London Riots

[radiator]

Conditioned to pay our bills and mortgages without actually asking why things have to be this way.

So we can eat, have a roof over our heads and keep warm?

To have any sort of stability and growth in society costs money, and everyone needs to contribute to keep the whole thing going. I genuinely don't know what you're suggesting as an alternative. A return to some sort of idealised, primitive pastoral existence where people live in huts (and die of dysentery at the age of 25)? I'll stay here with the NHS, the police, the internet and my iPhone, thanks. I'm sure we'd all like a fairer society but you have to be realistic about these things. With all the problems we have in the modern world, I'd still rather be alive now that at any point in history because of the standard of living and relative luxury we enjoy today.

We have ceased to be free human beings with enough time to enjoy our lives and each other's company and become ruthless consumers with hardly a moment to ourselves. Hardly a moment to think.

I'd be willing to bet that the average person now has a damn sight more free time than they used to. As far as I know the very idea of 'leisure time' is a recent concept.

Are we all becoming so niggardly that we can only appreciate a human being for what he or she owns or earns? Do we only have respect for those with jobs? Are those without jobs - no matter the reason - worthless?

I don't know about anyone else, but I respect people who are happy, and have managed to live within the system while carving out a life that works for them. That could mean being the CEO of a multinational corporation or it could be living on a houseboat, or scraping by but doing something they love. What I don't respect is people who are just plain lazy, or have no ambitions or aspirations beyond churning out a few sprogs and getting themselves a council flat.

[A.Cow]

Apparently the national average wage for the UK is £24,000 a year. That puts me, and I would guess a lot of other folks here, firmly on the side of poverty.

Bollocks to that!  That's like Harry Truman being told that half of the American population are of below-average intelligence.

£24k is a mean average based on including ludicrously high salaries that shoot up exponentially.

The proper median average -- the appropriate statistic to use with skewed data like this -- is much lower (20% less, in fact) at around £19,000 per year.

[mogzilla]

hmmm, maybe national service isnt the idea after all do we really want this lot with the mentallity they have being given guns?

loving the swift justice though any media comparing it to dredd's world yet?

[Matt Timson]

Lovely woods. Too bad about those trees!

[SmallBlueThing]

Well, according to my neighbour (who i nearly had a fight with last week after he complained about my kids making noise- the day after his estranged son had woken us up banging on his door asking to use his toilet, which he was refused so then took a shit in a morrisons bag and left it in front of our house!) it's "all down to the blacks". Apparently, all the rioters are black and there have been rapes and murders but its been covered up by the media. And computers are to blame.

Fuck me.

SBT

[Leigh S]

materially, the state will put a roof over your head and give you enough to pay your bills.  Probably as much as the guy next door who actually works

When I stop dying of laughter, will you tell us another one?

Seriously Exile,  i see the figures on this everyday.  Maybe not cash in your hand, but add in housing benefit, council tax rebates, free prescriptions and school meals etc, and the gap is less than you think, even before you add in premiums and additional benefits that some can claim.

OK, if you could get a job near the average (or median) wage, you'd stand to benefit (perhaps!), but if you ahve no skills and are going to be on or around minimum wage?

Then theres the cost of getting into work (bus car train), child care costs, clothing for that job, and the cost of your time. I don't blame anyone for doing the maths and realising its not worth their time.  Working tax credits and such have gone some way to addressing this, but are the first things to face the cutbacks, with rates already reduced.

[I, Cosh]

£24k is a mean average based on including ludicrously high salaries that shoot up exponentially.

The proper median average -- the appropriate statistic to use with skewed data like this -- is much lower (20% less, in fact) at around £19,000 per year.

Don't doubt it, but can you point me at the source for that?

[pauljholden]

pft. Helmet's too small.

-pj
(Is this the wrong thread?)

[worldshown]

£24k is a mean average based on including ludicrously high salaries that shoot up exponentially.

The proper median average -- the appropriate statistic to use with skewed data like this -- is much lower (20% less, in fact) at around £19,000 per year.

Don't doubt it, but can you point me at the source for that?

Not the exact article, but a report on the BBCs website with details of average and median salaries that gives the median salary for all workers as £20,801.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8151355.stm

I did see a more recent article suggesting that the average wage had gone down by £2,600 since then but as the source was the Daily Mail, it can't be considered reliable.

[Mudcrab]

materially, the state will put a roof over your head and give you enough to pay your bills.  Probably as much as the guy next door who actually works

When I stop dying of laughter, will you tell us another one?

Seriously Exile,  i see the figures on this everyday.  Maybe not cash in your hand, but add in housing benefit, council tax rebates, free prescriptions and school meals etc, and the gap is less than you think, even before you add in premiums and additional benefits that some can claim.

But everyone gets free prescriptions don't they?

