Agreed and based on what I've read the funding package that the UK government gives them plus the TV tax (that each UK citizen has to pay with the purchase of a TV) sure helps them stay afloat
The BBC is consistently attacked by both right- and left-wing activists in the UK, which gives me at least a little confidence that they are trying to be balanced :)
The Wikipedia article you link to states "The money received is first paid into the Government's Consolidated Fund. It is subsequently included in the 'vote' for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in that year's Appropriation Act, and passed back to the BBC for the running of the BBC's own services (free from commercial advertisements)."
What funding package is that? Did you mean EU grants?
> that each UK citizen has to pay with the purchase of a TV)
The licence fee is payable if you are in the UK and watch live TV as it's broadcast. "live", "TV", and "broadcast" are defined in statute and statutory instruments.
The BBC has consistently been at the cutting edge of broadcasting since the 1930s. They have a substantial R&D department that does some very impressive work.
Within the uk it's being referred to as the EU referendum, since we're having a referendum to decide about our fate in the EU. I can see how that's confusing for the rest of the world!
Is the vote for a simple majority? In my country, Australia, a referendum must achieve a double majority which means a nationwide majority and a majority in a majority of states. Are there any similar provisions for this referendum?
The referendum is not legally binding anyway. It's just a big fancy opinion poll. Albeit, the shit would hit the fan if the government ignored a leave result.
The shit will hit the fan if there is no strong majority. And all the polls suggest that it is not going to be a strong majority. 50% of the population is going to be pissed. Too many bridges between both side have been burned.
United will only be in the name of the country after today. This is the beginning of years of trouble ahead.
Shit had already hit the fan with the Scottish referendum and the SNP wipeout at last election. The country is split between haves and have-nots, the globalization winners in cities and South and losers elsewhere; the have-nots are easy prey for nationalisms, as it's always the case.
I'm a big fan of reforming the electoral system in the UK, but the AV referendum was an awful fudge at best, plainly just offered as a sop to the Liberal Democrats.
It was genuinely one of the worst referendum campaigns of all time though. I'm still haunted by the 'if you vote for this then babies will die' adverts.
Well, it's not a referendum on Brexit or a Britain remain, it's a referendum on EU membership with two options: Remain and Leave.
This is unlike the Scottish independence referendum which was a Yes/No vote on if Scotland should to be independent. It's not specifically about either option this time.
All that said, “Brexit referendum” is a name that's been used. (And if the result goes a certain way, well…)
Something makes me feel like HN readers are aware enough to put together that a front-page HN post on some referendum happening today that has something to do with the EU is the Brexit one.
If in doubt, a simple click will solve any ambiguity which could arise with the Elderberry Unicorn referendum happening in Patagonia also today.
This is an extremely fine (not to say trivial) distinction, but there's something authentic about the perspective of that title, and since it's scoped by the domain (bbc.com) I think it's ok.
Numbers only get reported when an electoral district has finished counting. Right now only 5 of 382 districts have reported (and they're mostly small districts, which is why they finished counting so quickly).
Wow. Everything I'd heard today pointed to them staying in the EU. As of now the leave votes are winning. This will probably be one of the big political experiments in my lifetime.
From what I saw, it'll be morning before the vote is certified. It looks like only 9 of 380ish voting districts/constituencies/etc. (sorry, I'm not British and don't know what they actually call them).
If votes were being counted in a completely random order then 1m votes would have been more than enough to determine the result with very high accuracy.
Regional variations are the only reason things haven't been decided yet.
From my perspective in the UK, it's been interesting (though frustrating) to watch what's been happening.
It definitely seems like political discourse has taken a turn for the worse. In contrast with the Scottish independence referendum a couple of years ago which, although there was some animosity, did feel like a genuine political conversation… this one has seemed much more like an angry shouting match.
I'm particularly interested in the comparison with Trump in the US. In both cases, it feels like a nominally populist, anti-bureaucratic/anti-establishment movement (the extent of the truth in that being debatable) has been able to make a substantial impact with that platform, due in part to the abject inability of that establishment to deal with and neutralise the movement.
