I have a hard time understanding politics in other countries. Politics is mostly about star-bellied sneeches and nostalgia ’bout the good old days and if you won’t live there, you don’t which sneeches have stars or what people believe about the country’s past.
This Brexit summary from Carl Diggler makes some sense to me:
After David Cameron made a highly understandable mistake of caving to a perpetually drunk racist demagogue in Nigel Farage, he made another completely reasonable error of putting the EU referendum up for a vote. Compounding this, the UK media made a multi-decade long mistake of stoking anti-immigrant fears, which played in hand with existing English dislike of the EU.
But there’s a side of it that I don’t understand at all: what was Boris Johnson’s play here? He was mayor of London so he knows the banks are shitting their pants about Brexit. He knows that the EU won’t let the UK continue to have access to the common markets unless it keeps immigration and worker movement policies more or less as is, and the main rationale for the referendum was that these should be changed.
Did he think the thing would never pass and that he’d just get mileage from supporting Brexit after it failed? Or is there some other angle here.
James E Powell
How often to politicians look past the next election?
Cacti
The answer is:
The dog caught the car.
aimai
I’ll take a whack at it. I think he thought it would never pass. He has been writing checks with his mouth that he had no intention of cashing for years. I think we can’t really grasp just how stupid and puerile the politics of a Boris Johnson and his buddies really is. Its really a circle jerk of, well, high class jerks–they get off talking shit and making fun of the losers and the wonks and the serious people and, of course, immigrants and people in need and the pensioners. So I think talking up Brexit was a way of getting on TV and having something quotable to say. They never expected to win the vote and never expected to have to pay the piper, or be attached to paying the piper.
aimai
@aimai: This is politics without Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” as discussed in Politics as a Vocation. I can’t pull out a good quote because now, years after that essay blew my mind, I find that its quite hard to read and pull out a sound bite level quote. But basically Weber is arguing that a politician needs to have an ethic of responsibility–of means and ends–and must strive to be honest with himself and with the public about the true costs and side effects of policies which he proposes. You can’t just say shit and figure that someone else will fix it if it goes wrong. You can’t propose things you won’t fight for, or fight for things you know are a bad idea. Or trash talk your opponent just for a little advantage when you know what you are saying is a lie. Its all bound up in the ethic of responsibility–responsibility for the actions you take, and for the people who suffer when you take a good or bad action.
marduk
This seems to be the universal consensus.
Davebo
@Cacti:
Bingo! And now they are furiously trying to walk it back. Not going to happen. Scotland, and all it’s oil is ready to bail now and jump back in the EU and they’ll be happy to have them.
A political blunder that even Dubya would have seen coming.
Tim C.
in addition to the first three comments which are all spot on, there is also the geographic oddity that is the difference between the city of London and metropolitan London… which are two different cities. I suspect that some of his demogogary was about the rivalry between the two.
For reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
hovercraft
He saw it as his chance to position himself as the next PM. The people were not supposed to listen to him, but allow him to claim he stood by theri side against those evil foreigners. As@Cacti: said dog car.
Like the gop and the Teaparty the rubes had been primed by decades of Murdoch propaganda to prime them for his message. Now he’s all like I can’t believe you people believed me I was just kidding.
petesh
@aimai: Mind you, Cameron also too. He called the damn referendum to get himself out of a tricky spot with the racists on his right, kept them on board, won the election (narrowly) and …
Betty Cracker
My kiddo says Boris Johnson looks like Trump in his emo phase.
Mike J
Bernie told staff to buy double sided coins in case caucuses needed coin flips. And he wants to lecture us on democracy.
misterpuff
What is Trump’s play in the US election?
Sometimes Narcissists just gotta narcexist.
James E Powell
I will bet $100 that the UK never leaves the EU. The people who own things are against it. How often do governments do anything that the people who own things oppose?
Bobby Thomson
Don’t the MPs have to take action for it to become effective? And aren’t they overwhelmingly against?
Geeno
@Davebo: Remember that W forced the palestinian election that saw Hamas win when he was clearly rooting for Fatah.
Bobby Thomson
@Mike J: puts all the inaccurate whining about IA coin flips in a new light. Always projection with that crowd.
Chyron HR
@aimai:
Sure we can, the only difference is that ours is orange.
James E Powell
@aimai:
I agree. I’d liken it to the way the Republicans demand a balanced budget amendment every time the president is a Democrat, but forget that anyone ever mentioned such a thing when it’s a Republican.
marduk
@Mike J: Lying is unbecoming.
James E Powell
@Chyron HR:
Long before Trump, we had equally stupid and puerile Republicans.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Yes, I think it was a cynical ploy. These guys all wanted this to get turned down, so they could all point to anything bad that might happen later, and say, “See? If only you’d listened to me, we wouldn’t be in this mess now!”
A lot of it is just elemental, right wing politics, as they do it here: Keep the losers in the base all stoked up about something so you can get them out to vote for you, and then drop it as soon as you win. Their big mistake was to get them stoked for a referendum, though, rather than for a regular ol’ election, the way the Republicans do here. Get ’em fired up about God and gays, but don’t give them any outlet in the booth but that big lever with the “R” on it.
Revrick
@aimai: I flunked mind-reading in seminary, so I won’t even begin to attempt an explanation of what he was thinking. To me it looks a lot like primate social dominance behavior: wild vocalizations, threat gestures, chest-thumping, tearing up grass, bearing teeth and flinging feces. Beyond that, I can’t say.
Sean
@James E Powell: @Cacti: Yep. He was late to the exit party so he was probably banking on a close vote for remain that would still undermine Cameron’s position and elevate his. His reaction the morning after suggests he may have been also caught by surprise. As former mayor of London, he is well aware of the potential fallout to Fleet Street.
Chyron HR
@marduk:
Have you ever considered the possibility that bird wasn’t a sign sent by God to mark Bernie as His chosen one?
I mean, of course, obviously it WAS, only a silly registered Democrat would suggest otherwise, but hypothetically speaking, do you recognize the existence of non-divine birds that coincidentally happen to land near non-divine people?
Omnes Omnibus
@marduk: Who is lying?
hovercraft
Leave allies like these are of no help to Boris.
Everyone is screwed
J
Notoriously Boris Johnson was in favor of staying until quite recently. So this is opportunism of a particularly stupid form. My guess is like that of Aimai and many others, that he didn’t expect to win the vote. One thing the brief summary cited by DougJ leaves out is the extent to which, for more than a quarter of a century, the tabloids have blamed everything on ‘Europe’. I suspect that many leave voters, even those who are relatively free of xenophobia (as many of course were not), are under the the vague but persistent view that everything the EU does is a disaster. Of course it doesn’t help that some of the most conspicuous things the EU has done recently are a disaster (currency union, the handling of the financial crisis, Greece).
aimai
@Mike J: Not Bernie, his Staffer Joan Kato:
marduk
@Chyron HR: Oh well, apparently a lot of juicers are still off the deep end about the primary. Sorry to pick the scab, just pointing out that mike j was lying. I’m sure facts still matter to some commenters.
dmsilev
@Mike J: No, I think the proper way to read that anecdote is that someone in Sanders Central has decided that the campaign’s Nevada State Chair would make a nice scapegoat. Not that it really matters anymore.
Kenneth Fair
I finally figured out who Boris Johnson looks like: Captain Kangaroo.
Loviatar
Its the same mindset of the Wall Street banker or really any good salesman. Fuck You, I Got Mine.
