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>> No. 90350 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 6:10 pm
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Young people get it — hard work doesn’t pay

How old were you when you realised hard work and sacrifice weren’t worth it? Some realise it at retirement, when after a lifetime of indispensability and missed weekends to reach the prize — a powerful job — they are smoothly replaced and forgotten within a month or two. For others the revelation strikes later, perhaps ending up on one of those “top regrets of the dying” lists drawn up by palliative nurses. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” is always in there.

I think the general rule is that the penny drops some time in your fifties or sixties. Having spent your thirties and forties twitchily looking over your shoulder at your peers, trying to work out who is doing it right (the subtext, I can tell you, of many a tedious pub chat), it suddenly hits you. Most things are basically out of your control.

The philosophy driving Anglo-American economies — work like a maniac and you can achieve anything — is quite obviously untrue except for a lucky few. Everyone else can relax, become more fun to talk to, and maybe get into gardening. That’s a good lesson to learn in your sixties, with retirement on the way. But learn it much earlier than that and you have a problem.

Most of us have to work quite hard just to make a living, and the happiest workers buy into the idea that life is fair, it is all worth it and great rewards glitter just over the horizon. Without that romance and that spur, the daily grind just becomes more grinding. Those kids who could not wait for a marshmallow are of course in line for much less satisfying lives: the test predicts that they will fall in and out of work, even abuse drugs. The workplace is not set up for them. It works only for those who keep the faith.

Expand all images.
>> No. 90351 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 6:11 pm
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Let’s now consider Generation Z and the younger bunch of millennials: those who either graduated into a recession or are about to (I’m in the luckier elder bunch, we just missed it). The fight for good jobs has become tougher, yes, but also much less fair. In a downturn, access schemes dry up and rich kids who can afford internships and precarious starter jobs are at a spectacular advantage. Specialist training and master’s courses get more expensive, too. As a result some careers, particularly fun ones, now look entirely out of range for most people. For example, as The Sunday Times reported at the weekend, nearly all of England’s present cricket stars were privately educated, breaking the previous record.

Then there’s nepotism, which tends to get worse as opportunities really thin. Powerful parents get anxious enough to make some calls; employers get anxious enough to think they might be worth appeasing. (I can hear the comments from here, by the way, and whoever you think I’m related to, I’m not). If an influential parent with friends in the company thinks it’d be great to give their daughter a break, it’s a brave middle manager who says no.

Work is also less predictable now. It doesn’t matter how hard you have worked if your industry fails or your company goes belly up. And the usual paths in are closing. In my own industry it used to be that talent and hard graft on a local paper would at some point lead you to a job on a national. It still might, but mostly it doesn’t. And for those members of Generation Z who do make it really big — influencer is the route du jour — fame seems to strike at random and with terrifying speed, and disappear just as fast.

For the young, then, the workplace might look much as it does to a disillusioned 60-year-old. Opportunities thinning, success increasingly out of reach and subject anyway to forces outside your control. You could grind yourself into the ground working 12-hour days — but really, why would you bother? Trying to enjoy life a bit instead looks like a far safer investment. Generation burnout is here.

What are employers to do about it? One idea, of course, is to fix unfairness where they can and hope the economy picks up. But cultural change is needed, too. The idea that anyone can succeed if they put in the hours just won’t cut it with the new workforce: they already know it’s not quite true. The philosopher Alain de Botton has pointed out that the Danes have some saner ideas about work: that ordinary achievement is perfectly good, while long hours at the office are not. That strikes me as a far better workplace philosophy for the moment, particularly as many young people have already reached that point themselves. Sensibly, they don’t trust that rewards will come later, so, rationally, they would at least like a few small ones now.


Millennial work habits have long been scoffed at — low tolerance for boredom, anxious inquiries at interview about whether a pet can come to work — but they’re quite right. Pets and a bit of work-life balance are what really matter, and we all realise it in the end


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/young-people-get-it-hard-work-doesnt-pay-c3rmpggw5
>> No. 90352 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 6:35 pm
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>One idea, of course, is to fix unfairness where they can and hope the economy picks up. But cultural change is needed, too.

How utterly devoid of originality. What a boring loser trying to pretend he made it by writing in a dying national newspaper with an article to attract the pity party of Gen-Z (just as we read of Millennials who faced a recession).

Post-Covid we're not going to look at new solutions for a world that no longer matches the industrial way of life, we're going to copy the Danes. How Hygge! We'll all live in wooden homes in the country cuddling by the fire with our art-hoe life partner (wool socks and smørrebrød being compulsory). And don't worry kids, you'll never achieve anything anyway so don't work hard, you'll only ever man a checkout.
>> No. 90353 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 6:45 pm
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>>90352
>What a boring loser trying to pretend he made it by writing in a dying national newspaper
Clearly you read it very closely.
>> No. 90354 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 6:51 pm
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>>90353
I did. I deliberately read it all because, at a minimum, I could call him a cunt over the title missing an 'always'.
>> No. 90355 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 6:54 pm
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>>90354
Did you really?
>> No. 90356 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 7:17 pm
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>>90350
I get (and agree) with much of what she is saying - but the article isn't exactly proposing any alternatives.