> t feels like a nominally populist, anti-bureaucratic/anti-establishment movement (the extent of the truth in that being debatable) has been able to make a substantial impact with that platform, due in part to the abject inability of that establishment to deal with and neutralise the movement.
It's happening all over the world: Austria, France (National Front), China, Japan, Turkey, Israel, etc etc.
It's like the world forgot the lessons of the past - the curses of nationalism, populism and ideology - and nobody has stood up to remind them. The latter really angers and depresses me; nobody with a platform is making the well-known arguments about why these things are very dangerous.
> It's like the world forgot the lessons of the past - the curses of nationalism, populism and ideology
It could also be, that we are doing something wrong in the society, something we did better after the last wars. Such as not including everybody in the growth of the economy.
At least I'd like to think we don't have to kill hundreds of millions of people every century, to make people remember...
We have to find something to better than fear or hate to unify nations.
Company cultures have been shifting from fear-driven-development to a more human focus. Still a ways to go (especially compared with the marketing around it), but a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately people do not change. Look at our history, i fear that it's only a matter of time when we will see another hitler in disguise, but this time this will not be the jews that will be the target but muslims. You can feel populism all over the Europe, (i am from EU) every month right wing parties getting stronger and stronger, nationalism and populism EVERYWHERE. Only 30 thousand votes saved Austria from radical right wing president. Look at US also, political correctness in really excessive levels and not speaking about things made Trump so popular.
There is a problem with education also, we should teach our kids what populism and nationalism is, what are the consequences of radical nationalism.
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."
We are a long way from the Middle Ages; things do change quite a bit. Look at civil rights in the U.S.: Two generations ago, women needed their husbands permission to get a job, and were only allowed in teaching and nursing for the most part. Look at the spread of democracy.
I guess the changes happen too slow for a single person to notice within a span of single generation. So I guess I'll have to die in hopes that I have done my duty to change the world for the better and the next generation will carry the torch for me.
I just hope that trend you are talking about will keep up but...
I know someone that took part in World War II, he is alive still, this was not a long time ago, we are far from change my friend. Then look rwanda, somalia, balkans now middle east, north africa etc.
You mention Japan, but even as a local I'm not sure which movement you're referring to regarding anti-beueaucratic populism.
Perhaps, are you alluding to SEALDs and those against revising the constitution? If so, I don't think their voice are comparably as loud as those overseas.
I was talking about nationalism and populism more generally. For example, I've read many times that the revisionist far right has growing influence, re-writing history books to hide Japan's actions in WWII, launching campaigns against those who criticize that period, etc.
It's possible to argue the same thing from the other side: the political establishment in many countries have forgotten that they have to earn their legitimacy by working for the benefit of their compatriots.
We've had a political class who've decided that the hoi polloi don't really matter anymore and that governance is a matter of maintaining consensus at the top. Now the working classes are lashing back and sure it's ugly but it's a predictable consequence of the last few decades of tone deaf technocratic government.
But the way we're lashing back seems completely unproductive. Why not organize around a sane leader instead of electing bigger and bigger idiots in some kind of suicidal hope that the system will collapse?
You're asking why the angry mob is so disorganized? Angry mobs are angry mobs and demagogues are demagogues. My point is that the fault doesn't lie with the mob it lies with the people who let things come to this.
An angry mob is made of people who are individually responsible for their decisions. It doesn't matter whose fault it is; if the government won't fix it, the people have to organize to do it on their own, and an angry mob is not the best way to do that.
They aren't an "angry mob". They are people voting for what they feel to be their best interest. I find it interesting that you believe people voting to be an "angry mob" because 1) they don't listen to the political establishment on who they should vote for, and 2) they don't listen to the academic establishment on who they should vote for.
I never said they were. I was responding in general terms to the comment above mine. What disappoints me about this vote has nothing to do with the way people are organizing, but the thing they're organizing around. People are voting based on how they feel or what "side" they're on instead of thinking about what will actually have the best outcome. Cutting off the nose to spite the face and so on…
The traditional left parties, in much of the English speaking world, have shuffled so far right (the "Third Way" types like the Lange, Blair, the Clintons, and so on) that there's slim pickings for have-nots to vote for. In the UK half of the Labour party and progressive institutions (like the Graun) spend more time attacking Corbyn for being, well, a Labour leader than they ever do going after the Tories. Clinton says that everything is sweet and the system can't (and shouldn't) be changed.