He is planning to have on his gravestone Boris Johnson, Prime Minister. Fuck You, I Got Mine.
hovercraft
@Bobby Thomson:
The problem is that they are in the situation as the gop with Drump, if they toss the results they will all be tossed out. It would take real political courage to put the country before their own political futures. Anyone ready to step up ? Crickets.
aimai
@Chyron HR: I think you have to expect that a guy nymmed Marduk is probably pretty pro augury and ornithomancy.
Splitting Image
He has some precedent for that. Lucien Bouchard was a toady in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet and bailed on Mulroney when the Meech Lake Accord failed in 1990. He founded the Bloc Quebecois and used the separatist movement to escape the chopping block in 1993, when the Progressive Conservatives in Parliament were reduced from 158 seats to 2. While the rest of his cronies were thrown out, Bouchard became Leader of the Opposition. He was the main driver behind the 1995 referendum and used its narrow failure to make himself Premier of Quebec. The separatist movement was good for at least eight years of government paycheques for the guy.
As often happens, the remake has not been as successful as the original.
Iowa Old Lady
@aimai: You’re making me sad with longing for more politicians with that sense of responsibility. I think Obama has it. He doesn’t fool around with serious stuff.
M. Bouffant
Creepy, crawly …
Gavin
The problem with the “pocket veto” of the brexit vote?
All the Euro leaders are demanding UK act on their own referendum immediately.
And, of course, all the prior carve-outs for UK for their EU deal [keeping the pound, etc] are gone.
WarMunchkin
Really, Tony Blair? Can’t that guy just leave Planet Earth forever? Always hated seeing His Smarmymess on TDS.
Emma
This started as an intra-Tory fight and it snowballed from there. I think it’s true that a lot of the Leave leaders really didn’t want Leave; they wanted leverage. Now it’s spiraling out of control. Scotland and Northern Ireland are angling for federated EU membership, which would allow them to remain in the EU while the figure out all the other angles, and Plaid Cymru is making noises for “the beginning of” a Welsh independent movement.
So to whoever said they wouldn’t leave the EU, for right now, no bet. But still, the almost uncontrolled way this is happening, who knows.
Calouste
@aimai:
As usual, a picture says more than a thousand words.
M. Bouffant
@M. Bouffant: And another Entwistle tune that fits the Brits: “Nightmare (Please Wake Me Up)”.
raven
Why she voted for Brexit.
Bobby Thomson
@hovercraft: not that many need to bite the bullet.
Sloane Ranger
His ideal outcome was for a narrow loss for Leave setting him up to become the preferred candidate for the Tory Euroscepics in the leadership election once Cameron resigned at the end of this Parliament.
His fallback was Cameron doing the “honorable” thing and leading the exit negotiations in the event of a Leave Vote and then getting the blame for not delivering a deal involving the EU providing free milk and honey annually to all UK citizens.
The wind was taken out of his sails when Cameron resigned Friday morning. Hence him going into hiding now. He is trying to decide whether to stand for the Tory leadership anyway and take the blame for the inevitable crap deal or give up on his ambition to climb to the top of the greasy pole.
Personally I’m considering asking Nicola Sturgeon if Scotland could annex England.
Fair Economist
@hovercraft:
OK, I’ve been very sanguine about the chance of Brexit but THAT would be a disaster for governance and might even generate the kind of UKIP/Tory massive majority that could actually do a Brexit. MPs splitting from the party activists, ick. Anybody know where the voters would go?
WaterGirl
@raven: I only made it to reason #2, somehow related to buying eggs. Everybody gets to vote. God help us all.
nutella
It’s because Tories think politics is a game and governance is a means for pulling every penny out of the treasury and the pockets of the middle/lower classes into the offshore accounts of rich people like themselves. They’ve been doing this (its official name is ‘austerity’) for years and getting away with the destruction of their country’s polity and the livelihoods of many of its people.
Some of those people have wised up and voted Brexit to indicate they’re mad as hell and not going to take it any more. Unfortunately they have attacked exactly the wrong enemy.
EU austerity has damaged many countries but not the UK. All the austerity damage to the UK is 100% self-inflicted. It’s unlikely their membership in the EU has cost them anything. I expect the benefits and costs of UK EU membership are roughly even but the costs of getting out will be high.
So this stupid Brexit thing is a very expensive sideshow. What the victims of UK austerity should have done is gone after the perpetrators of it. They should have David Cameron’s head on a goddamn pike and tell parliament that more heads will go on more pikes unless they:
1) Cancel every one of the many austerity laws of Cameron and earlier.
2) Cancel every one of the laws providing tax dodges to rich moochers.
3) Enforce tax evasion laws brutally, thoroughly, and consistently.
But no, they’re going to waste huge amounts of time and money farting around with the EU and probably destroying the union itself. (Scotland and Northern Ireland are heading in the EU’s direction already).
And they’re going to entertain themselves in the meantime by assassinating leftist MPs and attacking immigrants.
Good job, English and Welsh voters. You should have gone for the pikes.
Great job, Tories. Shit got real with this vote. Pikes would be realer and well deserved.
Chris
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
I’m increasingly realizing that this is a global, or at least very widespread, phenomenon:
1) The “center right” faction (i.e. the elites) appeal to and stir up the “far right” faction (i.e. the most bigoted elements of the general population) as a source of popular support.
2) They then find themselves more and more trapped by that alliance, as the “far right” increasingly flexes its political muscle and demands action on things that the “center right” politicians didn’t expect anyone to remember after the election, but which the “far right” considers a hill to die on.
3) The “oh, shit!” moment.
America’s been doing this for fifty years, and it’s now culminating in Donald Trump. In Britain, we have Cameron and his peeps playing to the UKIP and UKIP-curious crowd, and getting this turd as a result. In France, center right politicians in the last decade started talking about “winning voters back” from the far right by hitting some of the same notes, but all it’s done is help further legitimize the far right (which many now think will be one of the two parties in the run-off election in 2017). In Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East, a bloodier version of this has been playing itself out since the eighties what with the whole support for jihadist movements by traditional elites like the House of Saud.
(I’d point out that a similar phenomenon also explains the rise of certain regimes between World Wars One and Two. But that would be Godwinning).
dmsilev
If you’re bored and want to check out an internet train wreck, take a look at the comments to this NYT story showing that, no, the exit polls are not proof positive that Hillary STOLE THE ELECTION from Bernie.
MattF
Blame Iceland.
maya
Nigel Farage. Now there’s a name that should have a front row seat for the happenings at the Place de la Concorde, nee, de la Revolution. Does he knit?
Felonius Monk
@James E Powell:
And, we will have them long after Trump as well.
? Martin
@Fair Economist: The Scottish National Party seems to be doing quite well.
Gelfling545
@Revrick: ?
SRW1
Maybe this comment in The Guardian is useful:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2016/jun/25/brexit-live-emergency-meetings-eu-uk-leave-vote#comment-77205935
Barbara
@J: But Britain’s insistence on adhering to the same blinkered austerity policies that the EU has enforced is entirely of its own doing — or that of George Osborne. Britain rejected monetary union, thus, had much more freedom to emulate the U.S. or Scandinavian countries when it reacted to the economic meltdown of 2008. People in the leave camp seem not to understand who is inflicting the most pain on them.
smintheus
The same question could be asked of plenty of Republicans, like Paul Ryan. Does he make all those insane proposals and generate utterly fantastic budget plans with the intention of trying to put them into effect and reconcile their totally unreconcilable bits and pieces?