Owning pets and having a better work-life balance is a bit of a facile solution to the problem.
>> No. 90358 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 7:24 pm
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>>90355
I could call her a cunt.
>> No. 90359 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 7:24 pm
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>>90356
>the article isn't exactly proposing any alternatives

It's quite rare these days to find an opinion writer who actually proposes solutions rather than just pointing out problems and hinting someone else should come along and solve them.
>> No. 90360 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 7:27 pm
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>>90356

How, exactly? A better work life balance is a clear cut, obvious benefit to everyone. I fail to see how you don't think that's a positive thing, unless you're some kind of turbo-Thatcherite who believes nothing matters but the numbers on the stock exchange going up.

You don't even have to be a leftie to buy the idea that a better quality of life actually makes your workers, and thus your economy, more productive. There have been studies on the matter that demonstrate this emphatically.

The Germans, who I'm sure you will know are renowned for their productivity and efficiency, have an average work week of between 36 and 40 hours. By contrast, we average 42.5 hours.

Of course everything won't just magically get better if you have a dog. But I think it's pretty hard to argue by this point that we work too long for no real benefit, if anything it's a net loss.
>> No. 90361 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 7:29 pm
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>>90358
You could, but not because she missed a word.
>> No. 90362 Anonymous
19th August 2020
Wednesday 7:49 pm
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>>90354
Did you just "not all" her?
>> No. 90365 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 6:03 am
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>>90360
A better work life balance is a clear benefit, but it's rarely in a workers gift to just go "oh fine then, I'll only work 30 hours a week" unless they're already very comfortably middle class. That means it'll take policy to deliver a push towards cutting hours, rather than just suggesting to people that they'd be happier if they cut their hours when they can't afford to and would stop getting called in to their zero hours contract helljob if they said they didn't want to work twice in a row.
>> No. 90366 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 8:08 am
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>>90365

I remember cutting my days down in my last job. A new line manager came in who made it his duty to be an insufferable cunt about the fact I didn't work Fridays.

He tried thin end of the wedge shit to get me to work Friday again. I told him, when he text messaged me to ask where a file was located on the Friday, using these specific words to fuck off. Don't take any guff from these swine. I don't know what his goal was I was significantly more valuable to the organisation, younger, smarter, prettier and better paid than him. I think he felt he had to justify his existence and resented that I didn't feel the need to work myself into misery.
>> No. 90368 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:41 am
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>>90360
>By contrast, we average 42.5 hours.

I don't think I've seen a regular office job advertised at more than 40 hours and the majority seem to be 35 hours, i.e. 9 to 5 Monday to Friday with an hour for lunch.

I reckon a lot of time is wasted by people looking busy because they've got an hour or so to kill before they can go home but can't be arsed to start anything. I bet working from home has eliminated that a fair bit.
>> No. 90370 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:52 am
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>>90368
>I bet working from home has eliminated that a fair bit

I'm an international businessman middle-manager in a bank - most people are working longer hours, and are actually being more productive, as a result of the increased working from home. It definitely has eliminated a lot of the time-wasting, but you've got the different problem of everyone going slightly mad without the social contact and actually valuable random social encounters, working in an office environment brings; that stuff is actually important too and nobody has yet solved that bit.
>> No. 90374 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 1:57 pm
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>>90370

>you've got the different problem of everyone going slightly mad without the social contact and actually valuable random social encounters

This - a lot of office people (most people) will say that their particular workplace is tolerable because of the people - what they usually mean by that is there's people they can talk to every now and then to distract or relieve pressure. Losing that must be hard for a lot of people.

Personally I'd like nothing more than to work in a darkened pod/cupboard alone, whether at home or not, but I recognise I am not representative of the majority.
>> No. 90375 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 4:37 pm
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>>90365

True, but I assumed it would be taken as a given that I meant give people shorter work weeks for the same salary. Or bump their hourly rate up to the equivalent, same difference.

I can't see a downside personally. We're just clinging onto the puritan work ethic.
>> No. 90376 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 8:43 pm
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>>90374
> is tolerable because of the people

I'd go further than that - what differentiates one workplace from another, is the people you work with and for - there is a cute saying, you join a firm and leave a boss.

I could work in a lot of different places (I am lucky) - what makes me stay at my current job is definitely the people I work with and how much I like them and get on with them - if that changed, I would move somewhere else.