The institutions that used to provide alternatives political voices have been co-opted. So who are they going to vote for?
Pretty much - we have the same thing in New Zealand, but one of the dynamics we see here (I don't know if you get the same in Germany) is a huge hostility from the old left parties to the new left parties - there's an arrogant assumption that those voters "belong" to the old left, and a lot of derision directed at them (I guess a not dissimilar dynamic to the Clinton/Sanders split).
It's a bit more complicated in Germany, because Die Linke is in some sense a continuation of the former East German ruling party.
So the accusations are not so much that `these voters belong to us'. But: no self-respecting party should form a coalition with these dictators ever.
That taboo has been broken on the state level in East German a long time ago. But it still holds some power on the federal level, and in West German states.
In other words, why doesn't the pendulum stop swinging?
Because bringing it to a halt would take precision work and even then it probably wouldn't be stable. Iterative systems oscillate. It's what they do.
Moreover, a lot of the suggestions about "how to solve it" are in fact what people are trying to do very hard, and are themselves part of the system. The obvious solutions are what are taking us in the current direction. The fact that they are obvious is why you can actually plot the cyclic progression of civilizations with some reliability. It's an interesting field of study.
(BTW, buckle up. We're almost certainly in for a period of substantial uncertainty based on those modes. But, also, you are not your government or social system. Whatever abuse those things may be in for doesn't mean that you won't come out of it. Also, while I'd say high technology shows little evidence of having eliminated the cycles up to this point, I do consider it a wild card personally. Doom is not guaranteed.)
Bear in mind that it's a field of active research, and I'm giving those more as starting points I plucked out from Google hits than necessarily endorsing those exact theories. Personally I would only defend a somewhat weaker idea, that the future isn't somehow entirely random, but that we can indeed look to theories like this for some understanding of the next few decades, modulo the technology wildcard. Or at least a much better understanding than just thinking it's all whims of fate and everything's on the table equally. I said some reliability on purpose... it's not totally reliable, but you can still do much better than nothing.
Because there aren't any. Although I would not use the word "sane" here, I would use the word "capable", as in capable of running a political unit the size of a country. The inconvenient truth that nobody wants to acknowledge is that there are no human beings capable of doing that. Countries are simply too big and too complicated. (This is actually true IMO for units much smaller than countries, but countries is the current level of discussion.) The problem is not to find someone who can govern a country sanely; the problem is to figure out how to organize ourselves and coexist given that nobody is capable of governing a country sanely.
To a lot of folks, those candidates weren't appealing. They didn't inspire confidence that they could work on a populist agenda while also being competent political leadership. Paul more than Sanders, but a lot of people have trouble taking Sanders' rhetoric very seriously, or believing that it is well-based in facts, is well thought-out, isn't likely to have disastrous side-effects, that sort of thing.
If this cycle is about that, why would Trump have gotten the nomination? Jeb/Rubio were the golden boys of the GOP, and they got blown up by Trumps appeal.
Yes, the Dems couldn't pull it off with Sanders, but it appears the republicans actually picked, perhaps not an anti-establishment candidate, but at least a non-establishment candidate.
I think this is probably key. People across the world are pissed at the political class – and I completely understand why.
In the UK, there's an intense feeling that the concerns of people in traditionally working-class communities have been ignored in preference of a metropolitan elite. There is increasing wealth inequality, cuts to public services, less job security and so on. Members of these communities are very aware of the costs of EU membership – free movement of labour being particularly damaging to these communities – and are not as convinced by the corresponding benefits.
I do place the fault squarely at the feet of the modern left-of-center political movements (Labour Party in the UK) which has consistently peddled a muddled message of internationalism mixed with social democracy mixed with unrestrained capitalism – in appealing to an imagined middle-ground voter they have alienated their traditional support. It feels like these movements have compressively failed to provide a convincing messages – instead peddling a weak compromise that pleases nobody.
It's frustrating, but I'm struggling to understand what the answer looks like.