MattF
OT, another Trump con. Condo development in Baja— lots of people got stiffed, nothing was ever built.
? Martin
@Barbara: Everyone is suffering from the same austerity problems – that we all use the same outdated assumption for taxation – that labor should be the main driver (payroll taxes, income taxes, etc.) With each passing year, that structure makes less and less sense because output is increasingly disconnected from labor. Corporate profits are better, but tricky to get right, and can do a lot of economic harm. Nobody has quite figured out a better mechanism that would allow for non-austerity.
dmsilev
@MattF: My favorite bit from that article:
les
Could this be the (hopefully last) WASP revolution? Bernie Bros, Trumpsters, Brexiters–all the same demo, with slightly different excuses. They’ve been in charge here and in England for centuries, but times they are a’changin’. They’ve been told by various stupid, greedy and evil pols for years that the Others are taking their shit, that nobody cares about them, and that the s, g and e pols will take care of them. So they’ve voted to fuck themselves for years, and no they want their payoff.
smith
@Barbara:
This is the thing that most gets me: Leave does seem to be largely a vote against what the pain they feel from austerity, yet just last year the voters gave the authors of UK’s austerity a big election win. It’s like attacking Iraq because of a bunch Saudi terrorists, or Kansas voting for Brownback (or Trump) because the state’s economy has crashed. It’s such a drastic case of ignoring a simple, obvious cause and effect the ignorance has to be motivated, and rather intensely so.
? Martin
@smintheus:
Same could apply to Sanders, or to many other Democrats as well.
Mike J
“Hostile” meaning anti-Corbyn. MPs are being shot over Brexit and Corbyn is sending protesters to their homes.
gogol's wife
@raven:
Wow, is that real, or some really, really skillful spoof artist?
? Martin
@smith: If only there was a way to destroy the economy for rich people without hurting the middle class as well…
sm*t cl*de
Cameron and Johnson were both members of the Bullingdon Club, with its tradition of hiring restaurants and thoroughly trashing the venue — to demonstrate the members’ privileged capacity to walk away from the destruction they’d caused.
Perhaps this is not the sort of person you want running your country.
CathiefromCanada
When anybody thinks it would be impossible to elect a buffoon, consider that Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto (Canada’s equivalent of London).
The support for Ford was mostly in Toronto’s suburbs, with the idea being to “get” the “elites” and “show them who is boss”.
And even after all the drinking and drugging and evil companions and general buffoonery, if Ford hadn’t been laid low by cancer, he might well have been reelected. His brother tried to replace him, but he just didn’t have the “jolly” reputation that Rob Ford did.
So I guess it can happen everywhere.
Schlemazel Khan
YES! View the success for the modern GOP in exactly this sort of horseshit. Get the morans all cranked up about something stupid and pray it never comes to a vote. Look how badly it worked out for the GOP (and the country) when they owned all 3 branches of the government. They never want that to happen. He wanted all the support of the racist, xenophobic assholes but he sure didn’t want to win this fight as there is no way it turns out well for him.
J
@smith: Well put!
The Thin Black Duke
@gogol’s wife: Thing is, if you interview a Trump supporter and ask the idiot why they’re voting for the rich idiot with the ferret on his head, most likely you’ll hear the same word salad, it just won’t have a British accent.
Feathers
@smith: The other discrepancy is that the areas of Britain that got the most EU subsidies voted “leave.” The best theory on this is that they were the ones who had to deal with the EU’s fiddly rules and requirements. I saw a farmer on the TV talking about how dealing with all the EU rules was nothing but trouble, so good riddance. His farm will probably not survive.
Barbara
@? Martin: No, not everyone. The U.S. recovery act should have been bigger and relied less on tax cuts, but the U.S. has not imposed the same hard line austerity policies that have been applied by the EU, which has been directed almost as a morality play by and on behalf of its largest economy, AKA Germany, for going on 10 years now. U.S. recovery has been much faster and more robust than Europe’s. And Sweden and Canada did not resort to the same kind of austerity measures.
WarMunchkin
@Mike J: Yeah, that’s irresponsible. But he’s not the one who lost the election in his party and is threatening to run third party. Comparisons to Sanders that many made here are a bit febrile in that light. But frankly sending protesters as if he has a goon squad is messed up and wrong.
Trollhattan
@gogol’s wife:
When you’ve lost the chavs….
Schlemazel Khan
@Bobby Thomson:
Yes they are against it but they also have to stand for election, it is a brave pol that will willingly oppose the voting majority of voters in his or her district on an issue that might cost them their seat.
@Geeno: GAWD! I had forgotten that, good point!
Mnemosyne
@nutella:
So they really are like Trump voters. Huh.
J
@Barbara: Couldn’t agree more, but only wanted to emphasize just how much the UK’s low information voters have been fed a steady diet of anti-EU propaganda for decades. I’ve no intention of excusing Cameron and Osborne for their austerity policies.
smith
@? Martin:
We call it progressive taxation. Good, hard, ruthless progressive taxation.
Tony J
@nutella:
Abso-frigging-lutely.
They never thought they’d have to actually take responsibility, but they failed to take into account the possibility that the millions of people their policies have hurt might actually believe the decades of propaganda their allies in the Press have spewed out blaming Europe, immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers, gays, loony lefties, and absolutely everyone – but – the people responsible and, given an opportunity, act on it.
I’ve no sympathy for the duped and currently nervously smug 17 million who voted to hurt me, mine and my country, but I don’t hate them quite as much as I do the cynical shitbags who think themselves their leaders.
? Martin
@smith: I think you missed something there…
les
@smith:
Unfortunately, progressive taxation seems to make things better for everyone. Oh, wait…
Felonius Monk
Where have we heard this before?:
Schlemazel Khan
@Kenneth Fair:
HEY NOW! Why are you insulting Capt. Kangaroo? Not only was he a died in the wool liberal who infected tons of kids with radical ideas he fought in the Pacific and drove landing craft at (IIRC) Okinawa. Plus he was nowhere near as ugly on the outside either.
But I do see your point.
Schlemazel Khan
@nutella:
This sounds familiar . . . where have we seen the same sort of party and the same sort of games played here in the US . . . .hmmmmmm
Bill E Pilgrim
It’s perfectly simple. If you’re not getting your hair cut, you don’t have to move your brother’s clothes down to the lower peg. You simply collect his note before lunch, after you’ve done your scripture prep, when you’ve written your letter home, before rest, move your own clothes onto the lower peg, greet the visitors, and report to Mr. Viney that you’ve had your chit signed.
patroclus
I don’t think Brexit is ever actually going to happen, but we aren’t going to know that for sure a for a long time. There are just too many obstacles in place and while there “may” have been a 51.9% majority of referendum voters in favor of exiting, that’s not nearly enough to overcome all the hurdles. First, they’re gonna have to have a new Tory leader and then they’re going to have to have to actually get it through Parliament (both Commons and Lords). The Tories only have a 12-vote majority, which really means 6, so all it would take to stop them in the Commons would be a dozen or so courageous Tory Remain MP’s to vote no. Northern Ireland voted Remain, so they probably couldn”t count on the Ulster Unionists other than 1 or 2 to bail them out. That could stop it right there, but the Lords could also delay it for up to two years and Lord Heseltine has already said he’s gonna try, if it even comes to that. And, if Labour ever gets their act together (doubtful at this stage), they could demand that the vote be treated as a vote of confidence and potentially force a new general election which could, democratically, effectively be a re-do of the referendum. The SNP and the Lib Dems are clearly opposed. Back in the 1970’s Roy Jenkins of Labour broke with the then-opposed Labour leader Wilson and led a pro-EEC -Labour faction that joined with Heath to get it done – if there were just some courageous “Jenkins-like” Tory Remain MP’s, that would end the whole idea.