>>90375
You're highlighting the exact problem with this facile idea we should all just work fewer hours - who wants to get paid less? Any which employer is ever going to pay us the same for working less? There is a difficult tension there.
>> No. 90377 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 8:53 pm
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>>90376
>You're highlighting the exact problem with this facile idea we should all just work fewer hours - who wants to get paid less?
I'm pretty certain that people whose constant and only goal is to earn the most possible are in the minority. Outside of people who struggle to survive, at least.
>> No. 90379 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 9:06 pm
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>>90377
Hmm, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree on that point. I don't think everyone who wants to earn more money feature it is their constant and only goal, but its always very high on the list of priorities. A lot of people struggle to survive, even the ones that notionally get paid a lot. Outside of the middle-classes/inherited wealth, which I think is a smaller band than one might think, I have met very few people who would be happier earning less money. I'd like to meet more, but maybe we mix in completely different circles.
>> No. 90380 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:05 pm
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>>90379
I feel like you skipped the part where I said
>Outside of people who struggle to survive, at least.
but I'm led to believe it's fairly common to work shorter hours in mainland Europe, at least.
The main thing I was thinking is that while business and work are a rat-race, most people aren't fully dedicated to getting that next promotion or moving to a better paid job. Lots of people seem to not really think about working even more beyond what they already have. If that were true everyone would be working overtime, in two jobs, weekends, constantly backstabbing and creating a cut-throat environment.

I'm not trying to say people are lazy, that sort of optimised-for-high-pay lifestyle would be exhausting but people can often push themselves further, particularly if they give it some thought.
>> No. 90381 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:10 pm
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>>90376

>And which employer is ever going to pay us the same for working less? There is a difficult tension there.

But that's exactly the point. It shouldn't matter if you're working less, as long as your productivity is the same; and considering that all evidence points to productivity increasing with shorter hours, it really is win/win. You should be paid based on your value to the company, not just some arbitrary number of hours you loitered around the building. The more you think about it, paying people based on the number of hours they put in makes very little sense- Unless you're, say, a security guard, or a hooker.

Thanks to the fact we mostly still think in terms of the aforementioned puritan work ethic, most people simply can't fucking wrap their head around this. There's this cunt of a woman at my work who hates my guts because I constantly turn up late, and none of the bosses give me enough of a bollocking to satisfy her impotent rage. What she can't get her thick little brain around is that I work twice as fast as her, so being there ten minutes longer in a day doesn't make a blind bit of difference.

In short, we need to get our heads out of the fucking industrial revolution, is what I'm saying.
>> No. 90382 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:18 pm
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>>90381
Crabs in a bucket. I know I'm one of the more efficient members of my team at work and can do in two days what would take others over three. If I was allowed to work 10 fewer hours per week as one of these people, whilst being paid the same amount and completing exactly the same level of work as them, I could see it leading to an almighty shitstorm.
>> No. 90383 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:25 pm
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>>90382

The thing is, there's probably nothing stopping them working at the same speed as you (not that I intend to devalue your abilities, you understand). They just know they might as well toss it off because they're there until 6pm either way.

If the incentive was "you can fuck off home once you've finished your work" (obviously the conditions for that would have to vary depending on the nature of the job), I reckon you'd be amazed at how efficient Sandra and Janice who usually sit gossiping about Love Island suddenly become.
>> No. 90384 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:30 pm
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>>90383
You've got to remember that quite a lot of people are limited in their productivity because they are, quite simply, thick.
>> No. 90385 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:36 pm
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>>90384

They can do the simpler tasks, then, can't they. "From each according to their ability..." and all that.

Fair's fair in the end- Bin men are just as important to the function of society even if their job doesn't require the mental acuity of a brain surgeon.
>> No. 90386 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 10:50 pm
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>>90385
Bin men get paid shitloads for the work they do. They run a racket and threaten to strike if challenged.
>> No. 90387 Anonymous
20th August 2020
Thursday 11:04 pm
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>>90384

This is true to an extent, but it would also be fair to say we have plenty of thick people who are over trained and over qualified to do jobs which are, at the end of the day, really not that difficult. We've just artificially inflated the requirements for a lot of work.

And I suppose, if we're being frank about it, we should confront the fact that there are also plenty of people whos job involves very really little of any consequence either way. If we were to restructure our economy around the productivity of workers like proper, old fashioned socialists before it all devolved into giving immigrants free money there would be a lot of people who suddenly find they are absolutely and entirely surplus to requirement.

I feel quite certain that all the home-working and so on thanks to covid is waking a lot of people up to this sort of thing.
>> No. 90388 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 6:42 am
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With all the talk of productivity I'm reminded of how often productivity related pay deals come up when reading about unions pre-Thatcher.
Even without working less hours, imagine if you could actually get paid more for increasing productivity. (As far a bargain as I can imagine, that. Even if often it was working backwards from the conclusion "We want to be paid more")
>> No. 90389 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 7:39 am
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>>90386
I always find you people hilarious, as though workers demanding better pay and conditions is morally wrong. "My pay is crap, but you don't see me going on strike do you?"
>> No. 90390 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 7:54 am
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>>90389
I'm not complaining. Fair play to them.
>> No. 90391 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 10:23 am
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>>90389
Well if the service they provide is paid for by taxes, then I think there's an argument that it is wrong, or wrongermore wrong since you now affecting lots of users who don't necessarily have other options. Same with public transport.

