Independent people are more likely to live away from the masses, choose property with other criteria as a priority (view, weather, etc.) This is why the wealthy live in gated communities, try to prevent the public from accessing the beach in front of their house, live in the hills outside the cities, etc. They want to get away from the masses of poor, stupid, ugly, dirty, sick, etc. people. This is why royalty and titled people built castles and moats. It's why artists live cloistered lives. It's why the religious figures, the rabbis, the wise men, the medicine men, etc. had a space to themselves and people trekked to them for guidance and assistance.

The people you describe are not independent, they are actually hyper-dependent.

Without their subjects to bring them offerings, they have nothing.

This has been true for all of human history. The intelligent seek to shed the husk of ineptitude that is the rest of humanity.

The intelligent seek like-minded people.

For all the historical glory the lone inventor gets, the vast majority of progress comes from teams of people working together.

Windows 95 and 3.1 still had the same fundamental interface.
No, they didn't. They were extremely different.

The Desktop, Start Menu and Taskbar are the most obvious major fundamental differences between Windows 3.1 and 95. Extensive ability to drag & drop is another. The deprecating of the MDI interface (though - amazingly - it still lingers on in some apps). Context menus. Transparent interaction with network resources.

Windows 95 was a document/object-centric interface. Windows 3.1 was an application-centric interface.

Same with Windows 3.1 to 95, if you used 3.1 you could use 95 with no problems apart from the fact it looked a little different.

What ? No. People had huge problems moving from Windows 3.1 to 95. Microsoft even included Program Manager in Windows 95 and it was not uncommon in the early days for people to run it as the shell.

There are fewer fundamental UI differences between Windows 95 and Windows 7, than there are between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Indeed, in terms of UI fundamentals there's almost no difference at all between Windows 95 and Windows 7. But there are few, if any, similarities between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 (apart from the kinds of elements that are common to nearly all WIMP interfaces).

I do not have the time to properly research this topic, so I'll leave it here.

But everything I've read so far convinces me the UK is little different to the US and Australia.

The fundamental problem is there's more people than jobs. It is unlikely to be resolved in the future due to both political (conservatives and their backers have no interest in pursuing full employment) and practical (within a generation or so robotics are going to render probably half the workforce obselete) reasons.

Thanks for the discussion.

The point of unions is not to drive the "evil corporations" out of business. That would be counter-productive and stupid.

The point of unions is to put employees on an equal footing to employers when it comes to negotiations on working conditions and pay.

Generally, they achieve this goal well.

A free market is what people do when no-one holds a gun to their head forcing them to do something else.

But then inevitably someone does get a (metaphorical or literal) gun and starts holding it to people's heads.

Remember, total corporate profits in the US are less than 10% of total wages in the US. "Evil big corporations" are certainly paying as little as they can get away with, but there's not much slack there in the first place. It's not like, on average, we could be paid 20% more if our collective bosses was only more generous - that money just doesn't exist (and small companies are on far thinner margins here - making payroll is a monthly uncertainly for most).

Why must salary increases for workers be sourced from existing profits ? Why could they not be sourced by reducing the ridiculous pay packages of upper and executive management ?

There are lots of system admins around, but not a lot of them have advanced devops experience.

Maybe you should consider taking someone on and training them.

It might even generate a bit of loyalty.

Right, so if I quit my job now there's no other jobs available for me? Don't be so stupid.

I’m not the one being stupid. I’m talking at a macro level. You’re nitpicking at an individual level.

There are ca. millions more people looking for work than there are advertised jobs. That doesn’t count all the people who could work but for whatever reason aren’t considered to be looking. That means there’s not enough jobs. It doesn’t mean arbitrary person Joe Blogs cannot find a job. Obviously individual people move in and out of jobs all the time.

If we pretend to be physicists for a second, and assume each job is a perfect sphere, and we could somehow match up every single vacancy with a willing applicant tomorrow, you would still have millions of people either without a job, or working less hours than they want to.

That’s because there’s not enough jobs.

Yep, that's exactly the problem, over a million of them are NEETS for starters, youths not in employment, education, or training. They can get away with it because they live at home and £90 a week is still plenty enough to pay for the latest XBox games.

Where is the evidence these people do not want to work ?

What's the relevance of your anecdote exactly?

That your argument because you can in certain situations drive from point A to point B in less than three hours means long commutes don’t exist is stupid.

Of course if you live on one side of London and commute to the other and dawdle about walking slowly or happen to work or live far from a tube station then you're going to be able to get your commute up to 45 minutes but that still means they can get anywhere in the capital from their doorstep within 45 minutes which for a city with a population of over 7 million (think about the size of that) is not unreasonable.

