^I know that there are some areas where the British still have a good shout and stories like the story of the Blue Train Bentley will live on; Concorde had an adapted Bristol Olympus engine but British industry is a pale shadow of what it was, mainly because the unions over-priced the labour market: for example, there is still plenty of China clay to be mined around St Austell but the majority of production now comes from Brazil because the labour costs are so much less.
Last edited by meister (2011-12-24 14:56:53)
I see that Brazil's economy is said by The Guardian to have risen above the UK's.
It was also in The Telegraph earlier in the week.
It's fact.
The GDP per capita is a better measure. Brazil is about 55th. UK about 20th.
Millions in Brazil live in abject poverty. Brazil is not a place to look for inspiration.
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Last edited by The_Shooman (2011-12-27 06:59:23)
What's wrong with off course? After all, if the Titanic had been off course it would not have hit the iceberg...But, Formby, maybe the mental defectives and the drug addicts and the alcoholics sleeping in doorways (including in the West End of London), are examples of real absolute poverty, barring extreme hunger and thirst, as bad as any in the world (and which your statistics ignore), because they cannot help themselves and no one seems to be helping them; consequently, there is a significant number of these people, apparently living like animals in the heart of one of the world's great capital cities; the capital city of a society that touts the merits of its 'great western democracy' around the Arab world, and sneers at what it regards as the Third World, with its 'violence' and 'corruption'.
The examples that I gave of horrible recent crimes in one town in deep Cornwall show a deep-seated and disturbing degradation of acceptable moral norms, flowing from: useless state education; consequential pig-ignorance; a lack of discipline and respect; extreme selfishness and soul-lessness.
I think that it is difficult to be optimistic about either the British economy or its society. Frankly, it needs The Christ with a whip.
Hep - It's not really that cloistered and we do not live in a 'condo'. There is not much work here, beyond fishing and being a caseiro (for most others: 'house caretaker'), although factories and a new port are promised. However, most people seem to find a way to earn enough to live: in construction and maintenance, casual work and in the trades. There's one chap who goes round the town with a handcart from morning to evening, collecting tins and plastic bottles all day and, by the end of the day, he is like an Arabian caravan, piled high, and selling this gives him a living. He has a very modest house and buys usual amounts of food in the supermarket. If he can do it, I am sure that Norman Tebbitt would suggest that others should get out their handcarts. Moreover, I bet even the street-dwellers do something in the day time in Rio, like selling drinks and biscuits to motorists. They don't just sit on their tungies, eating Monster Munch and watching the telly on social benefit payments - there's far too much of that too. Offer any jobs to those on benefit and if they are fit to work, make them take the jobs or forfeit their benefit. No let-outs - just hard cheese.
I think that the optimists in the UK live (like some of my friends there) in cocoons.
Last edited by NJS (2011-12-27 10:46:30)