If bin collection were a service provided by the free-market, another provider would come and snaffle up the business if one were to go on strike.

Also people would just dump their stuff in fields and not choose a provider at all, so I'm not advocating a free-market solution for refuse collection, but just why it might be considered more wrong.
>> No. 90392 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 10:39 am
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>>90391
> If bin collection were a service provided by the free-market,

We'd be drowning in garbage.
>> No. 90393 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 10:47 am
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>>90392
>garbage
>> No. 90394 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 8:06 pm
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>>90350
>For others the revelation strikes later, perhaps ending up on one of those “top regrets of the dying” lists drawn up by palliative nurses. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” is always in there.

I find this a bit irritating. It's become a cliche, and personally I find it misleading. Why is it people who are literally on the cusp of death are seen to be in a right or clearer state of mind than those who aren't? Why does what you feel in your last moments matter more than what you were feeling for the majority of your life? Is it not possible that people feel happy and fulfilled for decades, then have a sudden shock and will feel regretful about a myriad of things towards the end, rationally or not?

It seems more likely to me that the problem isn't hard work or ambition, but in an economic system that drives you to "hard work" it's really a way of dying people saying, "I wish I had more time".

If you actually go back over people's lives, they were generally doing what they had to in order to maintain some standard of living that either a) was the absolute maximum they could achieve given their circumstances, b) they were unwilling to give up, or c) it never occurred to them to give up. I imagine the majority of people fall into a).

>Some realise it at retirement, when after a lifetime of indispensability and missed weekends to reach the prize — a powerful job — they are smoothly replaced and forgotten within a month or two.

This is also stupid -- I would expect a well functioning organisation to have people who could take my place when I leave, particularly when I've warned them of my retirement. And if I have a powerful job, then it makes sense that others will find it desirable and want to go for it.

>The philosophy driving Anglo-American economies — work like a maniac and you can achieve anything — is quite obviously untrue except for a lucky few. Everyone else can relax, become more fun to talk to, and maybe get into gardening

Sounds like the conceit of a privileged opinion writer, ignoring the fact that the majority of people have to work insane hours just to keep any semblance of material comfort and self-identity going. The economic system gives them a very limited set of choices.
>> No. 90395 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 8:26 pm
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>>90394

I think you're looking for nits to pick mate, you seem to broadly agree with the thrust of her point, it's just that women aren't very good at writing rhetoric.

The's an implied assumption that you, as the reader, already understand and share her belief in the coercive nature of the economic system, to begin with.
>> No. 90396 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 8:32 pm
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>>90395

Indeed I do already believe that our economic system is coercive, but the article still strikes me as totally wrongheaded. It's framing this excessive work as a choice when it is more often not.
>> No. 90397 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 8:36 pm
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>>90395
>just that women aren't very good at writing rhetoric

Pathetic attempt lad, have a word with yourself.
>> No. 90398 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 8:38 pm
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>>90397

Attempt at what, lad?
>> No. 90399 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 8:48 pm
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>>90396

You could argue that (considering it's in the Times), it's framed as a choice because it's directed not at workers, but at the people responsible for workers.

I realised a while ago that a lot of what pisses me off about people like Owen Jones, for instance, is that he's simply not writing for me. He's writing for the kind of people who have fashionable dinner parties with other professional couples. It comes off hilariously out of touch because if it had any air of authentic working class credibility, the people who need to hear the message would be uncomfortable trying to engage and relate with it and thus subconsciously dismiss it.
>> No. 90400 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 10:18 pm
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>>90399

He is basically the Eternal First-Year University Student with the iconoclastic worldview and wisdom on tick.
>> No. 90401 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 10:32 pm
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>>90399>>90400
Polly Toynbee earns over six figures for her Guardian work. I'm pretty sure if you were in a position to make shitloads of money for writing that kind of bollocks you would. Not sure on Owen Jones but I believe he's made a fair amount from his books.
>> No. 90402 Anonymous
21st August 2020
Friday 10:44 pm
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>>90401

I'm not ashamed of my analysis, but that sycophantic response to it needs 500 words with itself before the publishing deadline.
>> No. 90403 Anonymous
22nd August 2020
Saturday 12:07 am
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>>90400
He's a performative Northern leftie and not much else.
>> No. 90407 Anonymous
22nd August 2020
Saturday 12:52 pm
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>>90399
>>90400
>>90401
>>90403

My missus likes to play a joke by changing my desktop background to this. He's disappointed in me for relapsing on my vegan diet and getting a 20 McNugget share box to myself.
>> No. 90409 Anonymous
22nd August 2020
Saturday 10:26 pm
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>>90407
If anyone put Owen Jones and Comic Sans on my desktop I'd wear my spousal abuse conviction as a badge of honour.
>> No. 90410 Anonymous
22nd August 2020
Saturday 11:57 pm
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>>90407
This must be a joke but it does baffle me how people will so easily share passwords. I sometimes will be given a bird's laptop and she will just go have a shower. Do normal people not have secret gardens? If I made an /emo/ thread on here saying that I'm having an affair with a woman at work I bet it could cause a load of shit.

