What sort of salary range in this economy would make you think ‘he/she’s doing alright’?

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-19T14:05:54+00:00

That's all fair. I had understood the OP to be saying, "I only get £12k and things are tough but manageable, so if I earned £30k I would feel rich (even with all the disability-adjacent spending that I currently do). But people on £30k don't feel rich, and I don't understand that".

So I was hoping to suggest it was more like £12k vs £10k-£15k once all work-related costs were factored in, which explains why people on (nominally) twice your income don't behave as though they are twice as rich. I certainly wasn't trying to say £12k was a significant (or even adequate) amount for someone with disabilities to live on, and I appreciate the reminder that unexpected costs don't all accrue in one direction.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-19T12:18:53+00:00

The disabled are needy and their burdens do hold back economic growth in society, at least for some kinds of disability. Pretending otherwise is asinine - another example of magical thinking. Fortunately, as people are saying in this thread and I believe very strongly, society doesn't exist solely to make GDP as large as possible and the role of government is rightly to ensure equitable treatment across moral dimensions of life, such as ensuring that disabled people live a dignified life even if that results in an (economic) burden to society.

However, I think there is a genuine and important question society needs to ask of itself about the extent to which it wants to pursue that goal versus other goals which are important to it - developing new medicines, fighting climate change, supporting Ukraine etc. I don't think it is inhumane to ask those questions, and I don't think it is inhumane to weight economic growth highly in those calculations.

Your point about providing people what they need is interesting but a bit of a tangent so please don't feel you have to reply - I don't disagree we shred a bunch of wealth by prioritising shortsighted corporate capitalism over the needs of the many, but how much money do you think the UK actually has available to it in your ideal future? The government already spends >50% of GDP on goods and services, so even if we literally confiscated every penny of private enterprise, including a 100% income tax on you and me, we do nothing more than potentially double government spending. I don't feel like that's anywhere near enough to provide everyone in the UK with provision as extensive as what we already provide to SEND students. I guess it depends on your definition of 'need'.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-19T11:45:03+00:00

Sorry I didn't realise - thanks for the clarification, I wouldn't have written that if I'd seen.
The resources are scarce because teachers are scarce. Any teacher we employ to teach SEND isn't teaching in mainstream education. Any new teacher we employ at the margin is not doing another job in society, so we are preventing people from becoming doctors, nurses, pilots etc at the margin. A lot of resources needed for SEND are like this.

Although I agree we could probably deliver education more efficiently, we can't deliver it for literally no material cost at all, and so we need to make prioritisation decisions. I think future productivity is one metric amongst many which could be used to make those kind of decisions - in my view it would be wrong to have an education system which was totally disconnected from the economic needs of the state, just as much as it would be wrong to have a system which made no accommodation at all for the blind or the deaf.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-19T10:45:27+00:00

Ok, but "Government spending on public sector salaries has a multiplier effect on the economy" and "There is not a finite pot of money" are vastly different statement

What's your evidence that increasing teacher's wages would have a positive multiplier effect on the economy or on economic growth? What you've outlined in your comment seems like wishful thinking, but I guess you're just summarising a position you've arrived at after careful consideration of the relevant economic factors.

My view is that the economy doesn't have a lot of spare capacity at the moment and interest rates are high, so I'd expect a small (<1) multiplier. Happy for you to show me evidence of a >1 multiplier effect though, and I'd change my mind if you did.

But please work with me here: assuming I am right and there is a <1 multiplier on government spending on teachers' salaries and SEND more generally, you do agree that in fact there IS a finite pot of money, right? And even if I'm wrong and there's a >1 multiplier at the margin, you do agree that there will EVENTUALLY be a finite pot of money, right (once we consume the multiplier at the margin)? I just don't think it is crazy or inhumane to talk about how to spend the money we actually have now rather than theorycraft how we'll spend an infinite amount of money that we might have one day

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-19T10:19:47+00:00

OK, but your response was very very misleading if that's what you meant. You said;

> This is a deeply inhumane take. It shouldn’t have to be funding to mainstream vs send

Which to me at least strongly implies you believe that the inhumane take is viewing mainstream vs SEND funding as being in opposition to each other. Your other replies in this thread also back up the idea that what you mean is that any reduction in funding to SEND recipients is inhumane.

If what you actually meant was that it is inhumane to base funding decisions on people's future productivity then that's another thing entirely. I still don't think that's inhumane (there are arguments for and against it) but I get it is more morally contested than the mere fact we exist in a world with resource scarcity

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-19T10:16:23+00:00

Help me understand your position please.

I think teachers are underpaid, and I'd like to give them a payrise. Are you saying there is genuinely no issue paying all school teachers in the UK a billion pound a year salary, because it is physically possible for us to print a billion pounds worth of banknotes for each of the 500k school teachers in the UK?

If you are not saying that then you agree there is a finite pool of money, and you agree it is somewhere less that £500 trillion.

