Sampson

If we had PR it might mean something and we could adjust our hyperbole, but in a FPTP system, all the hyperbole is justified tbh.

This is outdated. They’re trillionaires nowadays, since Covid let them corner the world economy.

The polls show the country already had the mother of all buyer regrets after Brexit and their solution was to vote even more Brexity. Voters solution to feeling annoyed at Reform tacking a hatchet to the NHS would probably to vote for Restore Britain because they are saying 3rd generation immigrants on benefits are sponging off the system and we didn’t go far enough on kicking out anyone who has a non-British parent or grandparent.

We’re all just dungeon crawlers while the US tech bro class are all Scolopendra Club regulars from The Inner Systems’ Enhancement Zone.

But isn’t this the problem? People feel like they’re being attacked and get defensive when people are making economic arguments and not moral ones. so it’s been easier for politicians and the the fast food media to blame immigrants and NHS ineffeciency when these are economic issues and rising political populism are just as big an issue in the US, Japan, Korea, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany as they are in the UK with all their different types of healthcare systems and immigration levels? But all the solutions are intolerable - isn’t that the point? I mean it is - tax all the rich and let them leave the country and try and start again with a different economy system, cut pensions or just keep going with a system everyone can feel has making them feel worse for a good 20 years now until we inevitably end up with some war or rebellion?

How do you support an economy where 2/3rds of the population is on its pension and 2/3rds the tax payer money goes on pensions or health care for the over 65s because that’s the way the world is going either way generations of below replacement birth rates? The pension was designed for a small percentage of the population for a few years at the end of their life rather than 1/3rd of the population for 25 years of their life. It’s not that the pension rate should be cut, it’s that the state pension age never increased in the post-war years along with rising life expectancy and if you want a realistic level of burden then the pension age would realistically be around 80 or 85 these days. But people in their 50s 60s and 70s who make up a large amount of the voting population aren’t going to vote for that - I’m not talking about the morals of it, but just the realistic cost of it. I mean you saw the riots in France when they tried to raise the pension age by 2 years a few years back. Everyone complains but they don’t want to live with the decisions that are needed to fix it. And it’s easier to blame immigrants and government inefficiency when in Farage’s own words “it’s common sense politics” that you can afford spending 1/2 of your national budget on pensions and healthcare for an ageing population (when over 65s make up the overwhelming majority of healthcare costs) and where you’re ratio ends up being more pensioners to working age people

The issues in the uk are the same in every western country - capitalism stopped working in 2008 for the average working or middle class westerner and since Covid the west been morphing into a Putin-inspired Oligarchism where a small number of US tech firms are cornering the western or even world economy and are becoming richer and more powerful than countries like the UK, France and Germany and probably within 10 years will be richer and more powerful than the US or China. Capitalism was great for a couple of generations in helping grow the economy for most people but as in football or F1, eventually the highest get so much money that they can squeeze the middle classes back down to the working classes and you’re now in a position where a couple of well educated middle-class engineers with Masters degrees in their 30s can’t afford a house or to have children and are probably going to have their jobs replaced by computers within a decade. Now the population has become old that people’s taxes are largely just spent propping up the pensions and healthcare system as well because it’s a closed feedback loop in democracy where politicians will just go after the grey vote as that’s where most of the votes are in an ageing economy. So they just say all our money is going on immigrants and disabled benefits when they money on pensions and healthcare largely used by those 65+ massively dwarves those things. But away from the economy, the internet has been a net negative for society and AI will be even worse - it’s the most sophisticated technology humans have come up with and so much of the social internet been designed to make people get addicted and feel angry or like shit. Not only that but it’s massively increased the surveillance state, bureaucracy and the amount of data we have on everyone and people naively voted for this thinking “being tough on crime and immigrantion” in the 2020s meant more police and not the creation of AI facial recognition, data scraping algorithms which all employers will do quick AI searches of your entire digital footprint soon and god knows what else. And people are now made unemployable because of a post they made 10 years ago while half asleep on auto-pilot they don’t even remember. Regardless of the economic side, I think the balance of technology has now become more oppressive than helpful in every day life. And your average person just feels more anxious and on edge all the time because of it. I know so many people who feel frustrated with how addicted they are to the social internet nowadays as well.