Don't even get me started when I'm given a card and pin-number "yeah, before I go, let's be dead kinky with some handcuffs. It'll be a laugh, trust me."
>> No. 90411 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 1:55 am
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>>90410

I'm happy to share certain passwords, but not all of them - and my secret garden is secret enough that a partner probably wouldn't even know it existed.

I don't have anything to hide, really, I have never cheated and rarely do anything nefarious, and if you're going out with me, you're probably going to know that I buy drugs off the internet occasionally, so that's fine. But I'd never give anyone my "master" passwords for things like SSH, my Google account or facebook - I realise the last two are ironic as using them means everyone can see my data, but you get where I'm coming from. Facebook I only have for messenger, and I only really limit access to that because my girlfriend doesn't need to see the horrifying amount of women I speak to when I'm single, and I'm too lazy to delete all the chats.

As for money, nobody but me and maybe my mother would ever know the pin to my current account, the one with all the real money in - but if you need to use my money, by all means take the credit card with a grand on it that sends me a push notification every time it is used - to me it's worth losing that sort of money to discover your potential life partner is a clumsy thief.

If I'm giving you my laptop, it's either logged into a guest account, or I've deleted my history/closed all 40 porn tabs I keep up because I'm an old man who doesn't like bookmarking stuff. And, like you say - .gs is my secret garden, really, and even if you find your way here, you'll never know what I posted specifically.

If you use the same password/pin for everything, however, then you have other problems.
>> No. 90412 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 2:50 am
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>>90410

Any other girlfriend and I'd agree with you, but I don't even have to hide my naughty texts to other birds from this one so what is there to worry about.
>> No. 90413 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 4:33 am
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>>90407
That image is probably his most effective and life-changing piece of work, even if he didn't produce it himself. Your partner is to be commended.

If I could be bothered, and had the skillz, an Owen Jones/Comic Sans meme website would be top of my list for an internet (serious) business.
>> No. 90418 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 6:04 pm
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>>90411
>the credit card with a grand on it that sends me a push notification every time it is used
Whoa how do I get a credit card like that?
>> No. 90419 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 6:20 pm
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>>90418
Monzo have a whole bank account that does the same, too - highly recommend them.
>> No. 90420 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 7:44 pm
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>>90419
Aren't Monzo in financial trouble?
>> No. 90421 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 8:20 pm
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>>90420
Not in the slightest - they're not making as much money as they planned (nor is any bank at the moment), but they're easily doing the best of the challenger banks out there.
>> No. 90422 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 8:33 pm
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>>90421
>Smartphone bank Monzo warns the coronavirus pandemic has raised doubts over whether it could raise money in the future and continue operating.

>Having already seen losses increase 142 per cent to £114million in the 12 months to February 2020, it said growth had slowed and its revenue had been 'significantly impacted by the pandemic'. The challenger bank, which has around 4.3million customers and issues a 'hot coral' coloured debit card, said it was 'exposed to the risk that revenues are significantly lower for a long period of time', and the pandemic 'makes the fundraising environment more challenging'.

>Its directors warned the loss-making bank faced 'material uncertainties that cast significant doubt upon the group's ability to continue as a going concern'.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8578349/Britains-Monzo-flags-going-concern-doubts-COVID-19-impact.html

>Flicking through the results, and it’s achingly clear what the problem is: Monzo has yet find a real business model.

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/08/05/1596621735000/Monzo--the-bank-that-doesn-t-want-to-be/

Significant doubt as to whether you're able to continue as a going concern seems like trouble to me.
>> No. 90423 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 8:38 pm
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>>90422
"material uncertainties that cast significant doubt upon the group's ability to continue as a going concern" is the standard wording required in an audit report for when outside circumstances might bring you down. Any company that doesn't get that assessment in their report this year has insulated itself well.
>> No. 90424 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 8:53 pm
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>>90423
How are they easily doing the best of the challenger banks?
>> No. 90425 Anonymous
23rd August 2020
Sunday 9:16 pm
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>>90423
Exactly - I work for a different bank (not a challenger) - we'll all have that on our financial reports this year.

Monzo are doing the best because of the rate they've grown and the quality of their customer experience - just about every other bank (who aren't a challenger) wishes to buy them - so I would take any talking them down with a pinch of salt. Revolut are bigger, but they've had issues with AML and so would be far more wary of them as a customer.

We'll see - I've used it as my lunch/travel/contactless bank account for a long time now. I'm not about to start paying my salary in there (but know plenty who do), but I think they'll get there and would recommend them to anyone.
>> No. 90426 Anonymous
24th August 2020
Monday 3:21 am
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>>90425
Yeah, given they seem to have a significantly above-average rate of account lockouts which they refuse to explain (therefore denying the customer the ability to resolve), I wouldn't trust it as a primary account any more than I'd trust PayPal as a primary payment provider.