The _average_ London commute is something like 37 minutes each way.

You are arguing a 45 minute commute is unusual. In actual fact it’s common if you live in London.

I am not making any comment about whether or not that is “unreasonable”. I am making the point that it could be a reason that taking a particular job is impossible.

Except that's unnecessary because guess what? we also have publicly funded schemes to deal with those problems for parents.

You have a scheme that picks children up from their homes, takes them to childcare and returns them at the end of the day ? From anywhere ?

They also get the bulk of childcare paid for, and child tax credits which leaves them with a net profit for having a child.

A quick Google says the base tax credit is 500 quid. I know the cost of living there is a lot lower than Australia, but I still doubt that would be enough turn a profit on the annual costs of child rearing.

You're just showing you have no idea about the breakdown of UK finances, the amount of benefits available and so forth. Bank bailouts don't even get included in general spending figures as they're classed as one off costs. Some of those banks have been sold back to private investors and much of the money recouped now anyway.

Who said anything about a breakdown of finances and spending ? You said:

“This is a large part the reason we ended up with one of the highest levels of public debt in the world when the financial crisis hit.”

Incorrect. See above. You've no idea what you're talking about:

Actually that breakdown is the same one I found before commenting.

I was under the impression we were talking primarily about welfare frauds - people who could work but choose not to, and how much the welfare they receive costs.

I think you just need to admit you're bitching about problems in your country and trying to project them everywhere.

Actually everything I’ve read during this discussion has led me to believe you have exactly the same problems. The sort of middle-class welfare you mention (payments to millionaires) is a problem here in Australia as well.

This shouldn’t really be surprising, since the people running the whole western world for the last 20-30 years are all adherents to the same broken neoliberal economic philosophy.

Yes, actually, it does.

Unless you want to mount an argument that large numbers of people would prefer to live in abject poverty rather than work and live in relative comfort.

Further, even ignoring that, there are hundreds of thousands of available jobs, and millions of job seekers. More people than jobs. Lots more.

Yet apparently you think tens, hundreds of thousands of people would rather “hold out” and choose to be unemployed, living on the pittance offered by welfare ?

The former are accounted for in the “0%” I referred to. That’s why it was in inverted commas.

The proportion of people who choose to not work and live in abject poverty is vanishingly small. You’ve already stated you wouldn’t do it. I certainly wouldn’t, either. Nor would anyone I know. Yet you want to try and argue tens to hundreds of thousands do ?

Doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

“A person is classed as unemployed if not only out of work, but also actively looking for work and available to start work within a fortnight.”

So unemployment stats don’t account for people who have given up looking for work, or who couldn’t start within two weeks.

Further people are considered “employed” if they work an hour a week. That means unemployment statistics don’t account for underemployment - people who want to work more but can’t because there aren’t enough jobs.

Real unemployment is _vastly_ higher than official figures. This is a worldwide problem. There is an under- and unemployment disaster that’s been building up in the advanced world for decades.

Anecdotally, I know many people living in London. None of them have less than a 45 minute commute door-to-door, each way.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325262/Rise-super-commuter-Number-Britons-travelling-hours-day-work-soars-50-cent-years.html

That’s actually 3 hours in total, rather than each way, and I have no problem saying I picked 3 hours out of the air, but the overall point remains. It’s quite reasonable for there to be quite legitimate reasons for someone to be unable to take a job, as opposed to unwilling. A long commute interfering with other critical obligations is simply the easiest and most obvious example.

For a parent who has to drop off and pickup a child at care or school on the way to and from work, a commute could easily stretch to a couple of hours in each direction.

Long commutes tend not to come with sparse population (up to a point). They tend to come with concentrated population (ie: big cities).

No, that would have been the bank bailouts.

The kind of welfare benefits you’re railing against are a small part of the UK’s national expenditure (as they are in every other country). You could eliminate all of it tomorrow and public expenditure would be largely unaffected.

I can’t find any suitable historical statistics about welfare compared to real inflation or the median wage in the UK in the five or so minutes I’m prepared to spend on this. You may well be right, but given it would buck the trend of pretty much every other western country, where welfare benefits (and similar things like minimum wage) have been outpaced by real inflation and salary increases, I’m highly sceptical.

Because it's interesting and useful to them in the vehicle design process.

Two fairly immediately obvious things that they can learn that would help them in product design are areas most of their cars are driven in and the most common speeds they are driven at.

There is also the obvious marketing benefit of knowing where your customers live (and by extension, a reasonable idea of their socio-economic groups).