The problem is that the uncertainty is likely to last for months if not years; thus continuing a drag on economic growth and generating a massive amount of instability. There will be widespread sustained turmoil for some time and there’s no easy way to fix it.
? Martin
@Barbara: Local variations in economies allow somewhat different results, but everyone is running up against more-or-less the same wall.
germy
@Chris:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is front-pager level commenting.
MattF
@Chris: You invite the thugs in, and then they take over. And, somehow, it’s a surprise. See ‘Red Harvest’ by Hammett.
Bill Arnold
@aimai:
Bill E Pilgrim
@patroclus:
I agree. Can’t know for sure of course but I’d wager that it will never happen.
Cameron today ruled out not leaving but he’s the one who arrogantly called the vote because he was certain that Remain would win, so his predictive powers are roughly Bill Kristol quality at this point.
Calouste
@les: WASPs are about 50% of the population in England (the ‘A’ in WASP might give you a clue), and that’s not counting people who are non-religious but culturally WASPs.
MattF
@Bill E Pilgrim: I know nothing about UK constitutional law– but these guys do know about it, and they say that invoking Article 50 requires an Act of Parliament.
Anonymous At Work
My best guess is that he wanted Leave to get 49% of the vote and inherit the role of that 49%, plus the EU-loving Conservatives, to be PM next time it was a Tory.
rikyrah
Gary @GaryTomWilliams 9h9 hours ago
My 73 yr old Mum (who voted Remain) tells me people in her lunch club thought LEAVE meant, quite literally, voting to make immigrants leave.
Bill E Pilgrim
@MattF: Yeah that and a lot of other things I’ve read, the vote is non-binding to begin with, then as you cite, who has to invoke Article 50, and no matter who it is, no one is obligated to because of the vote.
Pretty crazy times though, it certainly will be interesting to see what plays out. Horrible and interesting.
rikyrah
@petesh:
Cameron played himself. It’s ridiculous. How DA PHUQ? did he leave this up to a 50%+1 vote?
PHUCK OUTTA HERE.
Emma
@rikyrah: I’m not suprised. It was pitched like that by Farange and his crew and winked at by the Leave leadership.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
Meh. I think the “wall” to raising salaries is an artificial one. Trying to come up with workarounds so companies can still have the highest possible profits without having to pay higher salaries seems like a mug’s game to me.
Tony J
@germy:
Yeah. He’s young, but he’s always worth reading.
aimai
@rikyrah: Whoopsie daisy! Well…no one ever went broke, etc..etc…etc… My god people are stupid.
Villago Delenda Est
@Davebo: I don’t think so. The deserting coward is as fucked up as Boris.
smith
Speaking of salaries, in all the hoopla today I’d missed that SCOTUS also declined to review the new overtime rules, so they stand. So, with the abortion ruling and denying guns to domestic abusers, a pretty good day.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: Stupid racist shit. These people deserve to be fucked over. Too bad so many more don’t.
Baud
@smith:
You sure? It seems too early for the overtime rules to be before the court.
les
@Calouste:
Somewhere around 51.5%, eh? I think I knew that, and was aware of the “A.” Fortunately, they’re a smaller share here and split a bit between the Trump and the Bern.
Anoniminous
@rikyrah:
Another example showing why governing by plebiscite is really dumb. See California for many others.
Barney
Boris Johnson wants to be Prime Minister, and has done since he was a teenager or before. That is the main thing to remember. By taking over the Leave campaign, he ensured he is the leading candidate on that side of the party (the majority of Tory voters, and almost certainly members too), while the Chancellor George Osborne led the Remain faction (and has screwed up his chances with excessive fearmongering). The other leading candidate, Teresa May, Home Secretary, might have gone for ‘Leave’, but chose Remain (rumour has it that Johnson had an article ready explaining why he was joining the Remain side at the start of the campaign, too); she might be able to thread the needle of being a ‘party unity’ candidate, but it’ll be tough.
Johnson thought (and seemingly still thinks) he’d be able to get some renegotiation done if Leave won, and step forward as the man who drastically cut the British commitment to the EU down, He toyed with the idea that the UK could get a better (from his point of view) deal, and hold a 2nd referendum to say “now we’ll stay”, and the the rest of the EU would give in to this rather than lose the UK. He has always used bashing Brussels as a way to be popular – see this description from a fellow Brussels correspondent in the 90s: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/opinion/who-is-to-blame-for-brexits-appeal-british-newspapers.html?_r=0
Emma
Well, well. The Welsh are getting clever.
Sturgeon for PM!
Mnemosyne
@Villago Delenda Est:
FWIW, a lot of the complaints seem to be more about Eastern European immigrants so, at least in US terms, it’s xenophobia rather than our color-based racism.
(There is also racism in the UK, most frequently against people from South Asia, but the current bout of insularity seems to be including people from the “wrong” parts of Europe who are white in the US.)
debbie
A couple of my friends work in London and the posts they’re sharing on Facebook, while less foul-mouthed than the weekend’s tweets from Scotland, are pretty entertaining:
smith
@Baud: You’re right — it was the overtime rules on home care workers. My bad (but still a good result).
Trollhattan
@raven:
Okay, now convinced she’s performance art and deserves a role on “Ab Fab.”
rikyrah
The video is cute…coolest President ever!
…………………………………………..
BuzzFeedVerified account
@BuzzFeed
5 Things That Are Harder Than Registering To Vote, Featuring @POTUS #TurnUpToVote
rikyrah
Andrew Beatty @AndrewBeatty 7h7 hours ago Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Facing a constitutional crisis + economic turmoil, the UK essentially has no PM, no government + no opposition. Brexit is going ok so far.
debbie
@Trollhattan:
First, she should dump him for being a jackass and filming her. Second, it’s not very original.
dmsilev
@rikyrah: Time for Her Majesty the Queen to say something? Just to complete the “UK government in chaos” set.
rikyrah
Hey Kay,
I thought you would appreciate this.
The entire family – nothing but a Tribe of Con Men.
………………………………………
Joy ReidVerified account
@JoyAnnReid
Meanwhile, tales of another Trump licensing/real estate swindle, this time including Beltway media darling Ivanka:
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: Odds are, as Trollhattan said, it is an act and she is in on it.
Ruckus
@aimai:
So what you are saying is that no republican politician has every read or understood any thing you’ve written. Which is a nice summary BTW.
I think this gets to the heart of why so many people don’t like politicians, so many of them talk and act like Boris Johnson. Maybe not the degree but for sure the direction. And because they do, and get supported by much of the press, people believe them, hey the evidence is overwhelming, look at the press “coverage.”
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Then she’s an excellent straight person.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
Is it just me or does he get more handsome every day?
? Martin
@Mnemosyne:
The wall to raising salaries is that there’s an option there, one that didn’t exist a few decades ago. The first option is to outsource, which people understandably are upset about and which became economically attractive with the rise of containerization and rapid trans-continental communication, but the other option is to automate.
The problem manufacturing unions in particular are up against is before they were arguing for skilled/loyal workers against unskilled. It was a binary choice. Now it’s not. Now if you can raise the capital you just automate the work – buy a few million in robots (compared against the millions in future pension/healthcare obligations) and once installed they’ll not only work roughly for free, they don’t trigger payroll taxes, and they help avoid corporate taxes which are levied on excess capital, so these investments are at the very least tax deferments. Raise corporate taxes and in many cases you’ll actually hasten the loss of jobs.
