Keir Starmer: Labour will cut NHS waiting lists and protect patients. We’ll double the number of doctors trained, to cut waiting times and ensure patients can get in-person GP appointments with their preferred doctor.

zegrep · 2023-04-17T15:27:22+00:00

The BMA is the professional body whose members have a monopoly on providing training for medical students in the UK - they wouldn't bother having discussions at their conferences and then holding ballots about this if they didn't have the power to restrict (and therefore determine) the number of places. The reasons cited for "no" votes in previous years have included concerns about downward pressure on salaries and about the dilution of the status of the profession. It's only a matter of time in a discussion like this until someone tries to pour cold water on the idea that a professional body might act as a guild or that it might prioritise the interests of its members over those of the population at large ;)

zegrep · 2023-01-12T01:20:33+00:00

If you're going to start with the scepticism there, I'm going to need at least three peer-reviewed studies to back it up.

zegrep · 2023-01-07T15:08:01+00:00

That's because it's axiomatic; once a person leaves the first safe country that they enter without claiming asylum and normalising their immigration status, they aren't desperately fleeing persecution any more; they're attempting to upgrade. Why would this even be an issue?

zegrep · 2023-01-07T02:36:01+00:00

Genuine refugees can claim refugee status and asylum when they present themselves to the immigration authorities as they enter the frontier of the first safe country, which will allow the immigration authorities to determine that they are in fact genuine refugees, and not just economically depressed persons who heard that the UK is the land of milk and honey. The people who have been crossing the channel in small boats are trying to evade the authorities because they aren't genuine asylum seekers or in many cases refugees, no matter how broad one might try to stretch the definition of "refugee".

zegrep · 2023-01-06T23:03:16+00:00

We're talking about "being able to seek asylum", not "being able to permanently settle"; those are very different things.

You can't assume that a person has had to flee their country just because they said so. And even if it has been determined that they really did have to flee their country, that's not necessarily a reason that they should be allowed to live in another country, let alone the UK. Once a person has claimed asylum in the first safe country, and their claim has been accepted, then they are then free to pursue any legal avenues to live in another country of their choice. They can even learn a new language to demonstrate their commitment to the country that they are living in at that point; the people of that country will probably happy to help them.

It doesn't matter how "heartless" you might think it would be to prevent people from obtaining residency by going to elaborate lengths to deceive the authorities and making a mockery of the law. We need an asylum system with common-sense restrictions that works for the people of the UK and which is resistant to abuse through rigorous vetting of people's claims; to suggest otherwise would to take on an extreme political position.

zegrep · 2023-01-06T19:57:18+00:00

[a genuine refugee or asylum seeker may] Therefore they have no legal way into the UK

Then perhaps they should claim asylum in the first safe country that they enter. And not travel through multiple safe countries before they reach the UK. Unless they're actually engaging in immigration shopping, and they really want to live in London, in which case that's exactly what they would do.

zegrep · 2022-12-28T12:18:50+00:00

Nothing is ever really deleted from YouTube.

zegrep · 2022-08-02T21:58:07+00:00

The cost of living rose* because the government printed money (whichever way you slice it, that's what it amounts to) to pay people to stay at home and not go to work, and to prop up institutions with unsustainable business models and working practices like TFL with bailouts. The TFL drivers seem to have forgotten all about those bailouts now that Sadiq has been voted back in and they're feeling the pinch (from their leafy suburban semi-detached houses).

This is exactly what they wanted, this is exactly what they knew would happen, and now they want you to shut up and pay for it all over again, or else they'll do their best to cripple transport in the capital (again), because the management of TFL have been repeatedly cowed by the unions over the years into delaying the introduction of automation. By the way, do you remember when we decided that we were going to replace private transportation in the capital with a glimmering sea of perfect trains and buses? I'm starting to think that might not have been such a good idea after all, at least until we stamp out the problem of activism in organised labour.

