Westminstenders: 10 day count down

[RedToothBrush]

10 days to go...

... Wake me up when the shit show is over.

DH is struggling with choices that the electorate are making @thecatfromjapan
He wants a fancy new car and says the only positive he can find is that with a Tory government he will be able to afford one quicker.
Quite why so many people want to get him a Porsche neither of us can really understand.
We are happy to pay more for better education for all but they want us to have more money in our bank.

Sorry, not @BigChoc, &Red

@Red.

Fat fingers.

I know, Dreich. ☹️ That's a neat way of putting it.

"So a gynaecologist office that I got referred to literally told me today that "we don't serve transgender patients."
And me, being me, I'm shocked.. and confused... and hurt.
Are they allowed to do that, legally? Isn't that against the college practices?"
🤦🏻‍♀️
I'm telling myself that must be a spoof account, but even if that particular one is, such madness is probably happening in rl somewhere
This country has a serious problem with magical thinking

"threw up in handbag"
"prising my eyelids open with carefully extended claws"
< firmly decides an< future Choc will not be a Torturing Tortie >

pmk would post cat pic but he is lying across my ams causin typooooooa

How will the people of these countries survive in later years without a working population to support them?

TBH, there will be less jobs available due to automation and programming, so arguably we need a declining population otherwise we will have civil unrest. The idea that we need population to keep increasing to support the population is potentially anachronistic. Especially if global warming reduces the areas the humans can inhabit and drives migration from abroad.

It depends on how you view the world and the future.

@BigChocFrenzy Jessica Yaniv is a transgender woman with male genitalia in Canada who recently lost a tribunal case against estheticians who refused waxing services. She was ordered to pay costs and compensation, and was found to have targeted ethnic minorities specifically. There is some history here www.thepostmillennial.com/the-truth-about-jessica-yaniv-is-beginning-to-emerge/ - this is a person with some very troubling views around young girls and menstruation specifically.

I think that's Yaniv, who is Canadian. She's not a spoof account but is a highly questionable person, who recently became involved in a case whereby women-of-colour beauticians were prosecuted for refusing to perform intimate genital waxing on Yaniv.

The prosecution against them failed.

Better summary from MShip.

Thanks cat. Doesn't surprise me at all to see that Yaniv is going after gynaecologists.

Quite why so many people want to get him a Porsche neither of us can really understand.

Buying it is one thing ... running it is another. Four new tyres? £800. New discs and pads? £1000. Service? £600+ . It’s eye watering (and that’s for an older one at independent garages).

But ... you’ll love it!

Yaniv manages to makes the the UK political scene look sane in comparison to whats happening Canada.

And here's just 3 examples of population increases in Western Europe:

France:
65.0, 65.3, 65.7, 66.0, 66.3, 66.6, 66.9, 66.9, 67.0, 67.2

Netherlands:
16.6 16.7 16.8 16.8 16.9 16.9 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3

Germany:

81.8 80.3 80.4 80.6 81.0 81.7 82.3 82.7 82.9 82.8

So, population isn't delining in the EU, the working population has been moving from East to West Europe.

Whilst many here claim that we need these EU workers to look after us - what about the people that need and will need looking after in their home countries? Who is working there, paying into their taxation systems, to ensure their vulnerable people are looked after too.?

"How will the people of these countries survive in later years without a working population to support them?"

Hate Do you now oppose Albania's application for EU membership ?
I thought you were frustrated that it has been delayed

Losing the young and / or talented was also a worry in the USSR, which they solved by shooting people who tried to escape
Sometimes the interests of the state clash with the wish of individuals for a better life elsewhere

However, as the EE economies are boosted by EU trade and development funds, the people should return

This is what happened in Ireland, which had been exporting people ever since the horrific Irish Famine,
but the prosperity it has gained from the EU meant that they now keep most of their young people
and iirc its population is not higher than for some time

As pp said, all Western countries suffer from declining population and declining % young people, because women don't want to have as many babies as previous generations.

Germany's population of 80 million is prdicted to fall to 55 million by about 2060, so politicians are putting in all sorts of financial encouragement to mothers and ways to make their lives easier
e.g. maternity workplace rights, v v cheap nursery

I agree with red that we don't want to keep increasing the population, but we also don't want it to drop sharply, as that would bring massve problems,
A very gentle decrease maybe, so we can plan for the future ?

Welcome back, Hate. Good to see you putting the hours in.

pmk

Hateisnotgood
Look at the population of County Leitrim in Ireland ....
it is still well below what it was in the 1820's
population decline is fully manageable
and in the long run a declining population is beneficial for the planet

The German population increase of 1 million was due to Merkel accepting the migrants a couple of years ago.
After the political fallout, that won't happen again.

However, Germany, France, NL have been successfuly receiving significant numbers of workers from S Korea, India, Malaysia, other developing countries,
as well as the effects of govt measures to encourage more babies

So, population isn't delining in the EU, the working population has been moving from East to West Europe.

You need to go and look at the statistics in more detail, a lot of them are available on europa.eu

There is a lot of non-EU migration in there: Germany has assimilated the best part of a million Syrians since 2014, for example.

At my employer (v large tech firm) the non-German workers are mostly from outside the EU:
Turkey and India especially, S Korea, Malaysia, China / HK

And don’t forget that whilst birth rates might not be increasing, death rates are decreasing - this is now adding 15,000 to the Netherlands population in 2019.

If the EE economies continue to grow, then they will also see their population helped along by workers from India etc

A declining population is less of a problem than a population which is shifting older in age. Older people simply cost more money: they work less, draw pensions (55% of social security spending in the UK goes to pensioners), and cost more in terms of health care (see attached plot - average £1K/year for 16-45yo, rising to £3K for 65, £6K at 80, and £10K for 90) and social care. We are getting older on average, but on the whole those are not additional healthy years.

Solutions will need to include addressing the high cost of health care for the last year in particular of people's lives (rather than age, time to death is the biggest determinant of healthcare spending), properly funded social care, including good pay and working conditions for the carers, and creative ways of extending working lives. These are big challenges and the people who are directly affected (i.e. the oldest part of our population) are conversely the most likely to vote against the taxation and social policies that would be required, instead deferring the burden onto the next generations.

No one from Labour or the Lib Dems seem to be talking much about the current Brexit deal at the moment. I've heard little about the issues - except for the US trade deal, and very little about the border issue in Northern Ireland - except when Boris implied that his Brexit secretary was lying when he said there would be checks in the Irish sea.