and micro targeting. Honestly, I find it victim blaming.

For example, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025. Now the people he has selected for his government are from Heritage Foundation and all that.

Furthermore, he incited a coup yet still is going to sit on a throne. That is not democracy in my book.

I'm merely saying how democracy works. If democracy fails because the people who have the voting power are too unintelligent (your words, not mine) then that's a flaw in the political system.

Personally I think people are plenty intelligent. (OK, there are a few morons, and they get good TV time, but for the most part people are smart enough.)

Blaming the electorate is not victim blaming. Since they hold the power they can't be victims.

It is the goal, and function, of politicians to persuade the people. If the people choose to follow one source of media, that is up to them.

Trumps lies are easily debunked to anyone who cares. Lots of voters don't care that he lies. Lots of voters believe whatever they want. Democracy, as a system of govt explicitly puts the power in these peoples hands. That's not a bug, it's the killer feature.

Trump was very clear in his goals. Tarrifs, deportation, abortion ban, IVF under threat. No support for Ukraine. 100% for Israel, pro Palestinian support suppressed. Ignore climate change. Demonize minorities. He ran on these policies, the majority voted for them, he'll do what they asked for.

Look, all systems are fine and dandy when the politicians have good intentions. Equally all systems fail when bad actors come onto the stage. But hey, democracy is the best option right?

That’s not an excuse. By construction, not voting means voting for the option with the most votes. These people should realise that they would not be in this shite had they bothered to show up.

Unfortunately nobody has solved the pesky problem that people need to eat at least once a day, so somebody has to work in the food industry. Getting rid of these central markets means smaller markets spread all over the country will do the same work, but likely making the food more expensive and the supply less reliable.

And the food worse, since it will be less fresh.

Keeping these is a strategic good for the country.

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