CrashedOutAndBurned

I don't know how a factory farm like that is fully staffed - the government keeps telling me the jobless are feckless shirkers? I'm surprised Amazon didn't have to recruit from Bulgaria due to all the lazy brits living it up on welfare up North.

Stabwcs?

No one gave a toss about all this nonsense when there was a sizeable stock of council housing before right-to-buy.

Social Darwinism appeals to fascists and right-libertarians or anyone else who think they are part of some sort of genetic/intellectual elite. But evolution is all about species adapting to their surroundings - some species thrive much better than others in a environment that's suffered a nuclear blast, for example. Present ruling classes only exist due to a highly complex apparatus of social privilege and control not because of much innate ability. Chavs have adapted brilliantly to modern society while the working and middle classes are barely passing on their genes at all, for example. If we are to make the crude biological-reductionist arguments of the social darwinist we could say it's harder to wring the neck of a bare-knuckle brawler than bankster weasel in a fist-fight if modern advanced capitalism collapses.

With peak oil, increased shipping costs, and rising labour costs in China it makes sense for the Chinese to look to impoverished parts of Europe as places to set up shop. Buying up some future 'worker dorms' makes sense.

So you get raped, one of the worst crimes that could happen to you, and you don't bother going to the police but just complain to the leadership of some silly fringe group you knock around with hoping they might deign to report it? Oh, okay...

Wow. Looks like a great little cottage.

I love this film. It's almost like it's been made by the various voice on the HPC-forum, be they left, right, liberal or conservative.

Ouch. Makes me yearn for the self-cert mortgages I once railed against. It would be really bizarre if I had to now try and get any old mundane job, close my business for a while, just to land mortgage. Surely it's not THAT bad?

In a sense it should be fine. I know what we bring in between us each month and the mortgage will be 300 less than what we pay in rent (we're moving a touch further out of a city and will be throwing down a big deposit). Neither of us uses accountants. We do our own uncomplicated book-keeping. We both earn in the same ball park and in theory you think we'd scrape the mortgage we want on just one income. We could put down an even bigger deposit but I would sooner keep some money on hand rather than tie every cent up in a house.

We're looking to move soon and will look at both renting and buying. There's not much in it now if we throw down a big deposit. However, I've been fully self employed for a little under two years while the other half, while deriving the bulk of her income from freelancing, still had a part-time job until fairly recently. So if we were to buy, does the fact that neither of us have three years of accounts solely from self-employment going to mess things up? I'd imagine we'd be looking to borrow 60%, perhaps 70% tops or less if it meant we could still get a mortgage. Anyone have useful insights?

Surely this property ladder thing is just a brief 70s-80s blip when there was still plenty of inflation and wage inflation to go with it. ie. You got that mortgage, which might have seemed large for a short while then as your salary inflated seemed small. Now it's the era of well-paid professionals buying what was once the typical home of low-paid workers and graduates from good Unis doing McJobs. None of it makes sense. None of it.

Wetherspoons is a mixed bag. Some are in quite nice old buildings that wouldn't be economically viable as anything other than a big chain pub. The food is okay for the price. It's McDonalds for grown-ups. Others smell of pee and just just seem to be places where older male benefits claiments go to sip pints all day.

Right. Mercedes drivers are just idiots too. Proton's had electric windows and power steering for years. Mercedes is just a brand name.

Make a pact with the Tories and your party basically dies instantly. Ask Nick Clegg.

It's like some time warp back to 2004 where Coldplay are storming the charts, Sarah's funbags are bouncing all over Channel 4 and Debbie at the office knows a great mortgage advisor that can get you a loan as big as you want.

Can't see Dixons lasting long term either. During the debt-bubble there was enough freshly-created money to sustain the online shopping revolution (which would have happened regardless) but also to fund the high street and ugly new megamalls. Now the reality that many people find it blissfully easy to buy all sorts of things online and not have to brave chavvy town centres and retail parks is sinking in.