Not at all. Nearly every Leave supporter I've talked with over recent months finds Farage and Boris just as foolish as any of the rest of them.
If you live in the NW or NE it's probably down to disenfranchisement. Large parts of the NW and NE are still not out of the 2008 recession, so hearing the constant bleating about the economy, they're told is doing so well, just reinforces the emptiness of the political classes.
On Europe specifically most of the remain arguments were economic. It's quite hard to listen to those seriously whilst London is in its usual bubble and the area in which you live is still suffering. Nearly every EU economic argument is reinforcing the EU being about big business, just proving, in their minds, the disconnect with the people. People who are living in areas that have seen enormous decline in the last 30 years. Makes it harder to vote for free movement and markets when you can see the decimation of your once vibrant industry and town centres.
So nearly every argument for Remain is demonstrably untrue in their own life and region.
So, no, they're not voting for Farage, they're voting against the Westminster groupthink bubble. If they had got more regional development, or the regional economies were given better support, things could have been very different.
FWIW I was remain. I have no idea how this will play out. Twenty or thirty years ago I would have had definite ideas of how a UK exit would have played (quite well), now I just don't know.
I would hope that efforts can be made to make the UK economy more inclusive. The areas voting overwhelmingly to leave are all the areas that have been suffering since the 80s - NE, NW, Wales.
How the UK operates and competes globally now, I simply have no idea. I'm also concerned we're going to lose a lot of the protections we had in the EU.
> There is increasing wealth inequality, cuts to public services, less job security and so on
These are Tory policies; Labor opposes them.
> free movement of labour being particularly damaging to these communities
How? The UK has had internal free movement of labor for a long time, and it didn't damage them. Blaming the immigrants sounds suspiciously like populist propaganda. It doesn't make it false, but can you back it up?
EDIT: From today's NY Times:
there was no question that while the immigrants contributed more to the economy and to tax receipts than they cost
That's not really the case. Wealth inequality increased massively under the previous 13 years of Labour government in the UK, for example. They're more 'new liberal' policies than Tory or Labour policies.
How? The UK has had internal free movement of labor for a long time, and it didn't damage them. Blaming the immigrants sounds suspiciously like populist propaganda. It doesn't make it false, but can you back it up?
I guess I wasn't that clear – I don't actually agree with them in the aggregate, and I'm solidly pro-EU and pro-free-movement. 'Blaming the immigrants' as you say is solidly nationalist propaganda. But there is a perception in these communities – false though it may be – that 'immigrants from the EU' come to the UK and 'take jobs,' 'put pressure on public services' and so on. Many people in these communities haven't been well-treated by successive governments, particularly around immigrations. That's why they're annoyed, not because immigration is bad for the country (it isn't.)
Austerity is a Tory policy ... I don't know about the rest, but Labor hasn't been in power for awhile.
> there is a perception in these communities – false though it may be – that 'immigrants from the EU' come to the UK and 'take jobs
That's the propaganda. Social services are reduced by Tory austerity, and then they blame the immigrants. Similar things happen in other places in Europe, especially blaming immigrants.
>nobody with a platform is making the well-known arguments about why these things are very dangerous.
This is the inherent problem in dealing with demagoguery. Logical arguments do not matter, and the left doesn't seem to understand this. You have to fight fire with fire. Feelings with feelings. You have to speak to people's guts, not their minds.
I want to like the EU and this in fact what was pushed really hard for by the school system at least in Germany. But I can't fail to notice its many disadvantages. It is fundamentally even less democratic than the representative democracies it unites, supposedly run by technocrats that in fact follow agendas set by corporations/industry, with decisions that get sold to the public as inevitable. I hate what the Bologna reforms did to higher education for example, but there are many other instances where EU decisions had extremely negative impact, with sometimes almost no popular support.
Point being not only right wing basket cases don't like the EU. The far left doesn't really like it either. It is a project conceived by US planners and executed by the French and German elites pushed onto the rest of the continent. Whenever there is talk about the "democracy deficit" it is brushed aside as something that will be fixed once Europe has become more integrated.
