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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26562 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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There is a reason it’s called Build Nothing Britain.

When comparing London to top tier cities in the US it looks like a terrible value. High housings costs but without the comparable salaries (obviously there are people killing it in London but speaking generally).

I have always loved visiting London. It is truly an impressive city with easy access to Europe but hard for me to justify living there vs top US cities.

Salaries in finance (including fintech) are only slightly lower in London compared to New York. For FAANG SWEs the difference is probably a factor of three between London and the Bay area.

NYC also has a PMC status competition thing going on which makes the perceived cost of living for upper-middle-class people high relative to the actual cost of living. "$250k in NYC is barely middle class given the cost of living" gets sympathetic nods. "£150k in London is barely middle class given house prices nowadays" gets you laughed at.

Hmm. I’d say £100k is equivalent to $200k in NYC. Sure, housing in London is 60-70% as expensive (still substantially cheaper), but groceries are less than half the price (Manhattan grocery store prices are often double midwestern suburb prices ime, in the UK You pay the same in London for groceries as someone in a town in Lancashire), restaurants and bars are half the price, many services and goods from private healthcare to personal trainers to piano tutors are much less expensive due to lower labor costs, Uber is less expensive, haircuts and cosmetic services are half the price, culture from museums to the opera, ballet and theater is so much less expensive. The only stuff that costs the same are consumer goods sold at identical prices internationally like iPhones and high end makeup.

There are certainly parts of London that have Manhattan prices, but they tend to be those parts where people are either independently wealthy or making ‘Manhattan rich’ salaries anyway.

These are all great points. TBH my view on London prices is based on when I’m there as a tourist so I’m likely doing all the things that are on the higher end of the cost spectrum and then comparing to more “normal” day to day activities in the US.

I found it dismal.

Dirty, full of CCTV, brown people.

Little to be impressed by except a little old architecture and the sheer novelty of the city being occupied by seemingly everyone but British.

Really? I had the opposite experience last fall. It was clean, very british, tons of great architecture and history. Easy cheap transport. We had a blast. Cheaper food and beer than where I live. I didn't feel the CCTV eyes on me, although I'm sure they were there.

I had a game how many CCTV I could get onto a single photograph. Think I managed 23 in one photo.

I was there in '13. On a low budget though. The transport was abysmal - buses slow and very full, not even in rush hour, underground cramped and hot. I'm used to the spacious, echoing and chilly Prague metro, which was, next to old buildings with metre thick walls the only refuge from the summer heat before AC became common... not so in London.

Didn't even think to buy food at a restaurant, just bought groceries and fixed some food for myself. Met a few locals who were staying at the same hostel because they couldn't afford rent in London while working. Had to deal with pretty nice French staff and one surly, incompetent black woman.

One of the places I went to visit was the artillery museum in Woolwich. Surreal. You go on a bus, endure the long ride and the mildly worrying schizo black guy talking to himself half the way. Disembark, see maybe one or two white people around, but the buildings look like Europe.

And of course, as I was taking long exposure photos of the pieces in there and some fucking kids were running around about and maybe 1-2 got into the viewframe when I wasn't taking pictures I was gently reminded to "not take photo of the children".

I mean if you're staying in shit places with weird people and have a bad attitude it is going to suck, you can have a bad time anywhere in the world by chance or by design. If you don't have the money to eat out a few times you can hardly fault London for that. It is a world city. To experience it you need at least a bit of a budget. I've been to Prague as well. I enjoyed it.

No, I specifically excluded the hostel from my judgement

What I meant by being dirty was lots of places being grimy, somewhat dirty, a little trash lying around etc. I don't give a rat's ass about whether pricey restaurants are any good or whether the very rich can find nice places somewhere. That's a given everywhere.

If streets, publicly used infrastructure looks mostly meh to bad it says a lot. Means the state is breaking down. You wouldn't see that in e.g. Austria or Germany outside of places with lots of migrants.

I've been to many German Cities. Some are grimy, Stuttgart and Erfurt come to mind as places that had noticeable bad parts. I didn't see any of that while in London really. While in london I saw a grand total of one old school hard luck guy silently begging outside of a classic pub down by the river, it added to atmosphere if anything, much cleaner and less bum filled than any day I've spent in Boston or NYC. We didn't do any big 5 star meals, or stay at any place above a Marriott, just pub food and one or 2 nice dinners.

Subway was on time and clean, sure the older subway tunnels and cars were a bit small and a tad warm, but that is because they are some of the first in the world and they only could build the tunnels a certain diameter back in 1863 as opposed to the Prague subway, built over 100 years later in the 1970s. We bought the "london pass" for a few days, it gives you discounted access to all the big attractions. I had no problem getting anywhere in the city for only 8.20 pounds a day! I had low expectations (in line with what you seem to have experienced, and from reading about dystopian policies online for 2 decades) for London, and was very impressed and surprised to have a great time! I would go back any time!

Maybe you just don't enjoy visiting a large metro.

The part of (very central) London I live in is impeccably clean. The streets are swept daily by machine operators, there is no trash on the street except in the early morning on pickup days, in the early hours briefly from restaurants, and occasionally during big sports events or concerts nearby from crowds, which I think is reasonable. It’s much cleaner than any comparable major tier 1 Western city. There are bad parts, but there’s no need to visit them unless you’re unfortunate enough to live there.

There isn’t one major North American city that comes remotely close in cleanliness, and big European cities like Paris, Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, arguably (still) even Madrid are worse. The only 4m+ inhabitant cities I’ve seen much cleaner than London are in Asia. Prague and Warsaw are clean but not noticeably moreso.

When it comes to the proportion of rich people, is there any borough of London that has more than the one you live in ?

Borough? Westminster is a very diverse borough with 250,000 people. It’s possible that Kensington and Chelsea has a higher proportion of rich people. Both Boroughs contain very rich and very poor neighborhoods, though.

Is there a smaller subdivision in use than that?

Politically, there are wards (each ward elects councillors to the borough government), but the borough (as ‘local council’) is the smallest non-ceremonial unit of local government in the UK. There are neighborhoods of course.

Dirty, full of CCTV, brown people.

Dirty? Compared to what? Of the comparably sized cities I've been to (NY, Paris, Berlin), I'd say London generally holds up pretty well on this front. There are horrendous areas, granted, but that's the same everywhere.

Yes, London is overall pretty clean (although due to urban planning failures in some neighborhoods they put trash bags on the sidewalk for pickup). I was shocked by how dirty Berlin is in comparison.

It's Germany's San Francisco, left-wing lunatic central, with city police getting infiltrated by ethnic mafias.

Berlin is relatively poor after all - something I think surprised a lot of people who assume by default that it's the national center of wealth generation akin to London, Paris, Madrid etc.

Indeed it seems Berlin is only slightly richer than Germany overall, which I didn't know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_per_capita

I wonder if the partition had something to do with that, Berlin had to prop-up East Berlin after reunification and even before it there was a certain instability about West Berlin being deep in enemy territory that probably heavily discouraged investment. Just guessing.

I think it is more that Frankfurt is the commercial capital of Germany, whereas London and Paris are the commercial capitals as well as the political capitals. Rome is poorer than you expect (about 15% richer than Italy as a whole, but below the northern Italian average) for the same reason - Milan is the commercial capital. Greater DC (the District itself is notoriously dirt poor) being as rich as it is (about 20% above the US average) is the unusual thing by international standards.

Almost certainly. And that it's in the poorer, ex-communist eastern half of the country.

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