BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
A wrongful arrest can be expunged and removed from your record quite quickly and if handled fast can have much less of an impact on your life and career trajectory than a wrongful firing.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
It's a place where underage girls are regularly raped by gangs of Pakistanis who kidnap and imprison them. Is that acceptable?
Nope, that's misleading as well, in the same sense that saying the US is a place where innocent Black people regularly get killed by the police is misleading. That also happens more than once a year in the US.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
The mean tweets definitely play a part in people getting arrested but almost always there's more to the story and when there's not in the unlikely event of an arrest it (eventually) gets classed as a miscarriage of justice (see how Northamtonshire Police was recently forced to pay a £50k fine for a wrongful arrest of someone for just "mean tweets", not to mention their legal costs and damages to the person who was wrongfully arrested).
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
People who have never been to my town feel confident to tell me what life in my town is like.
Oh, very much so. Perhaps Americans can also deign to stop trying to talk about how bad things are like in the UK without having a shred of lived experience (much as I dislike that phrase) of the place. Saying that the UK is a country where people regularly get arrested for saying mean things online is like saying the US is a country where schools regularly get shot up. It's misleading at best and outright false at worst.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
None of this would ever have happened in a non-At Will jurisdiction. The mob could howl as much as they wanted and the boss would just go "Sorry, the laws of this country prevent me from firing this person without good cause, if you don't like it vote to change things" and this would suddenly blow over.
There's a reason all this "firing" people for saying bad things stuff seems to be localized to the US (on both sides of the aisle).
Or else you continued to get laughed at and have power moved away from you because the rest of the (western at least) world stops accepting you as the primus inter pares and then lose the exorbitant privilege of running 6% yearly deficits because you have the world's reserve currency and can freely export away your inflation. If the UK tried the level of profligacy which has become standard in the US we'd end up under an IMF programme in 2 years.
The levels of contempt I am hearing against the US and Americans in my personal circle are basically the highest they have ever been. This isn't just a me thing, there was a recent piece in the FT how the appropriate response for the EU now given the US reducing its support for Ukraine is to hit back hard on US tech with tariffs rather than the "roll over and take it" with the 15% tariffs they accepted earlier this year. It's now becoming fairly standard that when I meet someone new from the US they'll volunteer by themselves unprompted within the first few minutes that they "are one of the good ones"...
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Yep, equivalently US citizens who move to Europe largely move to big cities and live in apartments.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Our version of single family home in Britain is a bit different from that in the US. This picture from your link shows a nice symmetrical structure in the middle which Americans might think is a single house for a single family. In reality it's two houses (semi detached) for two different families which share a central wall.
Fully detached houses etc. do exist but they are very much an exception and even then we don't have "suburbia" in the sense the US does, you'll often find such fully detached houses a short walk away from a 6 storey tall council estate and a commercial area a few minutes away too. There is very little "this is where houses are, full stop.".
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
I've lived in a big apartment block which had exactly 0 year space and the nearest grocery store was literally on our ground floor (though it was more expensive than the supermarket 5 minutes walk away). And yeah I had access to a well maintained very large green space two minutes from the apartment lobby much bigger than the yard even massive detached houses have.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Agreed. The whole "suburb" thing as defined here in uniquely American. Here in the UK we also have homes with a yard and a dog and a car (though some of the most expensive properties in central London won't have an exclusive yard and potentially not even off street parking given that they literally share walls with their neighboring super expensive properties (they are terraced, not detached). They are amazing places to live (hence the prices) but Cowen's phrasing would put them as not "attractive".
Plus the whole controlling your school district is a very American thing as well, it just seems quaint and weird in the UK: schooling should be run by professionals, not the whims of a bunch of parents who don't know shit about pedagogy. As we move to a more and more multi polar world US citizens need to realize that the rest of the world doesn't think like them and while in the past they had the luxury of being able to ignore what we said without much consequence this is fast dissipating and they will now need to learn some cultural sensitivity like the rest of us.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Both things can be true at once.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Honestly I would not claim to know what any of these people were thinking, remember this was said in the early 20th century so their standards of civilisation and decadence were probably quite different from ours, but the general sentiment of Americans being seen first as uncivilised barbarians and transitioning straight to being parvenus when they finally get wealth still is as relevant today as it would have been then, if you ask my non American social circle (the Americans I know would half agree and half vigorously deny it, in the "doth protest too much" sense).