Any proof of that? From a US perspective, I can't see how a unified Europe would benefit the US - neither economically nor militarily. The EU is the only state (besides China with 4x the population of the US) that can compare to the US economy. Dealing with smaller countries gives the US an advantage compared with similar deals with the EU itself.
A unified EU military would be the only state both large enough and advanced enough to pose a valid military challenge to US hegemony.
> I hate what the Bologna reforms did to higher education
A bit off-topic, but what exactly do you hate about Bologna? I liked it that it shortened my studies (math) from 4 years to 3, although I would have appreciated a bit more depth (more elective subjects)... But then, I only have a very limited perspective, so I'm very curious about what other people think, and what possible improvements they see.
I don't like that especially in Germany it has reduced the depth to which people were expected to study a subject to receive a degree (A German diploma in math took 5 years) and that they introduced grades that mattered along the way. This pushes students to narrow their focus and optimise good exam results. In the old system you had two exams that mattered, one oral exam after two years and your final grade was determined by a set of oral exams and your thesis.
The result is as far as I can tell from personal experience that the quality of an average master students in Math and Physics is now significantly lower than that of diploma students.
They also introduced very interesting language, you study Modules, each of which give you points. In the end you are supposed to end up as a nice exchangeable semi-educated narrowly focussed cog in some big corporation.
This is exactly why I also don't like the EU. Not the racist rhetoric UKIP is using, but because the EU is deeply undemocratic. The EU is one whole layer of extra politicians above those that we have already elected in local parliaments. It makes the distance between me and those who are in power much greater, both physically and metaphorically.
Plus, Germany, the UK and France are the big players in the EU. Naturally the union favors their agenda and overrules smaller member countries.
There is a theory that this is what happens when you have several generations live their lives without seeing a major war or crisis, and feeling its results firsthand. Presumably, that's when people, and societies as a whole, get too "cocky" and less compromising, because they don't fear the consequences enough.
Yeah, I think after a few generations of stability, when the last survivors of the last major calamity leave power, people start believing that this time is different, we've moved past war, without realizing that humans haven't fundamentally changed.
I think its more a statement on the perception of globalization and how it affects the working class in western countries, combined with some actual breaking down on how the whole trade thing is supposed to work (WTO, Doha round is now 15 years old !!!)
>It's like the world forgot the lessons of the past - the curses of nationalism, populism and ideology - and nobody has stood up to remind them.
The average worker in the western nations did a lot better when the cold war was in full swing than afterwards. Peaceful competition among nations and economic systems seems to work best.
I've read that the reason US and other Western workers have done worse since the Cold War is due to the breakup of the Soviet Union, and with it, the fear that the population might support communism if capitalism became too predatory.
Once the USSR and its satellite states disappeared, US capitalism had no fear of a revolution ever gaining hand, and the results for the middle class have been as expected.
Seems like a valid idea.
I do know that in the aftermath of WWII, the Allies, under the Morgenthau Plan, treated the German population in the West very poorly. Essentially, the goal was to keep them in an agrarian state so they'd never be able to pose a military challenge.
After it became apparent that a large ideological battle between the communist and capitalist systems among the German population was being waged, and that the western population might just begin to choose communism, should things not improve, the Allies did begin to allow the West to re-industrialize.
In the US this started during the Great Depression. Political leaders at the time were legitimately afraid of a socialist / communist uprising. The New Deal social welfare and income redistribution programs might have helped to prevent such an event.
I watched the Grapes of Wrath (1940) a few years ago. The amount of pro-communist idealization in the film would never, ever be allowed to play in a main-stream theater in the US today.
I think most younger people don't realize that communism was a huge threat to the US Capitalist system pre-Soviet-breakup, and because of that, a very large propaganda campaign was waged until the 90's. The remnants we see today are why an effective attack on Bernie Sanders was to associate him with socialism / communism.
Obviously, young people didn't fall for the tactic. Older folks who had been taught to fear and hate communism for much of their earlier lives, on the other hand, were influenced heavily by the attack.
I don't think it's so much the forgetting of history as much as overreach on the part of those who would try to deny that human nature exists.