I can understand why more accounts get locked - they're on the hook for fraud, and by necessity there's a sensitivity/specificity trade-off in fraud detection, so if you're in a financially weaker position the PR hit of false positives is a better bet than having to cough up on false negatives.
>> No. 90427 Anonymous
24th August 2020
Monday 10:39 am
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>>90426
Banks don't get shut down for losing money - they do get shut down for being slack with AML controls.
>> No. 90851 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 8:59 am
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Millennials all over the world have lost faith in democracy

Millennials in democracies throughout the world are more disillusioned with their system of government than any young generation in living memory, a study has found.

A survey of nearly five million people showed that those in their 20s and 30s, born between 1981 and 1996, had less faith in democratic institutions than their parents or grandparents did at the same stage of life. The collapse of confidence is particularly pronounced in the “Anglo-Saxon democracies” of Britain, the United States and Australia. However, similar trends are seen in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Europe.

“This is the first generation in living memory to have a global majority who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works while in their twenties and thirties,” Roberto Foa, lead author of the study from the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University, said.

Of the 2.3 billion people in countries covered by the report, 1.6 billion, or seven out of ten, are in nations with declining democratic satisfaction from one generation to the next. This did not mean that voters would support autocratic alternatives, Dr Foa said. Rather, they were frustrated that their systems were not working for them.

The report shows a slump among young Britons, fuelled largely by inequality. In 1973, 54 per cent of British 30-year-olds reported being satisfied with democracy and 57 per cent of baby boomers expressed the same sentiment when they turned 30 a decade later. For members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, satisfaction reached a high of 62 per cent during the 1990s and 2000s. For millennials, it has sunk to 48 per cent.

Inequalities in wealth and income, the difficulty of climbing on to the property ladder, the burden of student debt and a greater dependence on support from parents have created a perception that “the chances of success or failure in life depend less upon hard work and enterprise, and more upon inherited wealth and privilege”.


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/millennials-all-over-the-world-have-lost-faith-in-democracy-q6pjnpg0w
>> No. 90852 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 11:14 am
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>>90851

Doesn't surprise me that's the spin the times would put on things; a more accurate title would be that we have less and less democracy. Democracy does not matter that much if the only options available are the neoliberal consensus or nothing, hence the recent descent into nationalist and alt-,right lunacy.
>> No. 90853 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 1:14 pm
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>>90852
Similar framing from the Indy:

>Millennials more disillusioned with democracy than any generation in living memory, research suggests

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/millennials-democracy-populism-cambridge-generation-x-boomers-study-b1155826.html
>> No. 90854 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 1:37 pm
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>>90853

Fair point, it's not unique to The Times, then. I still find it a curious way to frame the research, that perhaps begins with the nature of the study itself, which assumes that we actually have meaningful democracy. The scope of options has been narrowing (or skewing back dramatically in favour of private power) for the last half century or more.

To then publish a report claiming people are dissatisfied with something leaves us open to the suggestion that people want something other than democracy, rather than to fix or improve democratic institutions. I have a feeling it would be very easy to spin this into a "group x are anti-state" or "anti-whatever" when that's not the case.
>> No. 90855 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 2:08 pm
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>>90854
>The scope of options has been narrowing (or skewing back dramatically in favour of private power) for the last half century or more.

Isn't it a case of reverting to the mean? The post-war consensus was the exception rather than the norm in terms of power and we've since been shifting back to things have always been, with this correction accerlated by the financial crisis.

>I have a feeling it would be very easy to spin this into a "group x are anti-state" or "anti-whatever" when that's not the case.

I expected the comments to be full of "Millennials don't like democracy when people don't vote the way they want them to" but some of the top rated ones are:-

>If people want to talk about "entitlement", that word could have been invented for the boomers. Still, don't touch the triple lock pension. Don't change a thing. Just have a go at the snowflakes.

...

>I think an important point in the article is that millennials are not against democracy but dissatisfied in the way the democracies work in practice. I think that's a pretty fair comment. There are glaring issues here in the UK and elsewhere that devalue the democratic process.

...

>Which generation is entitled? The one that loaded the country on debt, deliberately didn't build enough houses to make it's assets more valuable, signed off outrageous unfunded pensions for the next generation to pay for, went to university for free, burned all the fossil fuels, and still gets free travel cards. Ah yes, millennials are entitled.

...

>It’s not the concept of democracy per se - it’s the electoral system and the quality of politicians that’s the problem. There is insufficient competition in our two party system and the candidate selection process is rigged.

Heck, these are top comments on the Mail's article about it:

>When democracy can be purchased without investigation such as the brexit referendum, can you blame them.

...

>The older generations have not taken their responsibility to listen and lead seriously- Brexit has been a massive betrayal of trust and the constant government lies surrounding Boris and trump means politicians reputations have reached rock bottom - the government had better be careful this could be an even more desperate and dangerous situation halfway through next year. All the things we have taken for granted could be gone forever

That said, beyond that it's people who've only read the headline complaining about snowflakes, the liberal media and loony lefties indoctrinating children in school.
>> No. 90856 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 2:26 pm
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>>90855
>Isn't it a case of reverting to the mean?

