I often think about this. I don’t think it’s wrong to provide selfish reasons to do the right thing.

In the end, the world is full of people with different priorities and ways of thinking, if you restrict yourself to only the “pure” morality arguments it’s not like you can use the purity of your argument to correct the brains of all the people who are not swayed. But if you provide a variety of arguments you’ll convince lots more people.

And in reality most people are not pure selfish or pure selfless. Spoonful of sugar (selfish benefit) helps the medicine (selfless morals) go down.

Not trying to entirely quench your cynicism, just lightly cool it.

There’s some of course, somewhere around 15-25%, less than the men as is sadly standard. Looks like there’s another 25% edging towards nervous thanks to the media coverage.

https://www.stonewall.org.uk/news/new-report-tells-us-how-public-actually-feel-about-trans-people

In the end, too many people follow the media, which follows the money.

Checked with my wife, “jk Rowling is the wicked witch of the literature world”. So not all the women here thankfully. Mostly just a few rich arseholes trying to ruin things. Same old story.

Our prison system is a mess right now, so give this guy a nice long sentence, he might just be the best warden we’ve ever incarcerated

Thankfully people don’t behave that way on average. A few outliers don’t matter much.

Cheaper now and forever as far as I can see, so yeah, some cans are better for kicking than others.

I do support policies that make immigration less exploiitative, but I don’t support curtailing immigration much, the alternatives suck.

I do accept other options exist (eg encouraging more people to have kids), but they are much more expensive, like multiple percentage points of gdp more expensive. Like we’d have to curtail pensions to afford them, or set a tax increase larger than any in living memory.

We could solve this without immigration eventually if we had the willingness to spend that much money. It’d take 20 years to start working (people take a long time to grow up) and in the meantime we’d need a lot of political will (nobody would enjoy the kind of tax rises we’re talking about), but yeah it could be done.

We’ll have to do it one day, we can’t benefit from immigration indefinitely, but doing it early does mean spending vast amounts more money. It’s not like this gets cheaper over time, we’ll have to keep spending every year. So rushing into it before we need to gives few benefits that I can see. Especially since we’re competing with other countries that aren’t doing it, and therefore can spend their money in ways that encourage investment (ie outcompete the uk for investment) instead. Once immigration settles down (as it inevitably will, unless there’s enough destabilising wars to undo all the progress around the world, hopefully not), all the countries currently depending on immigration will be forced to solve the birth rate problem at once, then at least we’re competing on a level playing field and might not suffer so badly for adjusting our spending.

So no, I don’t agree with doing it now, because there’s a cheaper option and cheaper means we can afford to spend the money on other things. We’re struggling already, think how much harder it would be if we were throwing all our welfare spending into convincing people to have kids instead of into pensions or the nhs. Some issues get worse when you kick the can down the road, but this one just sits and waits for us to confront it, so delaying that as long as possible is the optimal choice.

You’re not wrong that it suppresses wages. And if we “just” wanted to fix that we could (by increasing the minimum wage for immigrants perhaps). Interesting that all our anti-immigration policies are less about doing that and more about bullying people.

But on the flip side, we do need immigration. Wage suppression is only a part of it, at some point wages can’t go up because the money doesn’t exist (especially for the kind of roles we need, the kind of person who needs a carer doesn’t have unlimited funds), and we’ll need it more and more as time goes on too. We genuinely need a growing pool of workers whilst we have an aging population. We’re not making enough young workers ourselves to care for our aging population. And turns out the amount of money you need to offer people to make them comfortable to have more kids is rediculously high, so immigration is filling the gap at a much cheaper price.

Eventually the world will shift and immigration will dry up because everyone else will be in the same boat as we are now, then we’ll have no choice but to throw money at the birth rate. Probably at a cost so high we’ll have to concider some pretty terrible things to pay for it, but for now immigration is saving us from that fate.

If someone doesn’t work for 20 years? Other than any Brits who go to university, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant here.

This is discussing people who do work, and how long they need to work before we trust them enough to treat them like citizens.

If someone comes here at 18 and works for 5 years… this may shock you, but they’ve been a net benefit to the country to the tune of 5 man-years of work (minus their salary, which presumably is less than the labour, or nobody would be throwing money at them). They are already better for the economy than an equivalent Brit since they didn’t spent 18 years being a drag on the economy (instead they were a drag of whatever poor country wasted the resources prepping them for us!).

Hypothetically the absolutely most untrusting and stingy position we could take would be to require someone to work long enough to pay off the cost of caring for them for the rest of their life. That would mean assuming they immediately stop working the moment they earn leave to remain. But that would be like a life insurance company saying “we’ll insure you for £100000 but you need to pay us £100000 to cover the risk”.

Thankfully we can very easily predict how people behave in aggregate. We could pick a number where we’re near guaranteed to come out ahead, I bet it’d be embarrassingly short (most people work to just before pension age). But that’s not what’s driving this policy. This policy exists to look “tough on immigration”, but not too tough because we are actually dependent on immigration. Enough to ruin lives without you know… accidentally having any real effect on immigration numbers, since they would be a disaster.

So it’s just political manoeuvring designed to have no real effect on the thing people want to change (because they thing can’t change, we need it too much) but will still do massive damage.

Might as well “solve” small boats by regularly nuking the English Channel, its equivalent levels of bullshit.

I never said evil, but I do think immoral, as I outlined in my previous comment, we’re talking about benefitting from people dedicating a significant amount of their working lives to this country doing jobs we are failing to do ourselves. Leaving those people in limbo for so long isn’t fair to them. This is just statistics to us, but it’s their lives getting uprooted.

If people are bouncing between different countries and jobs, good for them, and this policy won’t change things for them one bit, because they already wouldn’t be eligible, and if they’re bouncing around they really wouldn’t be interested either.

We are desperately dependent on immigrants to keep our nation functioning. Then leaving them living in uncertainty for almost half their lives potentially seems like scumbag behaviour.

If we actually wanted to reduce immigration all we need to do is give migrants more rights, require generous pay and suddenly there wouldn’t be so much demand for them because they wouldn’t be worth the price, but we won’t do that because we need them too badly to fill the hole in our economy, all the bad jobs that there aren’t enough uk nationals to fill. Treating them as equals who can earn their right to live here simply by doing the work we cannot do ourselves anymore feels like the least we can do, a minimum of the respect they are due. Dragging it out as long as possible is the action of a dodgy boss, not a nation worthy of respect.

Yeah, he gets detriment of the doubt at this point

I thought hobbits were supposed to be resistant to the taint of evil? Proudfoot is a wonderful name besmirched by this loser’s existance.

It’s still better in the long run, I guess the reduction in the deposit percentage means anyone who can afford a monthly mortgage isn’t far off affording the deposit too? Obviously combined with the total mortgage amount getting rediculous

That’s sad, they would have helped the local community so much!

I don’t think cat meat is particularly pleasant. Nope, you’ve convinced me, the super nazis are a problem that needs to be dealt with after all.

Tigers probably don’t want to be shot during a rescue attempt.

Also, not saying there’s an afterlife, especially 1 shared afterlife, but just in case, I don’t want to go to any afterlife that contains a tiger holding a grudge waiting to ask me why I got it shot. I’m not suicidal, but if I were I think an eternity of beef with an angelic tiger might be reason to rethink.

Wow, they really didn’t seem the type did they?

You never can tell.

Yes, hydrogen might turns out to be capable of that use case too.

This is all true, and if it continues maybe batteries will become cheap enough for 2 days of storage. But seasonal variation will always be beyond their grasp.