When people can see all around them that gender, nationality, race, and religion convey useful information about the people they meet, and they live under the rule of an elite which claims that these things are irrelevant, then when some demagogue or other comes along who acknowledges the truth about these things but who lies everything else, people are going to go running into the arms of that demagogue.
Had these people advocated a fair and humane acknowledgement of these obvious, day-to-day truths instead of adopted a posture of absolute denial of the obvious, we wouldn't have Trump in the US and Brexit across the Atlantic.
> When people can see all around them that gender, nationality, race, and religion convey useful information about the people they meet
> absolute denial of the obvious
You say that as if it's assumed, but I don't agree and neither do very many others. I agree it's obviously a human instinct to think that, but that's true of many other bad ideas - we're not beasts, our intellectual abilities take us far beyond our instincts. That tribal instinct has led to terrible destruction - arguably it's caused more harm than any other idea.
Of course I'm not speaking in absolutes (and I hope you don't you mean to). There's a little bit of information there, but generally I find people are the same everywhere; there are good and bad, smart and dumb, happy and sad, capable and incompetent, kind and cruel, etc. just as much in every group. It's really the individual that matters.
It's also essential to liberty and basic fairness: An individual need to be judged on their own merits, by their own action, and not by the color of their skin, their nationalities, their religion, gender, sexual preference, etc. If we say, "people in religion X are thieves", then it will be an injustice to almost all the individuals in that religion. It leads to widespread injustice even in peace, when a skilled woman or minority, for example, is judged instead on their race or gender and denied the job.
When you ask people to deny the evidence of their own eyes, you're setting up a kind of resentment that can lead only to bad outcomes.
Of course, it'd be awful to be individually assumed to be a thief because you come from a group full of people unusually likely to be thieves. My point is that if it's a matter of fact that people of that group are more likely to be thieves, whatever the reason, and you tell people that, no, that group isn't full of thieves, and people are terrible for thinking so, then as soon as some demagogue acknowledges the truth, people will run to him no matter how bad his other opinions and no matter how ruinous his policies.
People hate liars, and even more, they hate being compelled by social forces of shame and ridicule to deny their true beliefs. It's better to have an honest conversation about these things than to repress them and create the kind of pressure cooker that explodes and makes a Trump president.
In an EU context, maybe it'd have been better to accept some restrictions on freedom of movement. Maybe it'd have been better to scale back centrally-imposed regulations on consumer goods (e.g., the EU banning traditional UK tea kettles).
Now we're going to see the EU damaged because well-meaning people tried to bring about the world they'd like to see by demanding everyone pretend it be so, and only children play pretend.
You keep using the words "truth", "matter of fact", "accuracy", "evidence of their own eyes"; and refer to people who disagree as "liars", etc.
But I don't think any of that is accurate; I think your words are false and the argument rests only on the assumption that they are true.
If you want to cite something persuasive, you'll need something with more widespread credibility.
EDIT:
> It turns out that stereotypes, however distasteful, usually do have a certain degree of accuracy ... You may not want to live in the world where they do
This is an argument with a strawman that you made up, some absolutist person who says otherwise. If you read my prior comment, I already agreed with you that they have some degree if meaning.
> but that reality is what it is.
However, you don't get to define reality; maybe your definition is wrong.
You claim to want to avoid propaganda, but you are hewing to that approach closely with the assumptions, the absolutes, the lack of skepticism of your own position. My impression of Heterodox Academy is that it's more of the same but regardless, how about finding some more serious sources if you genuinely want to know?
I suggest reading through the blog I linked; Haidt is serious and well-respected. Alternatively, you can look at various impartially- (and usually government-) collected statistics that demonstrate group differences.
Most of these differences are too incendiary to link here (and I'd rather not attract the wrath of dang), but let me cite one example: men are, biologically, physically much stronger than women. 95th percentile in women is 5th percentile in men. See this well-sourced quora thead: https://www.quora.com/Are-men-generally-physically-stronger-...
I think it's pretty easy to corroborate the statistics with everyday experience. Muscular strength is a function of total number of muscle fibers. Look around you, if you're in a group of men and women: which group tends to have the thicker biceps and triceps?