Oh no, that's just the Norts 

I think I've just found the cause of the riots right there 

[The Legendary Shark]

To have any sort of stability and growth in society costs money, and everyone needs to contribute to keep the whole thing going. I genuinely don't know what you're suggesting as an alternative. A return to some sort of idealised, primitive pastoral existence where people live in huts (and die of dysentery at the age of 25)? I'll stay here with the NHS, the police, the internet and my iPhone, thanks. I'm sure we'd all like a fairer society but you have to be realistic about these things. With all the problems we have in the modern world, I'd still rather be alive now that at any point in history because of the standard of living and relative luxury we enjoy today.

Well I'm obviously not suggesting going back to the Middle Ages. I'm suggesting we use our technology and our brains to run our society in a better way. At the moment we're paying other people to live, not paying our planet.

For example, we are running our manufacturing processes as linear processes. Linear processes in finite environments don't work. You could liken it to extracting clean water from a fish tank using a length of pipe with a filter in it. The fish tank is the finite environment, the filter extracts useful compounds from the water and the pipe is the linear system. Unless the water is put back into the tank after it's been cleaned then the tank will wind up empty. This is how we are using up the planet's resources - we extract, manufacture then discard. Why do we do this? Because it makes certain people along the way very rich whilst viciously exploiting others.

This point is explained very well in the short (20 minute) video The Story of Stuff.

The banking system must also be changed. For example, you believe that people must be made to pay if they want to live in a house. Fair enough, the resources to assemble that house must come from somewhere and if we insist on using the primitive monetary system then let's at least make it fair. Do you think it's fair that private banks create money out of nothing and lend it to you at massive interest when a social bank, like the Bank of England is supposed to be, could very easily create the same amount of money out of nothing and then lend it to you virtually or even completely without interest? Imagine business loans at 1% or less. Imagine taxes down to a couple of percent and a welfare system and public works projects that are paid for by interest free money which is not lent into society but spent into society.

These are just two of the things I suggest for improving society and, as you can see, neither one involves stepping backwards in time or sacrificing our collective wealth - although I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this is exactly what the government's wholly unnecessary austerity measures will accomplish.

I'd be willing to bet that the average person now has a damn sight more free time than they used to. As far as I know the very idea of 'leisure time' is a recent concept.

Not sure about this. Certainly some people have more free time and some people have less. Automation and technology has vastly reduced the number of people needed in certain industries, but instead of using these technologies to ease the strain on society we instead use them to increase the profits of a few and chuck working people out to find something else to do. That something else tends to be less well paid and increases the strain on society whilst adding to the profits of companies and corporations. This one of a hundred little ways that the wealth of societies is being stolen from under us.

(I seem to remember hearing that modern workers have less free time than in the 1930s and far less than in the Middle Ages. I can't find a link for this, though, so I may have dreamt it.)

What I don't respect is people who are just plain lazy, or have no ambitions or aspirations beyond churning out a few sprogs and getting themselves a council flat.

And why is that? Since when was being a parent seen as a pointless exercise? Oh yes, of course - parenting doesn't make any money and therefore is a drain on the economy. Parents should have kids and work, or be rich enough to not have to work. Just because somebody doesn't want to be a part of this filthy, heartless, exploitative rampant capitalist vampire system we've somehow ended up with doesn't make them a bad person. The alternatives (at least from the Daily Mail type perspective) are to knuckle under and partake in a rotten system in order to live well, rely on the state to just live or go and live in a forest on your own somewhere if you want to live free, like a human being was meant to. Personally, I'm not entirely happy with any of those options.

[I, Cosh]

£24k is a mean average based on including ludicrously high salaries that shoot up exponentially.

The proper median average -- the appropriate statistic to use with skewed data like this -- is much lower (20% less, in fact) at around £19,000 per year.

Don't doubt it, but can you point me at the source for that?

Not the exact article, but a report on the BBCs website with details of average and median salaries that gives the median salary for all workers as £20,801.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8151355.stm

Cheers. Worth noting that this only covers people taxed through PAYE and not the self-employed. I'd, maybe naively, expect this to mean that the actual figure is significantly higher.

[COMMANDO FORCES]

Interesting stuff all round.
I think most of us agree on most of the things we have talked about in a round about way and this makes me very happy with our forum. Okay we have our little fall outs now and again and we shout at each other but that's the thing with a forum, it's like being sat in the pub but the response time is a lot slower and so you can't bat ideas back and forth very quickly.
We have people from all backgrounds, ages and political stand points on the forum and we never really have flame wars or what ever you call them like they have on other sites.

[JamesC]

Since when was being a parent seen as a pointless exercise?

Since people started being so fucking shit at it?

[The Legendary Shark]

Us lot for Parliament!

Bagsie the Ministry of Sex, Drugs and Pizza!