Just about got there today Connections Puzzle #1062 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟩🟪🟩🟩 🟪🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟪 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟪🟪🟪🟪

Yeah. China also doesn’t want tens of millions of refugees fleeing over its borders and is allegedly extremely brutal in handling those escaping North Korea across its border, which has always been one of the arguments why they don’t want to topple the Kim dynasty.

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Gettable but got too tunnel visioned on trying to get the blue straight away Connections Puzzle #1061 🟦🟦🟦🟨 🟦🟨🟦🟨 🟦🟨🟦🟦 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟪🟩🟩

Hantavirus is not even a particularly transmissible virus via humans. Genuinely saying sink a boat and kill thousands of innocent people is nuts.

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One thing I’ll say with today’s is to think of them more as pictures and outlines of things rather than symbols.

That was a fun one Connections Puzzle #1060 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟪🟪🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟩🟩🟦🟦 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟦

Kurzgesagt also just published a video on population ageing today in Germany, but you could easily just do this on the UK and it’d be the same

Well, the point is that the reason why population ageing hasn’t been as pronounced in Europe, the US, Canada etc. despite being still a huge issue is because of a semi-regular flow of working age immigrants throughout the 90s, 00s and 10s, which has now become politically unviable in the 20s. Like Europe and North America, Japan and South Korea’s birth rates started to drop below 2 children per women during the late 1970s, and now that birth cohort where the population dropped below replacement rate are in their 50s - population ageing is of course something that takes decades to actually affect society, but will exponentially only get worse as the years go by with women having less than 2 children on average - no country has managed to reverse it either - plenty have tried different things - Sweden tried more benefits for having more children and lengthy parental leave, Poland tried higher benefits, France has tried “semi-retirement” schemes with part time work and reduced pension, Austria has tried hiking up retirement age, Orban offered that any woman having 3 or more children would be excempt from income tax for the rest of their lives, but none of them have managed to really successfully raise the birth rate. Worth saying that China and South East Asia all started dropping below replacement rate in the 00s and South America had dropped below it within the past decade or so. Africa, India and the Middle East hasn’t yet which is why so much immigration comes from those areas - but it appears to be a constant of advanced, industrialised capitalism - that once economies reach a certain level of comfort people kind of stop having children and no one knows how to reverse it.

Btw semi related but watched this interesting video on rural Japan the other day travelling through the villages that are becoming ghost towns due to the low birth rate and population ageing. As Japan and South Korea are interesting examples of modern ageing economies that have resisted immigration but are still having the same arguments of their culture dying out and nostalgia for rural Japan of the past

I’m sorry but I can’t get behind this argument in 2026,. I see only the opposite pretty much every day - that calling the other side stupid either gains voter or makes people on the other side get disillusioned and then either not want to vote or vote for another party and split the vote. Trump was far more deplorable to Democrat voters in 2016 and used to do silly impressions of how disabled they were and got people chanting Hillary was a criminal who should be locked up. And there’s a constant air of pseudo intellectual superiority from populist right, Trump, JD Vance, Musk 3 or 4 times a week go one about how stupid or unAmerican or non decent the other side is and how low their IQs are and how smart they are and have aced all these tests. I never remember any left or centrists or even centre-right politicians ever doing that kind of thing. We heard all this with Brexit - “people only voted Brexit because you called them stupid” but whenever people did make economic, practical or cultural arguments they just got Boris, Farage or Jacob Rees-Mogg shouting “PROJECT FEAR!” as a come back. Its the populist right setting up a total trap where you can neither call them names nor argue with them logically nor morally - and so many centrists fall for it with this “now now let’s not call them names” whilst the populist right call everyone from the populist left, centre left, centrists and centre right every name under the sun 50 times a day I would think the past 10 years has shown quite conclusively that calling the opposition stupid, not decent or scaremongers does win votes or at least disillusions people and splits the opposition .

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Connections Puzzle #1059 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟦

Even the one I did get by sort of It felt like it was reaching as a category in the extreme.

Very impressed someone actually managed to do today’s!

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Connections Puzzle #1058 🟩🟦🟨🟩 🟪🟪🟨🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟪🟨🟨 🟨🟨🟨🟩 That was one of the most brutal I’ve seen. I still don’t think I understand the categories and there’s a couple that feel way vaguer than usual