The problem is that this non-labor productivity isn’t taxed and can be used as a tax avoidance mechanism (look at Amazon that runs almost zero net profits by continuously and aggressively re-investing capital mostly into non-labor productivity – robotics, datacenters, machine learning, etc.) You cannot get out of the austerity trap without finding a way to move taxes to output rather than labor. Half a century ago, they were largely identical. Now they aren’t, and they are getting further and further apart. Nobody even wants to recognize it as a problem. Labor doesn’t, so Democrats don’t. Corporate leaders don’t, so Republicans don’t. The workers notice, though, and they are pushing out the established leadership that is ignoring, choosing the best of a limited set of options – Sanders, Trump, Brexit, etc.
les
@Mnemosyne: FWIW, a lot of the complaints seem to be more about Eastern European immigrants so, at least in US terms, it’s xenophobia rather than our color-based racism.
rikyrah
Want folks to feel sorry for them for their cooning
Uh uh uh
…………………………………….
The lonely lives of Latinos for Trump
‘I don’t want to put my face out to the public. There are a lot of crazy people out there.’
06/26/16 07:20 AM EDT
MIAMI — Lifelong friends unfriend them on Facebook. Siblings and parents refuse to talk politics. Their kids are home from college stoked about the socialist Bernie Sanders.
Sure, their candidate may love them and be three weeks away from becoming the GOP presidential nominee. But it still isn’t easy being a Latino for Donald Trump.
From the get-go, with his big campaign announcement splash about Mexican immigrants being rapists and criminals, to his more recent broadside against a federal judge of Mexican heritage, the billionaire Republican’s incendiary rhetoric has made life more than a little complicated for many of his supporters who carry ties to places like Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and across Latin America.
But they insist that his business acumen will turn around the economy and that his unsparing views on illegal immigration will prevent people from jumping ahead of them in line for jobs or social services. Some are Cuban-American conservatives who think he’ll be a tougher defender of the nation’s freedoms than Hillary Clinton.
karensky
@Betty Cracker: Your kid is awesome!
Uncle Cosmo
@maya: Are we sure that name hasn’t been Anglicised from Niggling Falange?
IIRC, Falange came out with a statement immediately the polls had closed regretting that the Remain side had triumphed. Pair that with his later comment that of course the “£350m per day” the EU allegedly drains from the UK would not, as promised, be put toward the NHS, & you get the drift of the Brexeunt movement. Rarely does one see the plot of The Producers played out IRL to more faithful & drastic effect. I suggest cracking a Guinness, nuking some microwave bangers & mash, pulling up a TV tray-table & enjoying the spectacle of the flustercuckolds flustering away from a safe distance–the width of the Atlantic ought to suffice.
bemused
@rikyrah:
People that vote on an issue without knowing a single accurate thing about the issue or what the consequences of either vote might be are only listening to their friends and peers who are just as oblivious. None of them trust the politicians but they sure pay attention to what their own crowd believes, each other.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
And for jobs that can’t be automated?
I mean, I can sort of see the argument for jobs that can be easily outsourced or automated, but there are MILLIONS of jobs that can’t be, primarily service jobs. What’s the rationale for continuing to pay sub-minimum wages to childcare workers, healthcare workers, store clerks — the very jobs that CAN’T be outsourced or automated?
Sorry, but it’s a dodge. It skips over all of the non-automated jobs that aren’t outsourceable and refuses to answer the question of what the barrier is to raising wages for those jobs other than pure greed.
Notice that when the state of California called Amazon out for having facilities in the state but not collecting sales tax, Amazon grumbled and threatened and whined, but they started collecting and paying sales tax because they didn’t have anywhere else to put those warehouses. Automating them didn’t change the geographic realities of transporting goods from place to place.
ETA: Even your favorite example of the Apple Store can never be fully automated, because you still need people to receive the shipments and stock the shelves. Until you can get rid of shopping malls and grocery stores, you will always need people to help run them.
rikyrah
Elections have consequences.
And, so does not voting.
Young Britons are fuming about Brexit outcome, but many didn’t vote.
In a democracy, it’s those who turn out in larger numbers, not necessarily those with the highest stakes, who carry the day.
June 27, 2016
A large proportion of British youths are concentrated in cities, where they study or have entry-level jobs, so they represented one major factor in cities being centers of the “remain” camp. But seniors vastly outnumbered them at the ballot box.
Iowa Old Lady
The dismayed leave voters are kin to those who think Trump doesn’t mean what he says. I don’t understand the value placed on someone who even they assume is lying.
ThresherK
@Uncle Cosmo: Did Sarah Palin offer her advice on what to do with that “350M lb* per day”? I’ve been waiting for an American right-winger to say “It’s your money” and “Tax cut!”
That the British public are infuriated that this money’s not going to the NHS shows they’ve got a higher demand of their government than most Americans do, a point lost on American media.
Renie
@raven: OMG that woman is off her rocker. I can’t believe the ignorance; she seems like a RWNJ voter here. And why is that guy filming her and letting everyone know he has a stupid girlfriend.
TS
@dmsilev:
The Queen takes advice from the PM – she does not advise. The days are long gone when the Monarchy had any say in government. Holding on to the day job and showing up for the tourists is their main role. Going to need that tourist money more and more to prop up the £
Can’t comment on what Prince Phillip might say – he is known for foot in mouth comments.
rikyrah
Two-Thirds Say Obama Tried to Make Race Relations Better
ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON
Jun 27, 2016, 1:41 PM ET
Almost eight years after electing a black president, vast majorities of blacks and Hispanics think President Barack Obama at least tried to make race relations in the United States better, according to a poll released Monday.
But only about half of whites think Obama made race relations better or at least tried to make race relations better but failed. Almost a third of whites said the president “made race relations worse.”
The Pew Research Center report also suggested there is still a stark difference in attitudes about race relations among racial and ethnic groups.
For example, whites were split on the status of race relations, with 46 percent saying they are generally good overall and 45 percent saying they are generally bad. But blacks were less optimistic, with 61 percent saying that race relations are bad and 34 percent saying that they are good.
Many people had hope that Obama’s historic election would bring about better race relations, said Juliana Horowitz, a Pew associate director who helped craft the poll.
Sixty-two percent of Americans said the president himself made race relations better or at least tried to make race relations better, but a full 25 percent said he made things worse. The poll did not ask for specifics in how Obama made race relations better or worse.
SiubhanDuinne
@Splitting Image:
Poor bastard lost a leg to necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease).
rikyrah
Jesse Williams Had More to Say After BET Speech – JetMag.com
raven
@Renie: I think it’s a put on, there a a number of videos like that and they are getting tons of hits.
Tony J
@rikyrah:
Have to say, yes. Even those people in Britain who said it was very likely the Leave nutters might win because of the propaganda of the right-wing Press always thought that the nation as whole would probably make them look a bit stupid by voting comfortably for Remain and everything would be just fine.
That serene confidence lasted until the referendum results actually started coming in, when they finally realised that all those bigoted arseholes who actually believed the crap in the papers only arseholes read? They we’re as numerous as the arseholes who voted Tory two years ago. And the penny dropped.
Maybe they should have voted.