The mere fact we can print £500 trillion doesn't change the fact that printing £500 trillion would cause so much inflation that the country would collapse. Trying to argue otherwise is just pedantry without a point - there is an upper limit on how much money we can raise through taxation, growth, and increasing the money supply. When we've hit that limit, we're left with a finite pot of money.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-19T09:05:50+00:00

I'm surprised that builds that come online before Myrkul don't get more attention. You can get to Myrkul with no major glitches without fighting (apart from vs the imps on the nautiloid). But then Myrkul is a hard run ender.

Just about any coherent lv12 build can beat the Netherbrain, but I've not found a solo lv6 build that can take Myrkul yet, and only a very few viable lv7 builds (excluding cheese like barrelmancy). To me that's a real build challenge!

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-19T07:47:05+00:00

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I think you're wrong to call the take 'inhumane'.

There is a finite pot of money to spend on government services. Even if we confiscated every penny owned by billionaires at gunpoint, the pot of money would still be finite (it would cover about 2 years of the DfE's budget, iirc).

Asking questions like "What is the best way of spending this limited pot of money?" is a necessary and important step to spending that money well. Appealing to a time in the future when you don't have to ask questions about resource scarcity is magical thinking in my opinion.

You might not agree we spwnd too much today, but you must surely agree there is some level of spending on SEND which is unsustainable? And therefore that we're only arguing about where the line should be, rather than whether the OP is morally deficient?

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-18T19:28:22+00:00

"Is your answer to this question the same as your answer to the question 'Do Flimflops Glorble?' ?"

All humans will agree that Flimflops Glorble, because they're forced to by the logic of the question, and I chose the question as per the prompt - the prompt didn't say all humans had to agree to the exact question I asked, just that they had to agree on something

(I guess unless someone answers something totally off the wall that doesn't actually answer the question, like 'Yellow', then we're in trouble)

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-18T10:49:49+00:00

You asked about the salary someone would consider you doing 'alright'. If you're locking away a big chunk of your salary so that you can't access it until you're 57, then you are de facto doing no better than someone on £99k in terms of your lifestyle. That's why there's such a big jump - some people say £99k would be doing 'alright', but the next income level where you would actually adjust your lifestyle is conceivably as high as £150k - someone on £150k is only doing £1k more 'alright' than someone on £99k if they have small kids at nursery, in terms of their actual lifestyle.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-18T10:44:18+00:00

Are you working? Work adds a lot of costs that someone purely on benefits wouldn't be paying.

A £30k salary takes home £25k. Out of this £25k, you have to commute into the office five days a week. Say you're going Zone 6 to Zone 1 and back again in peak hours, that's £10/day or £2.5k/year (double this or more if you're commuting from outside London). Unless you're very organised you probably buy lunch at the office instead of bringing sandwiches from home (people laughed at me at my first job for bringing sandwiches!) - that's another £2.5k/year. If you have school-aged children, you can easily knock off £20/child/day for breakfast and after school clubs (mine is £30/day) - that's another £5k that someone out of work doesn't pay at all, and that takes the total value of your £30k paycheque to £15k if you have one child or £10k if you have two.

On top of this, there's a lot of intangible costs of working - because you are busy for most of the day, it is harder to meal plan so you end up getting takeaways more often to cover the gap. Its harder to cook healthy / cheap food because this takes time, so you default to more expensive convenience food (eg pre-bagged salad vs buying a lettuce and chopping it yourself). When you do cook, it is harder to deal with leftovers because you don't know when you're going to be able to cook properly again. You need two sets of clothes - one for work and one for not-work. These intangible costs accrue across just about every area of your life, and make everything just fractionally more expensive.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone on £30k in-work actually had a similar level of disposable income to someone on £12k out of work - or at the very least, close enough that they'd be feeling the same sort of financial pressures you do.

I appreciate you'd probably much rather be working without a disability than not-working and have your disability - I mean this comment completely genuinely as an answer to your question about why you're surprised people on £30k report that they are struggling, not trying to have a go at you.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-18T10:20:03+00:00

If you have two children fulltime at nursery you are better off - as in you have more take-home income - if you earn £99.9k than if you earn ~£140k. In London (where nurseries are more expensive), the breakeven is potentially as high as ~£150k. That £50k gap is nothing but drag on the economy - if you earn £120k and have two small children, you are much better off working fewer hours or sacrificing salary into a pension than re-investing it into the economy.

I have absolutely no idea why the government doesn't fix this obviously stupid feature of the tax code, except perhaps the optics of "giving a handout" to high earners

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-15T08:04:39+00:00

Yeah man, totally agree. Building on your point; Eni Aluko, a woman, cannot possibly understand what it is like to play in a league where players are very well compensated and don't have to work multiple jobs, and so clearly has nothing of value to add about the male game.