Right. 15+ years ago and a yoof could run a Mini Metro for pocket money prices. Now so now.

It's too cheap to keep empty stock empty. It should be possible to open a shop at a peppercorn rent if it was about 'supply and demand'. In the credit bubble there was enough no money to sustain megamalls and online. Now the reality that bland soul-crushing chain stores have been in large part displaced by websites has sunk in. It's the same as CD sales. No different.

Think this needs some background. Spanish home ownership is traditional incredibly high. There's this culture of living at home until you've saved a big deposit and then buying a small, boxy flat you'll live in for decades. The flat itself my not look much different to something the Communists would hand you for free and until the anglo-saxon style voodoo economics of the Popular Party, which saw deregulated Spanish banks become huge international players in a few short years there was often not much difference in price between a flat and a moderately luxurious car. There is traditionally very little rented sector. Even state-subsidised housing is largely bought: join a waiting list, buy your cheaper flat. Thus, 'home ownership' isn't some prestigious high-falluting thing in Spain but the almost sole mechanism that people have a roof over their heads. Hence the outrage in Spain over people being turfed out of their home. None of the Social Darwinist neoliberal spite you'd find here 'Oh, well, it's not fair that i have to pay my mortgage wahwah... let the market and the bailiffs do their worse'. There's a much greater shared solidarity going on against the plutocracy. Recently there have been mass protests all over Spain on a massive scale, with police brutes smashing the skulls of ordinary, often very educated Spanish young people in major cities. This latest action by the government just shows that they fear a tipping-point where they may get swept away by civil unrest.

From my own observations, I think the biggest driver of jobs growth is ordinary people taking themselves out of the job market by becoming self employed or setting up small businesses thus freeing up jobs and perhaps creating some too. This is another reason why high house prices kill everything - the people I'm talking about bought homes in the late 90s and missed the boom. With a more modest mortgage they could take bigger risks than someone a slave of a job they hate but can't leave due to being maxed out. To the rich it's a good thing to minimise labour costs ruthlessly and therefore snarf up more of the profits for themselves. I chuckle at some of the job descriptions of £20-25k job ads these days. They make it sound like you'll have three employees' roles and workload and more responsibility than the CEO. Surely even arch capitalists can see plutocratic financial parasites serve no purpose if the goal of an economic system is to provide as much economic wellbeing to all participants as possible. Sadly, most capitalists seem to revel in the current rigged game and shrug, 'It's markets, innit?'

Another huge squeeze. People will be priced out of suburbs and rural areas where you need a car constantly. But the towns and cities are already brutally expensive. there will be no escape.

Economics is a social science (like sociology or psychology) that frequently gets confused/conflated with mathematics or the natural sciences. So often a particular theory will not just gain support but be treated as unchangeable fact like gravity. Worse, someone in power might advocate one model but actually do something else if it effects them personally - 'socialists' supporting loose regulation to play the housing market, 'laissez faire' types bailing out their banker chums and so on.

I don't understand commercial rents. There's so much empty office space, millions of empty shop units, half-empty trading estates. You think you could get a premises for peppercorn rents but no... crazy prices considering the oversupply... Also, I think in the credit boom there was enough new money to fuel online and offline shopping so you had growing online business plus new megamalls. I think now the reality that huge amounts of high street trade has gone online is sinking in. Most town centres are crap - concrete despair with perhaps a bland glossy megamall in the middle of it that counts as 'redevelopment'. Why can't town centres be more about art, theatre, meeting places, leisure rather than endless purveyors of total tat no one needs and people increasingly don't even seem to want?

Conservatives tried to steal the language of liberalism but anyone with a brain sees through it. They are the deeply authoritarian party of the status quo, of unearned privileges. Before Friedman-fan Thatcher unleashed her voodoo economics and created the underclass this thread is about by removing all hope from the working class, the same Chicago school economics were trialled in latin American fascist states like Chile. You need a tough, skull-cracking state to make this stuff work. And they call it 'small government' and 'the state off your back'. It's laughable.