Cookie Monster
No-one’s mentioned it for a while, but Boris is actually a US Citizen. Born in New York.
hovercraft
Tweety, Hugh Hewitt, and Dana Loech discussing anything makes you dumber. Two liars and an ignoramus whose ignorance of the electorate makes him susceptible to whatever bullshit they are peddling. HH calling her the furthest, leftyest nominee ever. All three of them see Brexit as the biggest omen ever, Hillary is doomed. And they all agreed that Warren would be the worst pick ever and, would cause the loss of Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia where all the coal miners who have voted for her in the past would turn on her. I didn’t know those first two were in play.
The Ancient Randonneur
@rikyrah: That is the part of the story that is only now being told. Young voters not turning out? Shocking. That is why I wasn’t all that sympathetic to the cries of foul after the results were announced. Turnout in Leave areas was substantially higher than in Remain areas of England and Wales. Scotland and the north of Ireland both had good turnout but I think the combined population is only 8 million. They have legitimate grievances, especially Sinn Fein who took into account the open border which for all intents made the country feel more unified. This referendum result changes the calculus dramatically.
phoebes from highland park
@rikyrah: Where is the article about Trump and his children you’re referring to? I’d love to know where it is and get a link. Thanks.
SiubhanDuinne
@MattF:
Jesus Hamilton Christ curled up in a champagne flute, how many of these scams are out there, anyhow? Why the hell hasn’t he gone to jail multiple times? Or even once?
Emma
@TS: Actually, the Queen’s role is to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. There was a documentary a few years ago (Silver Jubilee, I think) where a number of her PMs were interviewed and to a man they said they consulted her as she often knew better than they did, especially in social issues.
Too bad Cameron was such a smart guy he didn’t need advice.
rikyrah
I gotta get in on this ‘ study’ grift:
@CBSNews
White and black Americans tend to live in “different economic worlds,” new study finds:
The Ancient Randonneur
@Cookie Monster: And Donald Trump’s emo alter ego can stay in the UK!
@BettyCracker: Please thank your daughter for giving me a new Trump insult. Your kiddo is obviously a product of effective parenting.
Uncle Cosmo
Um, FTR that was £350m per week. So £50m per day. Mayo gulpa. Still ain’t coming back to the NHS no way no how no when.
The Ancient Randonneur
@SiubhanDuinne:
Consequences are for the little people.
gorram
I think there’s a lot of messy moving parts here that I suppose demonstrate how little Boris was thinking this through:
-Scotland and Northern Ireland have both massively benefited from EU membership, both in terms of EU regional protections guaranteeing that more of the proceeds from local resources / labor stay in their communities, and in Ulster specifically by reducing the militarization at the border and the relevancy of the border there in general. That’s why, outside of the extremists who are predominantly settlers to those regions who have accrued most of the benefits of being within the UK and received literal UK military protection from locals, there’s little interest in leaving the EU but staying within the UK. Sure, leave the hassles of the EU behind, but the UK just made two new headaches for itself in terms of longstanding separatist movements now having the rhetorical ammunition of being able to point to a clear divergence of national goals as well as an upswing in recruits and attention.
-Northern Ireland is actually a uniquely disastrous case of that, since while Scotland has it’s ultranationalists (of both Scottish and UK preferring varieties), the Ulster extremists have been organized and armed and revanchist for most of the past century, as a result of Irish independence south of the partition. While many voters in Northern Ireland aren’t necessarily in favor of becoming part of the Republic of Ireland or more generally aren’t invested in where the border ends up, the minority who fiercely do not want the border to change (or at least, move towards or over them), are also some of the biggest supporters of the Brexit – because they perceive EU oversight and more general global attention as part of what helped create the Good Friday agreement and related other terms of the 1990s peace process. An isolationist UK is one they see as potentially going back to Thatcherite days of quietly arming the UVF and UDA. Expect The Troubles to go hot again, in short. This time, however, the border hasn’t been carefully redrawn to give that group a slim majority of the population but demographic shifts have rendered them a minority, the Republic of Ireland isn’t something of an international red-haired step-child but an EU member, and the Unionist bloc is no longer the besieged heralds of civilization but borderline theocratic colonial leftovers in the eyes of several international players (for instance, the US, which has had not only JFK but Clinton and Obama weigh in as people with Irish ancestry on the issue!).
-Wales, meanwhile has vastly more euroskepticism because EU protections haven’t as directly or demonstrably affected Welsh people’s security or economic well being. Likewise, as the originators of the NHS, they’re pretty protective of that, so any sort of argument that it could be bolstered by a Brexit is going to push that at least a few points further in the polls. That said, all of those are short term reasons that made a Brexit somewhat palatable or at least not unattractive. With a) the increasing isolation of Wales as potentially the only non-English “nation” in the UK b) the entire narrative about EU dues being instead invested in the UK crashing down, the nationalist question in Wales and the anti-poverty/austerity question are going to start converging in the way they have in Scotland in the past couple of years. Currently, Scotland’s more aggressively gaelic parties as well as the UK-broad labor party play second fiddle to the Scottish National Party. Alternatively, in Wales, the Tories have actually done fairly well outside of a few constituencies because they just barely outcompete Plaid Cymru (nationalist) and Labor (progressive) as individual parties. The only places that isn’t at least some of the time true are Cardiff (urban and progressive and safely Labor), traditional Labor tracts often with coalmining histories (typically Labor but with the odd Plaid Cymru year), and parts of the agrarian rural north in Wales (just about the only regular Plaid Cymru victories). It’s worth noting that while NHS lines played fairly well in many of those traditional labor tracts, Cardiff and a good chunk of the rural Welsh North voted for Bremain – that’s the beginnings of a less euroskeptical Welsh separatist movement, able to articulate itself as a solution to English colonialism, racism, and poverty/austerity all at the same time.
In short, this doesn’t just strike me as necessarily about race, but also deeply about ethnically-charged regional identities within the UK, and what just happened is that the English majority outvoted, with the help of some coercion and duping, those smaller nations within the UK. Expect Welsh devolution to suddenly be an issue again, the Scottish Referendum to come back, and an Irish border poll. England (and Wales) might have just voted to leave the EU, but now there’s going to be some talk about leaving the UK.
Mnemosyne
@gorram:
Didn’t Ian Paisley Jr. come out in favor of at least exploring the idea of unification with the Republic of Ireland? I found that pretty astonishing.
Emma
@Mnemosyne: He’s advising his constituents to get Irish Republic passports if they qualify.
Uncle Cosmo
@Mnemosyne: True as far as it goes…but it doesn’t go far enough. Corpitalists have done a bang-up job of automating damn near everything. You can’t for example automate everything involved in a point-of-sale operation, because occasionally there are fuckups that require human intervention. But you can reduce the number of personnel required to an absolute minimum. Look no further than your local stupormarket, where one employee is assigned to 4-6 self-service checkouts & is kept in constant motion handling special instances & scanner fuckups. Look no further than telephone tech support where you stumble between the branches of the option tree until finally encountering a live human voice which turns out to be in Hyderabad & has little understanding of your specific concern.
Computers will eventually make all of us redundant. It won’t even take strong AI; all that will be needed is programming that can pass the dumbed-down Turing test of making that caller to customer support believe that the voice on the other end of the line belongs to a real human. Judging from recent developments in the political sphere, that’s not going to be a high bar to scale.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
Wow. Just wow.
SiubhanDuinne
@Emma:
I love all these Dickensian names. Mr Crabb. Ms Sturgeon. Mr Salmond.