Right you are, though I hope the "mean" isn't a constant. I don't want to be fatalistic, and think we could return to and improve on the gains made in the post-war era.

Interesting comments, too, it seemed many also saw right through that one. I'm hopeful that the comments you posted are representative of the general reader, but it's hard to tell if that's the case.
>> No. 90857 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 2:32 pm
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>>90852
I think what The Times says is true, it's just that they don't understand how this problem has happened or they don't want to highlight it. I'm not sure how cynical I'm feeling so I can't come down one way or another on their motives. It's repeatedly baffling and frustrating to me how all these failings in our current system are as plain to see as the bone in a compound fracture, but no one with any real power is arsed. It's not as if changing our current socio-economic system would ruin rich people's lives, it's not the Byzantine Empire; no one needs to be blinded and locked in a dungeon. Going back to what I said about what I said about The Times' possible motivations, what are the political motivations for this? Is it cult-esque group think or are they just hopelessly amoral and don't care? Perhaps it differs from person to person. Either way, the mothership isn't coming, but the powers that be insist we keep showing up for a group reading of What Xenu Can Do For You anyway. I could go on and on, but I have things to do so consider yourselves lucky.
>> No. 90858 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 6:46 pm
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>>90852
>Democracy does not matter that much if the only options available are the neoliberal consensus or nothing, hence the recent descent into nationalist and alt-,right lunacy.

So why was satisfaction highest during the 90s and 00s? Surely John Major wasn't that good.

Get off your soapbox for 5 minutes and you will notice that the surge in confidence coincided with a crisis in people not voting. That should give you a clue as to the real reason being today's divisive politics where every election result is a disaster for someone and the government asks us what to do in referendums.
>> No. 90859 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 6:59 pm
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>>90858
Is that quote saying you should turn around and fight the wall?
>> No. 90860 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 7:26 pm
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>>90858

I actually don't know what point you're referencing here. Unless you want me to guess at and maybe misinterpret your point, you should just say what your stance is.

>Get off your soapbox for 5 minutes and you will notice that the surge in confidence coincided with a crisis in people not voting.

It's hard to interpret this without the numbers, but I'd be inclined to believe that a surge in confidence during low turnout is a sign that disaffected people chose not to vote, whereas now they vote but not satisfied with the democratic system as a whole. I'm not sure I see anything inconsistent between my views and what you're saying.
>> No. 90861 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 8:08 pm
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>>90858

"There's no point in voting because they're all the same" isn't necessarily a bad thing if they're all competent moderates and everything is going pretty well. High turnouts can be a bad thing if most of the electorate are voting for the lesser of two evils.

I've heard Tories say that they'd happily have Blair back and Labour supporters say that they'd happily have Major back; I think confidence in democracy was high in the 90s simply because Westminster was broadly competent and reasonable.
>> No. 90862 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 9:18 pm
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>>90858

>So why was satisfaction highest during the 90s and 00s?

Maybe because people earning the median wage could reasonably afford to buy a house without having to relocate to Scunthorpe or somewhere similarly grim.
>> No. 90863 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 9:21 pm
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>>90859
Worked for East Germany.

>>90860
I'm saying people were satisfied with the neoliberal consensus during its peak. Suggesting we don't have an alternative right now or that our democracy is somehow now more flawed is a load of bollocks because we have radically different visions at work. Its that confidence in the consensus that has been eroded and replaced by more 'winner takes all' style politics where both sides seek to attack the existing neoliberal system from different tracks.

In terms of the numbers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050929/voter-turnout-in-the-uk/

It's rather symbolic that the lowest voter turnout was mere months before 9/11.

>>90861
>I think confidence in democracy was high in the 90s simply because Westminster was broadly competent and reasonable.

I disagree given the 90s began with the poll tax riots and a government that was eventually thrown out of office due to sleaze. And the following decade that had the Iraq War and a curtailment in civil liberties attached to a general fear of a new trend in terrorism.

There's certainly wider issues that are driving partisan divisions but they're mundane explanations to do with continual challenges to our prosperity (not to say we didn't have those in previous generations) and a loss of social cohesion that challenge democracy everywhere. If we had a system that offered no real alternative during a time of prosperity then it wouldn't matter and if we faced hard times together it wouldn't knock as hard at our faith in the community consensus.
>> No. 90864 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 9:58 pm
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>>90863

>continual challenges to our prosperity [...] and a loss of social cohesion that challenge democracy everywhere

We overdid it on the imgrunts, basically.
>> No. 90865 Anonymous
20th October 2020
Tuesday 10:31 pm
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>>90864
Funnily enough, Fukuyama has actually been saying something along these lines. That the traditional working class feel betrayed by cosmopolitan social democrats and in general people lack a feeling of dignity in modern society like they don't matter.