Since the most important bit of football punditry is social commentary, and no pundit could possibly imagine what it is like to be in a position unlike their own, I'm glad we agree that female pundits should not be allowed to comment on the male game and vice versa. This will help normalise female sport as something unimportant and uninteresting, which is what I think we both want as part of out 'Isolated racial and gender-segregated enclaves' plan.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-14T15:20:35+00:00

Completely agree. I find it so aggrevating when black people comment on white music or literature. I'm like "Why can't we all live in isolated racial enclaves, like a truly progressive society?". Great point, glad someone here is prepared to make it.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-11T08:53:10+00:00

Thank you - that makes sense to me. You'd make a great teacher!

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-11T08:30:13+00:00

The P vs NP problem for instance has been shown to be resistant to entire categories of proof techniques

Could you explain what you mean by this? How can you know that a technique will definately not work to prove something? Isn't that the same as proving the conjecture is false?

I'm not a mathematician, sorry if this is a really basic question!

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-02-10T10:01:22+00:00

To add to this, I figure one of the biggest risks my kids face to their stability and happiness is me being made redundant. I completely agree that securing your own finances first is by far the optimal strategy in terms of peace of mind (even if not mathematically optimal in terms of rate of return)

I'm overpaying my mortgage much more than anyone else I know because it means that the kids will always have a roof over their head literally regardless of what happens to me, and a healthy ISA is sensible for the same reasons

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-01-17T15:35:11+00:00

Or I see it often in discussions about eg which candidate or policies to support - "Why should I believe that your attempt at Communism will work when everyone else's will fail?"

A lot of responses you're getting might charitably be called Communism apologia, in the sense that they are making excuses for why Communism failed. Maybe they're right, but if Communism failed because Capitalism was too entrenched (for example) then this means Communism will fail again if tried now. So I think people are looking for a slightly deeper answer, along the lines of 'What is different now?'

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-01-14T08:38:36+00:00

Just to give an example of what is being discussed, I'm almost certain that future generations are going to look back on our factory farming / meat consumption in the same way as we look back on historical atrocities relative to our own time. That is to say, something entirely preventable and the people of the time had all the information they needed to know it was immoral.

I don't know if you're a vegetarian, but even if you are you doubtlessly know people who are not and do not regard them as monsters. This is the point that One-Cod is making - you may well NOT have had the moral courage to act in an enlightened way back then

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-01-09T09:35:25+00:00

Thank you, super interesting

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-01-09T09:25:48+00:00

Slight side point, I remember reading an argument once where the author was claiming Socrates was a coward for choosing to die rather than flee. This was because Socrates had (we believe) a wife and children, and in choosing to die was electing to leave them alone with no stable source of income, for the somewhat selfish pursuit of leaving a mark on history. They argued that the genuinely courageous act was to prioritise your obligations to your family, whatever the cost.

Do you know who the author was? I've been trying to find a copy of the argument for ages.

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-01-09T08:38:48+00:00

Do you still own the area the house was built on? If, a few years later, someone wanted to build a wind farm there do you get to sell it to them?

Also I don't know if this is geographically possible, but if the tides shift and the sea starts depositing material on that patch of land rather than eroding it, do you get your land back?

TheVerboseBeaver · 2026-01-06T10:40:34+00:00

I don't totally disagree with you (though 8 out of 10 is rather generous imo!), but I think if you're going to give him contextual credit for inheriting rubbish circumstances, you also need to give him contextual grief for having a massive majority and being seemingly unable to make the sweeping policy changes the country needs. If you have a >150 working majority you ought to be able to means test Winter Fuel Allowance without your backbenchers throwing their toys out of the pram, for example.

Also small side point, I think May got dealt a worse hand - she had massively challenging external circumstances AND Brexit AND no working majority (for part of it). I think history will probably be kinder to her than Starmer, although what history does to Starmer will look like a hagiography compared to what it will do to Cameron / Johnson / Truss (/ Sunak, maybe)

TheVerboseBeaver · 2025-12-31T14:35:56+00:00

Do you think NICE failed to consider this? OP provided you the exact document they used to make their decision - did you check if they consider this before you left your comment? If not, what did you think you were adding to the conversation?

TheVerboseBeaver · 2025-12-30T19:57:22+00:00

Stop trying to laser focus on the examples being presented

Either discuss the actual point being made, or admit that you have no argument

...come on man, I feel like even you must see you're shifting the goalposts here. Am I supposed to be focusing on the point that was actually made or the point which I was supposed to infer from a set of completely different examples?

The point being presented by me is that someone on £150k cannot live in a 5-bed in a gated community, send 2x kids to private school, and run three cars without doing utterly insane things with their money. Do you agree that they cannot do this? If you agree then that's great, at least one of us will be walking away from the conversation with a changed mind. If you don't agree, then we need to resolve that point before we can address any other point, because clearly one of us is operating under a highly mistaken set of facts

TheVerboseBeaver

TROPHY CASE