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
If Republicans think it's perfectly reasonable to boost fringe political parties in Europe because they genuinely believe that's in the best interest of the USA then it's perfectly reasonable for European countries to officially adopt positions supporting the Democrats wholesale because they genuinely believe that's in the best interests of Europe. Something tells me the Republicans would throw a tantrum if it actually happened though.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
There is a quote, often attributed to Clemenceau or Wilde or sometimes Shaw that goes:
American is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Seems more and more pertinent by the day if you ask me...
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
so your comment is utter nonsense that you obviously didn't even bother to check
Fair enough, I remember reading something like this somewhere on the internet a few years ago and so brought it up. I fully accept that I didn't even bother to check, and yes, I should have done that.
Let nobody say that I don't admit to making bad points when I actually make bad points.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
That's positively cheap for even the outskirts of London or even 2nd tier UK cities, remember the figure is CAD.
The other thing is that people aren't comparing like for like. NYC in the 1960s was a much smaller city than NYC today. If you look at similar sized cities as NYC was in the 60s today the pricing of housing in a similar area in real terms is basically the same as it was in NYC in the 60s.
EDIT: This is wrong.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
You still owe duties to guests you invite into your house and then ask to leave but who refuse to leave, or at least you do in the UK under the Occupier's Liability Act 1984. They're not as stringent as those you owe to guests you continue to give permission but your not giving permission to be on your property doesn't give you an automatic right to treat them in whatever way you want until they leave.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
I'm not paying teeny tiny taxes like most of these people, I'm paying (nearly) mid six figures in taxes every year. At the very least that should get me a medal or some sort of other thing that distinguishes me as above those who pay £3,000 in tax a year and consume £30,000 worth of public services.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Breaking ahead of me in queues, generally acting rude when asked simple clarification questions, asking me if I speak English (this has happened multiple times, I kid you not, from people whose command of the English language is worse than the level I had at age 9), taking my money (via taxes) and then acting like they're the generous ones for letting people like me live in the country (without a shred of self awareness) etc. etc.
Now I must say this doesn't happen all the time or even most of the time or even with much regularity in my interactions with the lower class. It happens in fewer than 5% of such encounters I'd say (and in reality probably fewer than 2%), but when you have to live around and amongst such people the total number of interactions gets very high very quickly so you get exposed to a fair amount of such low human capital behaviours.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Lack of izzat is a massive problem among westerners if you ask me. The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people I'm subconsiously thinking "didn't your parents teach you any better?". Same with how westerners send their own flesh and blood parents off to a care home when they start becoming too much of a burden on them. The lack of respect here is galling: your parents took care of you when you were nothing more than a little shit machine and this is how you repay them???
The kiwifarms post is a half truth (well actually more like a quarter truth), which makes it worse than a total lie. Some elements of it are correct, but others (like how you can rape and murder with impunity if you have enough izzat) are totally 100% false (rape and murder are the number 1 way you an destroy your whole extended family's izzat in a very short space of time for generations).
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
My favourite macroeconomic model requires competitive markets without monopolies trying to maintain their influence over the rest of society by restricting who gets to benefit from the latest tech advantages and at what price. Our current society is nowhere near my favourite macroeconomic model and we're not getting there any time soon.
It's like the Coase theorem when it says it doesn't matter for societal welfare who is given ownership over goods and services so long as transaction costs don't exist. In real life though transactional costs are very real and somebody trying to rely on Coase to justify why the boon from AI should be handed disproportionately to the owners of current capital would miss the point completely.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Nope, I'm talking about people working 4 days but paid at the same amount they currently are. Yes, this means an across the board payrise per hour worked for everyone, which is affordable because AI is going to increase the productivity of everyone and rather than this boon being given to those who give people jobs (by e.g. them getting the same company output with half as many employees saving them payroll costs leading to more profit for them) we cut down the hours worked for ordinary people so the benefits of the productivity increase goes to them (by giving them an extra free day of their lives).
Now yes there are some jobs where a 4 day week isn't going to be possible so for them yes due to Baumol's Costs Disease they're going to end up getting paid more per current 5 day week than they are at the moment, for the exact same reason why the same coffee today costs more in Sweden than Turkey.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1mo ago
Ah, my fault, I didn't even know they were spelt differently.
Oh, I agree it's not unidentified. It's loud and proud foreign influence...
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