Now consider that quite a few people, particularly in the more blue-tribe areas of the US, think that it's a grave injustice that women do not have more representation in occupations that depend to large extent on physical strength --- e.g., firefighting.
Think about how frustrating it must feel to point out the unreality of this accusation. Imagine how it must feel to fear that you'd be fired from your job and ostracized from your social group for pointing out what the statistics and your own eyes agree in the truth. Now imagine that you had an opportunity to anonymously vote against the people who make you feel that way.
Can you imagine this state of mind? If so, you've captured why Britain left the EU.
> My impression of Heterodox Academy is that it's more of the same but regardless, how about finding some more serious sources if you genuinely want to know?
One sad effect of the current political climate is that it's become very hard to find unbiased sources --- or at least sources everyone respects (which isn't the same thing).
As someone born and raised in a communist country (what is now Czech Republic), I can tell you it is precisely because we DID NOT FORGET what it was like, that we're against the direction EU is going [0].
The parallels between our (still recent) past are absolutely striking: EU's propaganda, censorship efforts, ideological idiocy that nobody takes seriously any more (incl. economic).
But most of all, there's the scary disconnect between how real people live their lives vs what the official "party line" dictates. We're re-learning to read between the propaganda lines, again.
IMO we don't need condescending comments about how stupid everyone is (populists!), nor a platform explaining why this "central planning" ideology is appealing but very dangerous. We know very well, and we vote accordingly.
Honestly? Eastern Europeans, of all people, got massively subsidized by the EU. Biting the hands that feed you is a great recipe for building resentment and mistrust, which brings conflict and ultimately war.
Wouldn't a voluntary exchange of trade, labour and policies, in place of "a feeding hand" (what a condescending remark!) be better for everyone?
By the way, the subsidies feed mostly the politicians, and the hands of their well-connected friends who are the true benefactors. And that's no coincidence -- as I said, we've already lived through the reality disconnect that is the result of top-down social engineering.
What the linked poll shows you is that normal people are telling you to take your oh-so-generous subsidies and shove them. If it means being part of a political union they have no say in.
Sure. The squandering of EU subsidy money on nonsensical "well chosen" projects is hardly a tinfoil hat conspiracy. It's been covered by most major media in detail [0].
Regarding businesses: what about them? I happen to run a business, and dealing with EU partners and clients is actually a (marginally) greater nuisance than non-EU partners and clients. Are you aware of the complexity of the inter-EU VAT regulations and laws, especially for SMEs? [1]
The EU is nothing like the Soviet Union. That is itself propaganda, and undermines everything else you write.
The fact that a majority of a country believes populist propaganda is, unfortunately, not evidence of anything but the power of populist propaganda.
It seems to me the Czech Republic has become far wealthier in the EU, in large part because of access to EU markets and due to the stability of EU institutions.
The situation with Trump vs. Hillary and Brexit vs. Bremain seems almost identical to me, especially after having watched the TV debate the other evening (the first political debate I've ever watched in the UK).
Sure, you can say that Brexit are incredibly populist and play on peoples fears, but... the Bremain side was no better. Essentially, my take on it was, that the Brexit side was targeting the incredibly stupid people with fears like immigration, whereas the Bremain was targeting the merely stupid people with fears like economy crash. Neither seemed to have any kind of justification to their main arguments, or any other sensible argument.
The situation in the US seems very similar. Sure, Trump is spewing inconsistent nonsense left and right, but Hillary has nothing to say, period. Part of me thinks that she's so embroiled in potential scandals that it's actually better for her to say nothing, and hope that Trump auto-ignites and explodes based on his speech...
> It's actually better for her to say nothing, and hope that Trump auto-ignites and explodes based on his speech...
I saw something (jokingly) suggesting the other day that the best thing Clinton could do with her campaign's cash would be to loan it to Trump's campaign.
I'm a little bit put off by the mentality of "both sides are bad" that a lot of people seem to have in both of these issues.
Yeah, both sides have massive flaws, but isn't it stifling to keep insisting on this fact and to keep preaching it? Shouldn't we all just accept the lesser evil, by however small a margin it's less evil?
As good a point as you may have, isn't it more important to avoid a Donald Trump presidency/a brexit/a ridiculous fear of immigrants and Islam than to say what is technically correct so loudly and prominently?