(Dickensian = fishy)
rikyrah
@MomSense:
He has aged in the role, but it seems that the aging has stopped. And, he’s just becoming more ‘distinguished’, if you understand what I mean.
rikyrah
@phoebes from highland park:
It’s in the LA Times. Here.
SiubhanDuinne
@hovercraft:
I wouldn’t have said anything here, only that you mentioned Tweety. Someone on his show this evening stated that if Elizabeth Warren were to be named HRC’s running mate, “she’d be the first female VP candidate ever on the Democratic side.” And I’m thinking, “Wait, you idiot, what about Geraldine Ferraro in 1984?” But did Tweety, the great scholar of politics in the 1980s, bother to correct the reporter? NO HE DID NOT.
Uncle Cosmo
@Emma: And damn near all of them do. Anyone who was born on Irish soil qualifies for a passport issued by the Irish Republic.
Here’s a worthwhile Guardian article about the fallout. The English have placed a bomb under the Irish peace process:
I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again: Sufficiently astute political leadership in the Republic could negotiate sufficient cultural guarantees to Northern Protestants that attaching Ulster to a federal Irish Republic (& by extension the EU) might be a credible alternative to staying in the Untied (sic) Kingdom.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne:
Apple Stores are deliberately anti-automated. They are overstaffed with no dedicated clerical/menial staff jobs (no cashiers, no stocking, etc). The whole point of the Apple Store is to make the human connection with the customer. But they are also among the best paid jobs in retail for that reason. And even though the Apple Store is reliably the most expensive place to buy merchandise, they outsell any other retail establishment including far more overpriced places like Tiffanies by a factor of 3 or 4. People are happy to pay for that connection and with 13% of all retail now being online, and growing steadily, other retailers should take note.
So I am very pro-service jobs because they are much less exposed to automation because they are inherently value-add, and people should value and pay for human experience. They keep calling for baristas to be automated, but that’s not their role in the economy. We’ve had coffee vending machines forever – they’ve been automated for decades yet they’re almost universally rejected because Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee, it sells an experience. The two coffee shops I frequent the staff know me, they know my drink, they say hi, we chat about this and that. I’m really paying for a friendly morning interaction to start my day, using coffee as an excuse. That may sound sad, but that’s what Starbucks is selling – a pleasant habit – which is why there are so fucking many of them, because a long line or a difficult to get to location isn’t pleasant.
But that’s not enough. The number of manufacturing and other non-value-add jobs is massive. Automated truck driving will displace up to 6 million workers. That’s a lot of Apple Store employees. That’s also a big shift for those workers. There’s issues of geography (service jobs are in population centers, particularly higher income areas, but automated jobs largely are rural/semi-rural and tend to be lower-income) so families need to be uprooted, issues of training an education, and issues of access – how many service job interviews will even be granted to someone with 20 years experience driving a truck?
So there’s upsides to the economy as you note, but they don’t appear to be large enough (certainly not without the top line growth taking place which comes from finance, automation, etc.) and there is no reliable/predictable path for displaced workers into these jobs. These are big structural economic problems that are mostly being ignored, and even so, you have the decades long gap between wage share and economic output which inevitably means that those workers (like me) that happen to be in positions that can leverage automation for productivity (in my case its writing code to increase knowledge worker productivity, not robotics for manufacturing) will be increasingly rewarded under this system. Now, I’m doing better, but I’m also doing the equivalent of 3-4 positions from 10 years ago. I’m not earning 3x-4x as much for the government to tax. I’m not paying 3x-4x as much in payroll taxes. My productivity gains have boosted output, but they haven’t benefitted the pool of money that is needed to reverse austerity measures. And nobody has really tried to address the problem from this perspective. You can tax me more, sure, but it’ll never come close to what those 3-4 other workers would have paid. You can tax profits, but odds are those potential profits flowed back into capex to allow for the 3-4 workers to not be hired, so those taxes are missed as well. So the extra productivity is effectively untaxed, and the social safety nets need that money.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne:
Pecksniff?
SiubhanDuinne
@Emma:
If you’re interested, and in the U.S. (I don’t know what the schedule is in other countries), you might want to check out nearby cinemas for The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, on Tuesdsy, July 19. Check out fathomevents.com for details. I’ve seen this play three times so far (on screen only, alas) and will be seeing it again in a few weeks’ time. It is a fascinating timeline of the Queen’s private weekly audiences with her Prime Ministers since the earliest days of her reign in 1952.
? Martin
@Uncle Cosmo:
Dude, Amazon does over $100B in retail revenue and is almost fully automated from end-to-end, down to fulfillment. Hell, their most valuable value-add content (their reviews) are donated by the people that already send them money. Amazon is getting paid for their most valuable asset.
Emma
@SiubhanDuinne: Don’t you though? It’s like the Conservative Fish Tank. Except Sturgeon, she’s only a possible guest.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
There is red wine splutter all over my iPad screen.
Emma
@SiubhanDuinne: I’ll check it out. A Brit friend says he’d pay good money to see Cameron’s next Audience.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: My job here is done.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
You skipped over my question: why are we not paying service workers more right now?
It has nothing to do with “productivity,” and taxing productivity doesn’t raise wages for people who have non-automated jobs.
People get frustrated with you because you wander off onto tangents about “productivity” when the problem is WAGES. Productivity massively increased while wages stagnated, and that’s not solely or even primarily due to automation.
A minimum income isn’t going to do much for someone who’s still only getting paid $8 an hour while the corporation she works for makes massive profits. You’re basically saying we should fully embrace the Wal-Mart model and let companies pay artificially low wages that are made up for by taxpayer money. That’s insane.
Ruckus
@Uncle Cosmo:
I agree that a lot of jobs can be automated, badly by the way, as you pointed out, but there are many jobs that just can not be automated or at least not automated at anything like a reasonable cost. I build tooling for several industries, medical and aerospace among them. Because many of the items we build are in ones to maybe 5 pieces, they just are not reasonably automated. The cost of the machines and the people to run them for such few pieces far, far outstrips the current cost of labor, even when you account for the hourly wage being only part of the total cost of labor. This is but one example and in manufacturing that can not be automated. Most construction is that way, much retail is that way, even if the PTB in retail doesn’t see things that way, medical/dental can not be either. Banking can be to a degree, I mean sure it’s nicer to have humans to discuss having your wallet vacuumed, rather than an ATM but of course the PTB in banks could give a shit that you are actually happy with the service or lack there of.
Mnemosyne
@Uncle Cosmo:
I work in an archive that preserves artworks on paper. Please explain how to automate the process of examining the artwork for tears, accretions, and other damage; noting and repairing that damage; putting each individual piece of paper into folders with similar pieces of artwork; and storing it in climate-controlled vaults where it can be easily accessed as needed.
We discovered that the fastest and most efficient way to digitize our collection is to have humans essentially take high-res photographs of each piece, because further automation damages it.
Even better, please show the robot that can change a diaper on a human.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think that’s what Martin is saying. What he is saying is that in so many jobs that even if you paid double the current minimum wage, it wouldn’t make up for the bad way we tax productivity. Our basic tax code was set up decades ago to tax labor, when that was what most everyone but the rich did, physical labor. Now that we (and many, many other parts of the world) no longer count physical labor for as much a portion of the productivity (and by that I mean actual physical labor, pick/shovel/lifting/etc.) because much of our work has been, if not automated, at least less physically involved. And that that has been automated/computerized requires much less human hours to accomplish so requires fewer people, hence less taxes. Less taxes per capita means less spend per capita, or less accomplished by government. Throw in those neanderthals on the right……
sherparick
Boris Johnson = Francis Urquart: And if you are an obstacle to him getting into No. 10 Downing, don’t stand to close to the edge in Underground. https://www.google.com/search?q=house+of+cards+bbc&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
That is why Boris played the Briexit card like he has. He also wants to turn England into an off-shore, low taxes (if you are rich), libertarian, greater Cayman Islands libertarian paradise.