Not exactly revolutionary thought but consider where it's coming from.
>> No. 90866 Anonymous
21st October 2020
Wednesday 12:24 am
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>>90861
I don't think anyone really wants Major or Blair back. They want back the calmer times of the 1990s because they haven't given enough thought to how the events of the 1990s lead us to the events of the present. 1 month into a Major or Blair re-run they'd realise that neither of them have the midas touch and that everything is still shit, only now it's shit presided over by a grandfather instead of a gigalo.

>>90865
>in general people lack a feeling of dignity in modern society like they don't matter.
I think Michael Young (who coined the word "meritocracy", and not as an ideal) was before his time on this. He did do a book on it, but this comment piece is just as instructive: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
>In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the Blair government.
>The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment.
>They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves.
>It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.
>They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came.
>Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry between the haves and the have-nots.
>With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them.
...
>The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.
>They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.
>So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.
>Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have multiplied.

The only issue I have with the analysis post-2001 is that being pre-recession it doesn't have much to say for the downwardly mobile middle class, who have their certificates but still get beaten over the head with the "without merit" stick.
>> No. 90867 Anonymous
21st October 2020
Wednesday 1:07 am
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>>90866

I read a good article on the downwardly mobile middle class some while ago, that suggested they might be partly to blame for the modern day left becoming seemingly toothless. The downwardly mobile iddle has taken up the flag out of self-interest because it finds itself under pressure, but these are not people who object in principle to the unsatisfactory conditions of working minimum wage stacking shelves at Tesco. Merely that it is they/their children (who have degrees don't you know) who should have to do it. They believed in the meritocracy, they just never considered its window might shift.
>> No. 90868 Anonymous
21st October 2020
Wednesday 3:28 am
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>>90867

The debate over financial support for Tier 3 lockdown has really been pissing me off. The only reason we're discussing it is because we've spent the last decade gutting the welfare state, but there's a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that fact. We kept voting in a government that shredded the safety net, but it's only a problem now that middle-class people are hurtling towards the ground. We're studiously ignoring the elephant in the room - that we condemned millions of people to poverty, degradation and misery simply because we thought that we were better than them and would never have to share their fate.

A lot of people feel personally offended that the government is saying "if you lose your job, you should claim unemployment benefit", as if they're not really unemployed. They're acting like being mortgaged up to the eyeballs with an Audi on PCP is somehow morally different from having a massive telly on tick from Brighthouse. They were only too happy to tell manufacturing workers that they should just "up-skill" when their jobs went to China, but there's no way that they're going to retrain to become a healthcare worker or a lorry driver or a web developer. The whole thing just stinks of hypocrisy, callousness and the old deserving vs undeserving poor dichotomy.

I'm just a wet centrist social democrat Blairite bastard, but I'm glad to see the austerity chickens come home to roost. If anything good comes out of this shitter of a year, I hope it's a bit of empathy for people who have been shat on by life.
>> No. 90869 Anonymous
21st October 2020
Wednesday 2:30 pm
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>>90868
>I'm just a wet centrist social democrat Blairite bastard, but I'm glad to see the austerity chickens come home to roost.

Agree with you on your point, but I think Blair's Labour played a significant role in paving the way for the austerity you describe.
>> No. 90870 Anonymous
21st October 2020
Wednesday 3:32 pm
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>>90868

Couldn't agree more.

Trouble is the middle class tend to see their self-interest as aligning with capital, not the proletariat. This country's ingrained snobbery always cancels out any logical assessment of one's position in society, and therefore vulnerability to economic impact. Our preconceptions of class obscure the fact that earning £35k a year as a junior manager in the office puts you roughly on the same wage level as an experienced mechanic, which is undoubtedly a povvo job for people who only did BTECs. The difference is the mechanic likely has far greater job security.

Essentially this is the main con-trick the Conservatives have exploited to secure their position in office for the last ten years. You're one of us, not one of them.
>> No. 91363 Anonymous
9th November 2020
Monday 11:06 am
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Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/09/inheritance-work-middle-class-home-ownership-cost-of-housing-wages
>> No. 91364 Anonymous
9th November 2020
Monday 11:29 am
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>>91363
Pay no attention to the shitstorm around the corner.
>> No. 91385 Anonymous
11th November 2020
Wednesday 9:25 am
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>>91363
Does this assume that grandparents give directly to their grandchildren, or their parents pass the money through without skimming too much?
Setting your life up on the assumption of a future inheritance is weird. Waiting until your parents die to pay off your mortgage runs a hell of a risk of them dying broke or living for ages, and you holding a mortgage you can't pay or renew, just when you were hoping to relax a bit.
I wouldn't turn down an inheritance, but people bleating about inheritance tax can fuck off. Tax it like income.
>> No. 91390 Anonymous
11th November 2020
Wednesday 11:13 am
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>>91385

I think inheritance tax is just a stupidity tax, as it's so fucking easy to get around. If your parents/grandparents have the sort of assets to make it an issue, they almost certainly have an accountant or money manager who has sorted it out for them anyway.

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