L🇬🇧as Ohl

Just an ordinary Brit observing the problems and wondering why we can’t just fix them.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

Parents have abandoned their infant children. They prefer the dopamine hits of TikTok videos and Temu deals over the real-life tedium of trying to play with a toddler. Perhaps we need health warnings on apps? Do we just ban short-form video? (I say, typing on this dopamine app.)

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@MythoYookay GeoGuessr: expert mode

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@AbsoluteMeasure The obvious solution is to speed up the deportation process: days, not years. But that will require substantive legislative changes (stop them claiming Modern Slavery as a defence, repeal the Human Rights Act, withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention, etc.).

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@AbsoluteMeasure The authorities are turning a blind eye to it because doing anything is too expensive. If the police arrest everyone at a hand car wash, they now have a half-dozen illegal immigrants who need housing & feeding pending the very slow deportation process.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@tenebra_ai @CharlieChitty @edzitron It’s like Bitcoin. For years people kept saying “20xx will be the year of Bitcoin”, but it never happened. Now the price of Bitcoin is falling (50% down from peak!). But you could still have made loads of money buying on the way up.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@SimonMagus The first step is to close the door to new arrivals. No more importing brides from rural Pakistan. (The government tried this in 2008, raising the minimum age for a spousal visa to 21; but the Supreme Court knocked it down in 2011 under the ECHR’s article 8 Right to Family Life).

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@mr_james_c It’s noticeably less prevalent in the private sector though. Almost as if the profit motive keeps companies grounded in reality.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@SnekMonger @SCHIZO_FREQ This is much higher than other surveys (which typically report that 3-4% of men are gay), and probably says more about the type of person who is likely to fill in a “BigKinkSurvey” 🙄

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

Today I learned that British universities are as badly affected by DEI policies as American ones. I wonder when this will filter through to the university sector’s global reputation?

[Nick Almond @DrNickA]

I’ve been out long enough to say this, but one of the reasons I left academia for crypto was the sheer insanity that swept the sector due to this DEI mind virus thing. It became completely insufferable.

The people that run these training workshops are universally unhinged Marxists and / or arbitrary current thing activists. They confuse “speaking truth to power” with whinging about everything.

We went from hiring in some random consultant for an hour long workshop that went through a list of things that are cultural faux pas in different countries (fine), to hiring full teams that mainstreamed this weird theoretical grievance discipline into all things.

It operates on a debilitating psychosocial level that occupies spaces of perfect subjectivity. Things like “whiteness” and “unconscious bias” and “microaggresion.” I became convinced these concepts had been invented in a lab to be perfect organisational cancer. Squabble fuel.

The most insidious bit is that it has this kind of self protective auto immune effect where saying “wait, this is total bollocks”, is equivalent to declaring you are literally Hitler. So no one does.

I watched over the course of several years as it ground entire institutions to a halt, it went from 5% of an agenda to 70% then to entire purpose built committees, then the committees had committees.

We had baked it into everyone’s performance criteria, then into the curriculum of every course. Even computer science. Literally everything had to be passed through the lens of it. I saw lecturers accuse other lecturers of being white supremacists because they had no African scholars on their reading lists. I sat in equality and diversity committees and watched the people who run EDI training cancel each other for saying the wrong thing. It’s institutional mental illness.

It must cost us hundreds of billions at the national level, just due to all the wasted time, but now it’s provably lethal. If we annihilated it from the system it would add points to our GDP and save lives.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@DrNickA I’ve heard about this a lot in American universities - are you saying it’s just as bad in Britain too now?

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@Tom_Rowsell @EmmaBryn6 How does the price compare each way?

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@SimonMagus The first step is to close the door to new arrivals. No more importing brides from rural Pakistan. (The government tried this in 2008, raising the minimum age for a spousal visa to 21; but the Supreme Court knocked it down in 2011 under the ECHR’s article 8 Right to Family Life).

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@jeanpoissonier @AnneAshworth @Quilter Indeed. These reports urging higher pension savings always seem to come from companies that collect % fees on pension savings. Funny how they don’t mention that conflict of interest.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@NealOKelly @Officially_MK_ They have around 2,500 employees, it’s not tiny. On the other hand, the job can be done from Norwich or Darlington; it doesn’t need a London salary.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@wildheaux @SagesBasics @flackospalace Ok then yeah that’s wild. Maybe they’re working part-time, evenings / weekends only? Still seems like a low rate.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@SagesBasics @flackospalace I don’t know which country the original video is in, but it’s probably a place where $700-1200 is more than minimum wage.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@SagesBasics @flackospalace This is quite normal in many service industries. Look at the big consulting firms like Accenture or McKinsey - they pimp out their staff at 300% of their salaries.

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@EmmaBryn6 @NAVSkandalen @Tom_Rowsell That’s a persuasive case - but obviously not enough to convince the travellers who have abandoned the ferries! (I understand the bigger problem was low-cost flights, which have the advantage of both cost and speed.)

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@alexanderrX_ @DuxVul Is there free coffee? Last time I saw a government office (not Treasury), the staff all paid 50p a week into a kitty for tea & coffee (£1 if you had milk).

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@kslik7 @ReubenR80027912 The various LLMs say he was in his 50s when he wrote it 🤷‍♂️

[L🇬🇧as Ohl @lukas_ohl]

@ReubenR80027912 Britain and the Netherlands both have lots of individual narrow row-houses - they’re a feature of more capitalist countries, everyone has their own front door, no communal space. In France and Germany they have apartments instead, which are far more socialist.