For a nice take down on what a liar this clown is, see: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2016/jun/27/what-boris-johnson-said-about-brexit-and-what-he-really-meant
nutella
@Emma:
I would be surprised if it didn’t include Liz beating Cameron about the head and shoulders with her handbag.
dogwood
@sherparick:
I think Francis Urquart threw her off a building. Frank Underwood used the subway.
Gvg
@? Martin: amazon is big but frankly they aren’t usually the best deal nor do they always have what I want. Books, where they started, yes, other things not so much. I buy from eBay more than Amazon. Walmart still gets my business because of where I live but I honestly think they are going to cycle down and someone else rise soon. I have lived to see several discount king chainsaw ore boom then disappear and Walmart seems to me to be showing signs of not being as top of their game anymore. Automation is an illusion for them. They don’t like paying so they never have enough clerks the lines are too long, the stores are dirty a year old and that stupid automatic checkout usually doesn’t work right. Cheapskates trying to use automation do it badly.
I don’t believe automatic trucks are anywhere near reality.
Omnes Omnibus
@dogwood: Correct.
The Lodger
@SiubhanDuinne: I’m waiting for Simon Squid myself.
VOR
Point 1: Vote was intentionally called at a time when students were away from school – i.e. out of the districts they normally vote in.
Point 2: The 350M pound per week number was always exaggerated. After EU rebate, actual number about half that, and not even counting EU monies flowing to things like research at UK universities.
Point 3: Whenever I see Boris Johnson, I think of a scene in the movie Animal House where the group gets back from the road trip and Flounder’s car is trashed. So they tell him “You fucked up, you trusted us”.
Miss Bianca
@SiubhanDuinne: I didn’t realize that the “H” in Jesus H. Christ stood for “Hamilton”! This wonderful world!
Vhh
X
Martha from Augusta
@nutella: sic the royal corgis!
sherparick
@dogwood: I have become confused in my old age. I would not sand around edges of any roofs or windows with Boris around.
Miss Bianca
@gorram: nice analysis!
@Mnemosyne: Hell, way I heard it, Junior Paisley was getting *himself* an Irish passport!
Omnes Omnibus
Then there is this from Tina Brown.
Miss Bianca
@Uncle Cosmo: I find myself thinking that Brexit may be what finally drives a United Ireland – or causes another descent into bloodbath. Hell, I have friends in Belfast – they’ve got to be feeling sick right now.
sinnedbackwards
@Gavin: Keeping the pound is not a carve-out for the UK. Members have to opt-in, and even prove their suitability, to join the Euro. The default is to stay out.
Where the Euro has weakened democratic accountabilty in the EU is that several of the southern joiners did it explicitly to force labor market, spending and tax reforms that they could not get past their voters. I lived in Italy for four years in the 70s and followed this issue closely in the Italian press; a main justification for ditching the Lira for the Euro was that Mommy Europe would force them to behave.
It was a political miscalculation. They overdrew their credit and have been hammered, but it has still largely not led to the desired reforms.
It’s likely that the Greek government cooked the books in order to qualify in the first place. See where that got them?
Many European countries still have substantial rent-seeking sectors in their economies. This makes them uncompetitive with other parts of Europe. The result is that the EU members are not, in the jargon, an optimal currency area.
And there is a fundamental contradiction between democracy and using the EU bureaucrats to reform bad economic practices. That is what we are seeing being played out right now.
KS in MA
@nutella: This. It’s appalling how few references to austerity there have been in the media after the vote. I assume that was true before the vote as well.
polyorchnid octopunch
@WarMunchkin: I dunno. I can understand it. The hostile MPs are all from the Blairite faction of the Labour party, and intend to merrily continue their course completely disconnected from what their voters and the membership of their party want. There is a need for elites to re-remember that they are not wholly disconnected from their plebes.
And I see no indication whatsoever that Sanders is pondering a third-party run; that’s simply in the febrile imaginations of the more deranged part of his base.
Barney
@sinnedbackwards: No, there was an explicit opt-out for the UK about the euro, in the Maastricht Treaty – see http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=URISERV%3Al25060
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne: They don’t consider those people to be skilled labor & feel that some poor devil will take the $9.50 an hour job.
Paul in KY
@Emma: Well, either she fucked up with Blair vis a vis Iraq or wasn’t consulted or said not to do it & the fucker did anyway.
Uncle Cosmo
@Mnemosyne: Please stop willfully misunderstanding what I posted:
Shall we go through your job description?
Gladly:
Your job is better & more efficiently done at this point in time by a human being. Bully for you! Now, How many jobs are there in that category? How many tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade? Answers: Not nearly enough in a corpitalism-gold-in-tooth-&-claw earn-your-living-or-be-shat-on economy; and, Fewer & fewer.
We the Peeps have already been thoroughly trained to expect less & less in the way of one-off human-created service from those who serve us, all in the (supposed) service of cheaper for us. We navigate those telephone option trees so that the “service” can fit us into one or another Procrustean bed, or in hopes that we’ll get so frustrated we’ll go away & not bother them.
The problem is that crony-corpitalism has us all thinking we are customers (who must be served) &/or shareholders (who must be provided income for mere possession of “assets”). (And to the extent that we have 401k’s or pensions, we are the latter!) The farther this goes, the easier it is for the corpitalists to insist that neither consumers nor shareholders should have to contribute some of their undeservedly-added value (in the form of taxation) to support the economy that funds & serves them. And that’s the rub.
(BTW, that diaper-changing robot? Observe this patent for a robotic nanny. It may not be ready for dooty ;^D quite yet, but it’s coming–& it will be sold as a way for Mom & Dad to keep their paws clean & [sotto voce] not be tempted to belt the little squirming bastard in a moment of utter frustrated rage…)
gorram
@Mnemosyne: I can’t find him having said that, but admittedly I don’t follow the Paisleys much because they tend to leave a bitter taste in my mouth. The closest thing I can find is from Sr in 2010, when he took advantage of the banking crisis in Ireland to call for reunification… via dissolution of the Republic as a state. Not quite what Sinn Féin has in mind for the new border poll!
Jr did initially say he would be happy to help people get RoI passports while they still can, but looking at that sideways it’s the same old Ulsterite madness dressed in camouflage. Who’s going to apply for them? (Irish mostly, terrified people of color just trying to get out right now secondly.) How will that affect the voting power of the Unionist bloc? (It’ll stand to gain.) Since then he’s doubled down on saying that people should accept the Brexit vote, implicitly giving support to Farage and the other extremists trying to get Cameron to keep his word and trigger Amendment 50 and the whole exit process proper. Yikes!
Tehanu
@maya:
Front row seat? He should be on the stage, for the 30 seconds or so it’d take to shut his racist, lying mouth up permanently. The ink wasn’t even dry on the “Leave Won” announcement before he started back-tracking on the NHS money.
Bill Arnold
@Mnemosyne:
IMO this would be a holy-grail consumer item for 10s of millions of parents, maybe 100s of millions worldwide. If it were believed (by them) to be safe. So the incentive is there to invent, though it would need to be defended from the lawyers.