The steady march towards authoritarianism continues.
Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?
Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?
Not holding big tech companies responsible for the content which is housed on their platforms was always a one way street into heavy regulation here in the EU. As with everything EU it takes decades, but I fully expect us to eventually ban many social media products. Or get left by them because it will not be possible for them to make money if they actually have to be custodians of their content.
I think the only solution to this is to stop the centralised mess the internet has become.
Yes: leave the UK.
I and a lot of high earners are thinking about leaving the UK because it's simply a punishing country where you have high taxes like others in Europe but nothing to show for them. It's also by far the most authoritarian western country, as exemplified by measures like this one.
The way to overwhelm them is to sink the UK by having most of the people it relies on to function (high earners) leave and let the country collapse.
Leaving is useful, if it improves your personal well-being.
No need to be spiteful about it.
It’s a shame that Britain gave one of its “high earner” jobs to someone who’d enjoy seeing it collapse.
Throw a dart on a world map and chances are you'll land somewhere suitable. Any other first world country would be better for example.
> It’s a shame that Britain gave one of its “high earner” jobs to someone who’d enjoy seeing it collapse.
Britain didn't give me anything. They were unable to supply qualified individuals for a role that requires them, so they had to import a skilled worker on a visa that makes me ineligible to any public money, forces me to leave the country within 2 months should I lose my job, yet forces me to give the equivalent of 5 minimum wages of salary to taxes all the while having no benefits compared to said minimum wage workers and "enjoying" the same public services, such as a one year waiting list for a procedure that I got done for free in a day in the country where I used to live.
I also didn't say I would enjoy to see it collapse, I said that the solution to push back against those authoritarian measures, and other anti-middle-class policies is to vote with the only vote we are given: our wallet.
If you had caught cancer, lost your job, had a baby then you would have got help.
You drove to work on roads didn't you? Or perhaps it was subsidised public transport. Your wealth, and the wealth of the company you worked for was protected from a mob with pitch forks. Were you protected from foreign armies invading?
What about education? Or education for your children?
I run a large payroll, I don't see anyone that pays half of their pay in tax?
I'm not the one you responded to, but yes, nothing in return.
> caught cancer
The NHS currently has a waiting list of 6.3M patients waiting for treatment. The median waiting time for treatment is 14.2 weeks, or 3.2 months.
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-w...
This is for TREATMENT, not diagnosis, which you have to add on top.
And anecdotically, I had to wait for a year to get an appointment to discuss a benign procedure that I got done in 2 days in another EU country.
> lost your job
Unemployment benefits are a literal spit in the face in the UK. It is BETTER in the US if you can believe it. Jobseeker Allowance is £90.50 per week, or £392 per month (and you get it only if you're literally broke, I think less than 2 grand in savings).
https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance
For comparison, the median rent is £1,276 in the UK (not just London).
> You drove to work on roads didn't you?
You have to pay £15 a day for the privilege of sitting in traffic in London: https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge
(I'm focusing on London for transport because this is where the extreme majority of high earners are located)
> Or perhaps it was subsidised public transport.
TFL is basically not subsidized. It got subsidized by the government only to recover for COVID, and it is still the least subsidized public transportation in the world by far: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F4...
Note that TFL is also the most expensive public transportation in the whole world, to the point where it is more than twice as expensive as the number 2 (Tokyo).
> Your wealth, and the wealth of the company you worked for was protected from a mob with pitch forks.
Clearly demonstrated otherwise by the riots a few months ago where many properties were burnt by mobs, and companies' buildings defaced by protestors.
> Were you protected from foreign armies invading?
I let you search for "uk military unprepared" on Google News, I'm not sure which of the thousands of news articles you'll prefer.
> What about education? Or education for your children?
University is extremely expensive. In fact, if we take into account the purchasing power, the UK has the highest tuitions fees in the world: https://www.statista.com/chart/11058/bachelor-tuition-fees-i...
Even without that, many students get their loans forgiven after 30 years because they don't earn enough to reimburse them.
Besides universities, public schools are bad and private schools are extortionately expensive.
> I run a large payroll, I don't see anyone that pays half of their pay in tax?
You're right on this, it's not possible to pay 50% __income tax__ on your pay in the UK. That said if you take into account student loans repayments and other similar things, you can very well receive less than 50% of your gross income as net income.
No, not at all.
There may be a few (0.01%) rich people that don't contribute much, but high __earners__ are paying extremely high amounts of taxes with nothing in return.
The "parasites", as you call them, are low-income workers that get the extreme majority of benefits while essentially contributing nothing.
Take a look at https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-.... The bottom 50% only contribute 9.5% of total income taxes while the top 10% of earners contributes a whopping 60% of then.
The middle-class is being drained. The downfall of the UK will be inevitable once the top 10% realizes that they're better of in literally any other country.
The purpose of tax in this context is to reduce the propensity to consume by the payer (allowing the state to purchase it). Since the wealthy have a lower marginal propensity to consume, tax from them is worth less per unit.
Moreover, the value of someone is their contribution. As I said, there are plenty of people with lots of money that contribute little in real terms and still live lavish lifestyles. The best that can be said of tax in that context is that they might be living slightly less lavish lifestyles than otherwise, but it certainly doesn't make them more useful.
The point of what I'm saying is that you have very little power with your wallet. You do have power when you leave to remove your skills, which should doubtless be of concern, but people in general have an out-of-date understanding of their financial use to a country (which includes the politicians, so your rhetoric still carries some weight).
If more and more people are earning less, then that is not a good sign for the desirability of the country's goods and services.
There most certainly is not a one to one correspondence of stuff to money.
Because there is plenty of scientific evidence that social media is bad for children with many parents having first hand experiences with grooming, deep fakes, bullying etc.
And I think almost everyone can agree that companies like Meta, TikTok, X have major problems with their algorithms pushing people into ideological extremes, allowing rogue actors to manipulate at scale and not taking privacy or security seriously enough.
So finding people who want to defend them will be hard.
Schools in the UK spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with this, and in almost every case it turns out parents have no idea what their kids are sending/seeing online.
So the result is that bad parents demand bad legislation so that they can, in their minds, transfer responsibility for parenting their kids to the state. The state, well meaning rather than malicious, massively overreaches in its attempt to provide an answer. As a result everyone else suffers. And the 'majority of the public' think parents should parent, rather than making it the government's problem, and butt out of their internet.
Welcome to life in a society. We pick winners which by extension creates losers.
So you would be arguing that we shouldn't protect children from social media which is causing significant harm to them because it might inconvenience a minority of adults.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable, even laudable, that people with superior intelligence have better outcomes than people with lower intelligence
1) The majority of the UK's populace are onboard with the vast majority of these laws. Even if all the people that opposed this voted for another party, due to how the constituencies work, your vote will be effectively made moot.
2) Both major UK parties essentially agree that these laws should be implemented. The only solution to any problem that UK government can envisage is banning something. You can look into the Lotus Carlton ram raids of 40RR, they were singing the same tune back in the late 80s/early 90s.
3) There is no realistic pro-liberty / anti-censorship movement at all in the UK
This has been going for longer than I have been alive in the UK (I am now in my early 40s). I am not an anarchist, but I've heard the phrase repeated by anarchists of "You cannot vote yourself free". The only way to resist such laws is to subvert them via technology.