Lone_Twin

Only because we constrain the supply side. Don't get me wrong BTLs and other rentier scum are making money hand over fist on the back of misery and discrimination. But the root cause of that misery is government and it's building controls. Rent control won't make things much worse. But it won't make the situation any better. You'll just end up with weird market distortions trying to compensate. The only proper solution is to open up the supply side.

Parents mid range boomers (1956) Me late gen x (1979) Parents bought modest family home in basis of fathers job (skilled technical industrial) in 70's. Industry decimated in 80s father in and out of low skilled work in attempt to make ends meet mother returns to work full time (skilled technical healthcare). I admire my fathers work ethic (we never lived off the state as far as I know) but once he found himself a safe public sector job ( low skill public sector) he settled and never tried to climb back up. Spent rest of career blaming thatcher as if that was going to help at all. My childhood was modest with periods of being poor (I once received a lampshade for my birthday) but not poverty (though maybe by today's relative poverty standards it was). Money always tight. Having lived through all that when mother was promoted (junior managerial) and labour splurged on health salaries my parents suddenly decided they were middle class and ATM'd most of the equity out of the house, splurged on credit and lived well beyond means. I took a couple of years before going to uni (working not finding myself) . Arrived in London in 2003 on a modest salary with HPI carrying the chance of buying further beyond my reach every day. Spent 6 years in London lining the pockets of BTL scum before managing to scrape a deposit together to buy in 2010. I find it hard to judge who has/had it easier. I'll take home about 70kish this year (I'm fairly sure more than my parents combined income at the zenith of their careers) and my wife is a stay at home mum. But by god I've worked hard for it, swapped jobs, taught myself everything, taken risks, worked crazy hours, pushed constantly to raise my income. And due mostly to housing costs my standard of living is not much higher than my parents (first holiday abroad in 4 years thus year) and their house is considerably bigger. My parents on the other hand despite periods of hardship really seemed to coast through. Public sector cushy pensions and early retirement now. They never really had to push themselves and they are set til the end of their days something I know I won't get. It's complicated. In generational terms boomers had life on easy mode. But it's still possible to screw that up.

The excess of workers creates the industries you plonker. 100s of service jobs weren't sitting vacant until someone invented the spinning Jenny. The people removed from those processes go on to find things if value to do to claim their portion. It's self regulating and self correcting. If people can't afford to buy the newly automated services they won't get automated. No one is going to get rich turning out a mountain of products that won't get bought. Seriously this goldilocks "just enough" progress argument is such vacuous c.r4p. When someone invented the wheel there would have been some daft berk standing beside moaning about how it would put all the carriers out of business, and how for goodness sake don't we already have logs laid down as rollers, that's efficiency enough! At no point in history has anyone put out of work by technology thought. "Thank ff/u,ck for that I can't wait to go do that other thing" it's always scary, always unknown, there will always be losers from the process. But it is the natural progress of technology and it is wonderful. You just need to let your nuts drop and cope with it as best you can .

Moved jobs with an 11% (not including bonus) increase in October last year. Bonus was additional 15% of salary prorata to April. I work in IT for a non IT business.

No one is buying chrome or osx in serious quantity in the business space. A few execs are wandering around with underutilised iPads and iPhone has a good hold on corporates but most desk workers have a windows desktop or laptop. The story is not one of windows being usurped (perhaps in the consumer space yes) but a simultaneous functional plateau in both software and hardware. A super amoled super HD screen, high powered base unit with tons of excess memory and proc power means nothing to the spreadsheet jockey who would be quite happy with the functions of excel 2003 and nothing else. Computers last a while, there's no compelling reason to upgrade and with everything coming in as a service over the LAN/WAN local spec is even less important. Xp is still a perfectly fine operating system for most corporate needs. Win7 is fine. Win8 was a disastrous pushing of consumer function onto MS' core market.

What's an i3? (Apart from a mid price Intel CPU)

Don't be p|ssy now, I've played nicely with you. I'd be delighted if it was possible to earn mega money for undertaking these tasks. If the money is not sufficient people won't do them. But that's not the story here it's that an industry has shed a ton of workers and is moaning they might have to train some more to replace them. I'm not sure how you think you'll make these tasks more valuable by frowning at the situation and tutting?

Why/where does my post assume that?Edit. Ah sorry I get you now. Well in this instance I'm talking specifically about the subsidisation of low paying jobs not necessarily the jobs with unfavourable terms and conditions such as 0hrs. You're saying if company x paid proper money so that their cleaners didn't have to go through the rigmarole of topping up with benefits they could employ higher skilled cleaners. There's something in that for sure but again from a competitive standpoint if 50% of my real labour costs are being met by the state I can 1) chuck more labour at a given task than my competitor can. 2) expect to be more profitable more quickly an perhaps have a edge on the market. Have better cash flow and profit and be more resilient to changes in the market. This is also going to apply to low level jobs where the impact of labour skill will be less obvious ( amazon and dominos aren't successful companies because their warehouse pickers and delivery drivers are 20% better than their competitors.

Something of a crush? (: Perhaps you'd welcome the minivan?

I'm not sure I understand. Can you elaborate?

They are normally operating in a competitive environment against many other firms making a similar offer of goods or services. They will only be able to sucessfuly compete if they take maximum advantage of all opportunities to increase revenue and minimise costs. If cleaning company x decides to meet the full cost of employing a person at natural market rates. While company y places half the burden on the state . X will be at a massive competitive disadvantage. It is the state and particularly the idiot labour administration who have created a society where businesses can shift large portions of their labour costs on to the taxpayer. It is this that should be addessed before anyone even looks at jsa or dla.

All in-work benefits should be cut to nil immediately. Next question.

If you are unable or unwilling, for the purposes of clinging to your ludicrous positions to discern the differences between slavery and an offer of employment there is little point trying to argue either side since we are clearly living in very different universes. Everybody would starve were they not able to gather resources to feed themselves. If you want to go and shout at the night sky of the injustice that humans can't live on sunlight be my guest. Of course not everyone is completely free not to earn money to support themselves. That just can't happen without the intervention of a diety or total automation controlled by a beneficent version of the Matrix. Perhaps the choice someone has to make is do a really rubbish job or go without. That's life, not slavery. We are slaves to reality, to thermodynamics, to entropy, to the seasons. We are not slaves to a summer job cleaning contract in Bristol. The one freedom we could do something about is to loosen our slavery to the state. But since more government is your proscription for all perceived ills I doubt you'd relish that much.

Most tax credit recipients are going to be labour voters. Turkeys vs Xmas and all that. NL did an efficient job of expanding their client voter pool.

I'm very sorry, it's possible I've had too much lunch but I can't make out what you are trying to say. Who is deciding this other kind of value? On what basis? Are you going to start gibbering about "need"? I'm not saying there isn't a place for some redistributive effort to the destitute or the incapacitated. And there might be some examples where we might chose to pay collectively for services which might not be procured if left to individuals (street cleaning for example) though I rather think it would be preferable not to fore people to buy stuff they don't want. But that wasn't the context of my post. I asked was it better to take money out of a productive industry to pay someone to sit on their rump. On the matter of cross subsidisation the matter is particularly serious in Britain right now. as it stands right now I could set up any kind of rubbish business (a dog nipple polishing parlour) and as long as I could draw enough customers to pay minimum wage to some spod they would have their income made up to something livable (including housing benefit etc..) This is no clever redistribution to pay for collective services like defense or national infrastructure. It's vote buying from labour and subsidisation of crap businesses and big corporation who can employ legions of bods under their real market price.