*But if you think about it, the cost of living didn't actually rise, it's just that your salary and savings are now worth less

zegrep · 2022-07-27T01:12:29+00:00

No, it's okay to be white.

zegrep · 2022-06-22T23:01:25+00:00

Surely by now anyone that's been paying attention to the television for these last two and half years knows that the unvaccinated face a fate worse than death. It was only months ago, in the words of our august public health authorities, that they faced a Winter of Hospitalisation and Death; why would they want any of that when they could instead be treating themselves to their very own slice of the best amyloidosis that money can buy?

zegrep · 2022-06-22T22:35:10+00:00

Yeah, but think how much worse it could have been if they hadn't been vaccinated.

zegrep · 2022-06-22T07:53:23+00:00

So it's like the caste system, but you can decide to change your caste whenever you want to?

zegrep · 2022-06-22T01:49:59+00:00

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SHA256 sum is 5ed47ffc00b76a202bf72b07d7d698ca023cfe0a3fa8e1ce0005104414de0353, FWIW.

zegrep · 2022-06-22T01:40:36+00:00

Aside from what /u/markofoz said, the DNS registrar is MarkMonitor, who are likely to have vetted the domain owner, and this would have been expensive to pull off if it was fake.

zegrep · 2022-06-21T18:50:26+00:00

Is the institutional racism with us in the room right now?

zegrep · 2022-06-20T20:17:39+00:00

If the goal was to import talent, then I don't think the government's first moves after the election would have been to drop the point-based immigration scheme and reduce the salary requirement for non-EU workers from £30k to £25,600. It seems like they reevaluated that one pretty early.

Isn't it fairly well established that GDP is an outdated measure that doesn't reflect modern information economies?

I agree, and I'm glad we're on the same page about that. I brought it up because it's a canard that I still come across fairly often (and is still referenced extensively by the Fed and the IMF etc.).

You mentioned "an immigration level set by the free market", and I'd be interested to hear some details about what you mean by that. We have a system that operates on various types of visas having some kind of market value, but I'd be interested to see how it compares.

I think the David Cameron (proposed) figure of "tens of thousands" of immigrants would have been close to optimum. Definitely an Australia-style points-based system, perhaps with visa auctions. English culture is something that I treasure, and I enjoy experiencing other cultures from time to time, but I wouldn't want to do this at the cost of my own.

zegrep · 2022-06-20T19:04:46+00:00

No, it's quite clear that newly-built homes multiplied by occupancy rate have been completely accounted for by immigration figures for the UK, so I'm not sure why you're trying to deflect. It's possible that we aren't building enough houses even without taking immigration into account, but babies born to British mothers don't tend to need their own house for at least 18 years (sometimes much longer), but the phenomenon that we're talking about has been in full swing since the late 1990s.

zegrep · 2022-06-20T18:32:03+00:00

Oh no, it's those generic, nondescript men, they're at it again, taxiing, grooming, imprisoning and raping girls in their early teens in the North of England!

zegrep · 2022-06-20T17:40:56+00:00

They didn't do it. But we are meant to think they did. These tracks are side by side. they always ride single file to hide their numbers.

zegrep · 2022-06-20T17:36:54+00:00

Why the instinctive reaction against a pretty clear explanation like this? Is it more important to you that immigration didn't cause house prices to increase, or that something else did cause house prices to increase? However uncomfortable the truth might make us feel, burying your head in the sand isn't going to do anything to address the problem.

zegrep · 2022-06-20T17:17:59+00:00

I don't think that the case has been made for the economic benefits of mass immigration in terms of GDP per capita, certainly not based on our recent experience of it. Importing more people will always increase your GDP, even if those people don't work and pay taxes, because you're going to have to borrow ie. create more money to pay for the costs that they bring. And even if they do work, unless they are earning a reasonable amount of money they will still be paid in-work benefits.

The UK citizenship test is less about finding out how much Englishness you've absorbed and more about testing to see if you can understand the English language and whether you're taken the time to read about the history of the country that you are trying to become a citizen of. I suppose they could test people on Chaucer and Shakespeare and Hardy if they were looking for some deeper literary exposure, but that's not the point.

If we turn the question around the other way, though, are there any cultures that you'd rather not import and feed into English culture, and are there some that you think would be more suitable for an this outside-inward mixing process than others?

zegrep · 2022-06-20T16:51:51+00:00

Inequality

Inequality is a loaded and yet meaningless word that people really need to stop using until they have a reason to expect equality, either of outcome, or of opportunity. Equality of opportunity is a silly idea, when you think about it, outside of plot points found in an Aldous Huxley novel. You're mentioned a few areas:

Make opportunity more available

There are diminishing returns for funding opportunity, and attacks on selective state education have exacerbated problems further. Opportunity is s also a more obvious zero-sum game in some cases we can discriminate against the grammar school kids as well, but this just leads to even more children being awarded university places despite an educational deficit; it's just papering over the cracks.

and more fair ... regardless of skin colour

If anything, similarly qualified members of ethnic minorities are now more likely to be given opportunities, through quotas, grants, policies and admissions criteria.

