barry-cotter

That’s for the entire US population. If you look at the US population without even attempting to correct for demographic factors the US looks unimpressive at all ages.

The United States has one of the best education systems in the world, as proxied by the PISA test. US Asians have better results than anywhere but Singapore, Macau and Taiwan. US whites have better results than every majority white country besides Estonia and Switzerland. US Hispanics do better than every Hispanic country bar Spain. US Blacks outscore Jamaica, the only majority Black Country in the OECD and many European and South American countries.

I guarantee you the average Icelander does not understand how votes are distributed among parties. They trust the people who do it though.

toe the line, as in keep your toes behind the line at the start of the race, not tow the line.

The Chagossians are not by any meaningful standards indigenous. The land was uninhabited when George Washington was rebelling against the British. If the Chagossians are indigenous so are old stock white Americans.

And Mauritius have treated the Chagossians like dirt for decades, with no signs of that changing.

None of this is to deny the Chagossians were extremely ill treated by the British, but the idea that the Mauritanians have any interest in the welfare of the Chagossians is ridiculous.

This doesn’t fix your problem if the people you let in cost more than they contribute in taxes. See for example the Netherlands where non-Western immigrants are large net negative contributors and their children are no better. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf

Similar results apply in Denmark. https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf

EU style negatively selected immigration where easily a billion people are eligible for asylum and refugee status with easy family reunification means immigration is a large net negative fiscal contributor.

> having tight diplomatic relations and economic bonds was paramount to avoid conflicts within Europe.

The diplomatic and economic bonds between the belligerents of WW1 and WW2 were very close indeed before war broke out. The post WW2 peace in Western Europe was a function of the fact that NATO did its job “Keep the Russians out, the French in and the Germans down.”

If tight economic and other links prevented war there would still bebe a country called Yugoslavia. You need either actual broad based buy in or an imperial power willing to stop people who would like to go to war from doing so. NATO keeps Bosnia-Herzegovina from collapsing and as soon as they stop it’s done. No doubt there are other obvious examples in Europe, and it’s not as if anyone thinks NATO means much without the US.

> The EU has managed amazingly much over its existence. After WW II, it managed to keep peace

You misspelled NATO.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

There are 8.2 billion people alive on Earth ;getting drunk, high or otherwise taking psychoactive drugs is universal among human societies and you think no one has ever had a meaningful or enduring friendship result therefrom?

On the one hand it defeated affirmative action repeatedly in one of the most left wing states, on the other proposition 13 created a class of landed gentry and permanently screwed the state’s tax base.

What do you mean by women’s rights? The difference in support for abortion by sex is trivial. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...

Better than ruining real life relationships over politics. The only important impact most people have over politics is when they vote. Discussing politics has massive downsides and trivial benefits.

It’s not pointless. It may be counterproductive but kicking rich people when they’re down is popular among certain sections of society since it’s a subset of kicking rich people, which they like generally.

I like how your imagined DEI HR bureaucrat[1] engages in Asian erasure. 100% credible.

[1]in soul if not title

“Collapsed” It was acquired by UBS in 2023.

> The only ideology that should be unquestioned is human rights.

Why should an ideology that’s obviously derivative of Christianity be treated as beyond question and not Nietzscheanism or Wahhabism?

This is another thing that is captured in tone more than anything though the Brits do have a well deserved reputation for sarcasm. Difficult to convey in print what meaning you want the recipient to get.

> It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate analytical reasoning and deductive analysis.

That would be news to History and English teachers among others. You need to learn to make a structured and coherent argument based on evidence in many subjects and the evidence for the existence of transfer learning is so weak it seems unlikely basic Math makes the average or even 75th percentile student better at reasoning. Most people follow a formula at best, and forget that much rapidly after the end of school.

That the UN General Assembly endorses a document is no more valuable a signal than BRICS, the OIC or the Arab League doing so. If you want to point to a document for its moral weight better not to point to one from an organisation that has Saudi Arabia chairing its women’s rights committee.

The UN is not a moral authority and utterances endorsed by it have no more moral weight than any other political organisation.

> fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.

No one owns it so there’s no team of well paid professionals trying to make it grow.

There is also the optimistic gloss on this. At least 10,000 people have had this idea. It would make money. And yet no one has done it. There are a lot of opportunities available for those who wish to put in the enormous amounts of work necessary to capitalise on them.

School is not a place for being creative or productive. It prepares students for tests that they will eventually use to either get a job or go to university. In those places some people will make something people want (be productive) or have the opportunity to do something new (be creative).

>> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect

>You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.

If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now. By the same token I wouldn’t expect much from 100,000 Brits moving from India to the UK in 1947. West Indian migration starting in the 1960s or Ugandan Indians in the 1970s are movements of people who are genuinely different in important ways.

Those had no great effect on the civil service culture either.

If only there was some factual evidence to point to to suggest were wrong and Labour might do better than the Tories.

> Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.

No it doesn’t. It’s an outrage and a powerful argument against the entire system that produced it. There is no sane way that spending more money on stakeholder consultation for a comparable tunnel than Norway spent on building one can be defended.

> Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and

There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service. The culture of the British in India was an expatriate one, not one of colonial settlement or intermarriage (certainly not after 1900).

They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect even though in class composition the civilian element was elevated in education and social class compared to the general population.

The pied noirs in Algeria were settlers and they were distinctly different in terms of ethnic composition, being disproportionately Spanish, Maltese and Italian in ancestry compared to French from l’Hexagone and it’s still a matter of debate if their descendants are noticeably different from other French. The British in India were just that. Not a lot more culturally influential in the home country than the British in the UAE. As of 2015 there were A quarter of the million Britons in the UAE. That’s more than twice as many people from Britain in a petrostate then were ever in India.

British GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while the US’ has gone from $49K to $81K. The UK has declined in relative terms compared to what used to be a near peer.

> real stench of decline in England at the moment

Real GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while official population figures show population has increased by 10m. Total failure to grow the economy in 14 years of Tory rule and Labour aren’t exactly showing signs of having ideas to grow either.

I’m not British, I’m just not ignorant of Indian history. At partition the entire British population of India was about 100,000 including the army, civil service, civilians and family of same.

Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK. The British Army in India returning would have had nugatory impact considering the British had just fought WW2.

Leaving India was bad for the British upper classes because there were fewer jobs as officers that would keep a man in the store to which he had become accustomed on salary in the army. The ICS was less important than that in terms of numbers and its peak social impact was as an inspiration for the British civil service. The ICS is the only organisation in British India that might plausibly have had a large impact on the culture of the British civil service and it was too small to have had an impact by numbers alone as you originally posited.

Agreed. Thankfully we know what it takes to make housing a crappy investment vehicle. Build more housing. Build so much housing that returns on capital invested are flat, live Tokyo since 2000, or negative, like Seattle over the last five years.

Make building housing legal again.

Also. Renters deserve housing too. Restricting housing to the owner occupied is a great way to hate things by social class but I see no reason to further favour a population that’s richer and more powerful than the rest of the population already.