Really? Can you give an example?
Uh, practically the whole world, right now ? Indeed, pretty much since the whole sadistic idea of NAIRU gained acceptance ?

I believe your unemployment rate is higher than 0% (or the effective 0% to allow for brief periods between jobs). That pretty much means there's more job seekers than jobs by definition.

I don't really follow the UK that closely, but a quick Google on the topic pulled up this blog that has some facts and figures. 463,000 jobs, 2.68 million job seekers. That's 2 years old, but I doubt the situation has changed dramatically (either in the 2 years since or the decade before).

Note also that official unemployment figures almost certainly vastly underestimate real unemployment, since the definition of "employed" (usually something like a few hours of paid work in week) and "unemployed" (must be actively searching for work) have been comically gamed to try and make the under- and unemployment problem look much less worse than it actually is.

The only way there isn't a job in the UK is if you intentionally place artificial reasons in the way like "I can't be bothered to commute that far", "I don't want to do that job", and so forth, but all of these are choices, not impairments.
This is just more blinkered conservative moralising bullshit.

If the only job available to you requires a three-hour commute in each direction and you have a young child that goes to school, then that job is not a feasible option. That's not a "choice", that's reality.

It's pointless to go back 30 years because different benefits have come and gone in that time, or been drastically altered, but as I say in general they've been tied to inflation so have generally done worse than average earnings in boom times but much better in bust times. Overall it tends to balance out though and they do as well as average earnings increases for workers as a result.
I'm glad you agree that it might have gone up quicker than wages in recent times doesn't matter because it all balances out over the long run, even though I sincerely doubt it hasn't balanced out at all over the last 30 years (it would certainly be unusual if it had, because it certainly hasn't in the other countries of the Anglosphere). Now, what was your point again ?

You're right that the disability allowance is higher, but that's because it's intended for people who outright can't work, whilst job seekers allowance is intended as a short term measure for people who can work but simply can't find a job - you're not meant to live off of it indefinitely. It is however bolstered by free training, access to apprenticeships and so forth to ensure that there's always at least some job you can get meaning not getting a job long term isn't really an excuse, but a choice.

There's NOT "always at least some job you can get". That's the problem.

As an aside our welfare payment have risen with inflation, so for example in 2012 when everyone's wages were going down, unemployment benefits saw a 5.2% rise because inflation was high in the month they determine payments. The government is changing this now to try and make sure unemployment benefits more closely mirror average increases (or decreases) in wage rather than inflation.

And how does it look when you go back over the last 30 years ? My bet is inflation and wage increases have vastly outstripped the increase in the welfare payment.

Really, here it was mostly just dishonesty because our Labour government simply made such benefits too attractive an alternative to work and too easy to get which is why a roughly similar number lost these benefits when the current government did a complete re-assessment of everyone receiving that benefit. They simply shouldn't have had them in the first place, and didn't deserve them simply because job seekers allowance has become a less reasonable option for simply choosing to be long term unemployed.

People who "choose to be long term unemployed" are a vanishingly small percentage. Always have been, likely always will be.

From about 2005 to 2011 disability benefit claimaints increased by 30% even though there's no justifiable reason for this to be the case because the benefit hadn't really changed and there hadn't been any kind of mass reason for increased levels of disability in the populace.

In Australia, there has been a significant shift of welfare recipients over to disability pensions, because the standard welfare payment has not increased in line with cost of living and is now woefully inadequate, while the disability pension is higher.

So welfare services workers at the coalface whose ethics and morals are still intact try to get recipients over to the disability pension if they can.

I expect the same is true in the UK.

The bumholes that defraud the benefit system on a long term basis and drug addicts picking up their state-funded high in our country are the same type of people that turn to (often violent) crime in countries where an effective benefit system does not exist.

The simple fact of the matter is that long-term welfare frauds are a tiny, irrelevant fraction of welfare recipients.

Conservatives always go hunting for wide-scale systemic welfare fraud, and they never find it.

Sane people know that's because the proportion of people who would rather live bare subsistence on the typical welfare payment, vs a simple-yet-still-far-better lifestyle in a minimum wage job, is vanishingly small.

If conservatives were willing to go after the top 1% of people rorting the system as eagerly as they go after the bottom 1%, we'd all be better off.

Either get a job in the normal way, or if you want state handouts you should be spending normal working hours (eg 40hrs/week) in training or doing community work for the state.

Think of the benefits system as a fallback job... You should still have to work and not just sit on your ass, even if your wages are coming from the state.

Awesome idea. Let's build a society dependent on slave labour to function. It'll be just like the good old days !