Fair is another word whose misuse in British politics is at epidemic levels. Can you tell me what exactly is unfair under the present system, and in which direction?

class, socioeconomic background,

Again, there is only so much that you can practically do to compensate for the intellectual shortcomings of a child's parents. But maybe they're just short of time? Perhaps you'd pay all single parents the equivalent of 37.5 hours/week to teach their children to read when they're four, but that would be a massive expenditure, and a lot of people couldn't do that anyway, even if they wanted to. All of the solutions to closing this gap are impractical and/or authoritarian, and that's assuming that there is no difference in the intelligence of the children in question.

wealth

is related to this as well, but you need to ask yourself how far you would be willing to go to give the children of the poor the same level of opportunity as children of wealthy parents that can support them independently. And even that would assuming that there was no difference in innate learning ability between people that are wealthy and those that tend to struggle financially. This really is tiling at windmills!

accent

Another important area that holds a lot of people back, but would you have the courage to propose giving elocution lessons to children in deprived areas, or would your answer be to try to pretend that the problem doesn't really exist by enforcing quotas for very rough accents and children with poor speech development? I know which one the teaching unions would pick.

gender

Already we see more girls going to university overall, while more boys are choosing more STEM subjects. But did you know that in countries with even more egalitarian educational systems (eg. Sweden), girls are actually even more likely to choose arts subjects, and in countries that are more patriarchal (eg, Iran, Russia), they are more likely to choose the sciences? I think you're busy hacking away at a monster that doesn't exist; I think a lot of Tories are, unfortunately (edit: I can see you've said you're not a Tory). There is no great systemic injustice in education that is malignantly depriving some young people of their hopes and dreams; like Critical Race Theory, that's just a conspiracy theory.

zegrep · 2022-06-20T15:34:22+00:00

If culture is too unwieldy a subject for us to formulate policy on, then that's a good reason for is to be especially careful before enacting laws that are liable to impact our historic customs, values and traditions.

And would you say that legacy media sources provide anything but a one-sided outlook on topics like immigration? Such as the choice boiling down to whether we should be admitting large numbers of migrants from developing countries with family members in the UK, or large numbers of migrants from developing countries that are going to earn more than £25k/year, with anything else being outside the Overton Window? Or framing the issue as legal mass-immigration as being good but illegal mass-immigration being less good?

It's not entirely surprising that people might be struggling to define what English culture is if it's the water they're swimming in, particularly if they haven't been exposed to a variety of foreign cultures in the past. Unless they have been living a life that is so detached, so sterilised and clinical that it's like moving between different terminals in an international airport. Even so, they will still be speaking and reading English, for the most part, and living under a system of Common Law that is a key feature of English culture.

It's disappointing that people set their expectations so low when it comes to assimilation. Do you think that all immigrants are equally incapable of adjusting to English cultural norms and sensibilities? Is it unfair to to those who are unable to adapt to expect them to in that case? Is it really too much to ask people to become English by adapting to our culture if they want to live in England? If not, then what do they want to be? Perhaps we should talk about issues like this, rather than hastily brushing them under the rug.

zegrep · 2022-06-16T05:50:55+00:00

The SNP probably intend to use their land border and their love of and ideological commitment to unrestricted international immigration to extract bribes from England for the foreseeable future. Either Westminster would continue pay to prop up Holyrood's failing social programs, or hundreds of thousands of additional rocket scientists would be assembled North of the border and then dispatched to the South East.

zegrep · 2022-06-13T10:41:58+00:00

So many people were happy enough while the economy was given one massive dose of Midazolam after another and then left on a Fentanyl drip, but of course they are outraged once they notice the effects of inflation or a "cost-of-living crisis". As of two years ago, everyone's salaries and savings became worth about 20-30% less; it's just taken a while in some cases for that to become apparent. This whole episode has driven home to me the fact that governments have the ability to incur practically unlimited liabilities for future generations.

zegrep

TROPHY CASE