I feel like if we wind up with the worse cases, people might regret having made both sides seem bad. Plus, less intelligent people might avoid voting altogether rather than voting for the lesser evil because they keep hearing intellectuals say how bad both sides are.
Assuming that you think Trump would somehow be a disastrous clown - or at least more of a disastrous clown than Hillary. Really, it's Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich here, but from my perspective, Hilary has done nothing to inspire confidence, and a great deal to make me wary - Trump might be a jackass, but he is generally a shrewd operator, and really not liable to simple corruption.
> but he is generally a shrewd operator, and really not liable to simple corruption.
That would probably come as a surprise to the small army of people who have sued him over the years[0], or who have been sued by him for what seem to be vindictive or petty reasons[1].
You may prefer Trump, but the corrupting interests of business and politics very often intersect. I think it would be a mistake to assume he's neither corrupt nor corruptible.
My comment was mainly aimed at people who agree with me that Trump would be a disaster and Hillary would simply be the continuation of the not-so-great status quo. To those people, I plead to stop making the both-sides-are-evil argument.
You seem to be a Trump supporter, so there you go, you're not on the both-sides-are-evil boat. I have no qualms with you other than the obvious political differences.
I'm no fan of Hillary, but have you listened to what Trump has been saying?
I highly recommend reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer . It was written in the aftermath of WW2 and tries to break down the factors that go into the formation of mass movements like Naziism and Communism.
I wouldn't say we've reached the same levels by a ways, but the parallels between the situation then and now are chilling.
Yeah, both sides have massive flaws, but isn't it stifling to keep insisting on this fact and to keep preaching it? Shouldn't we all just accept the lesser evil...
Today's vote only has two possible outcomes, but please don't perpetuate the myth that Americans have only two choices in November. Both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein would serve the public better as president than either of the two corrupt charlatans that the two wings of the Status Quo Party will nominate. If we want to improve the nation, and we want to do it by voting, we will be fools if we continue to vote as we always have.
A myth? We literally only have two choices. There is not a single chance that someone else will be elected unless someone within either of the parties does something.
What do you seriously suggest the people do to get another person besides these two?
Whether you like it or not, the fact remains that those who vote for a third party have always been a tiny minority and have ultimately caused elections to be lost to people even they think is the worse evil. Unless of course you respond with what your plan of action is and how it will work.
Some people have already done something, and both of the candidates I mentioned by name in the parent comment will be on the ballot in your state. Please vote for one of them! Don't vote for what you know to be "evil"; that wouldn't be rational. No one will stop you from voting rationally, except yourself, by listening to the "literally only two choices" bullshit that the media spoon-feeds you.
This is probably too political for HN, so I'll stop now.
I want to listen to you (I'd write in Bernie to be honest) but unfortunately it's not realistic. I've come to this conclusion by observation of reality, not from the media. I don't even consume much American media.
You're saying you only want to vote for a party that could win. Why? For the satisfaction of feeling like you made a difference? If the polls showed that the "greater evil" party was winning by a large margin, would you vote for that too because the lesser evil one has zero chance?
People who vote against their own interest and focus on over-emotional bipartisan feelings are exactly the reason America's government keeps doing things that people don't like. They're so afraid of the "greater evil" that they'll even kill the greater good in a futile attempt to avoid it. The republicans will still keep on winning every couple of cycles, just as they always have. Voting for one of the two major parties is really a vote for the status quo of alternating republican and democrat governments. It's like sports, no team is ever really going to win. They just keep switching places.
Score Voting or Approval Voting, yes. It's the only way to ensure—like mathematically guarantee—it's safe to vote for your favorite candidate _always_.
Why? Getting a bit political here, and I'm sorry, I just need to answer the question then I'll cut it out with the strong political views:
Because I couldn't bear to be a citizen of a country that elects Donald Trump as president. I'd be too embarrassed in the face of my peers around the world. I already get made fun of enough for my country by my German, Swiss, and Korean friends for just the prospect of Trump winning. I couldn't live here anymore or represent this country when I travel. The people who surround me, my compatriots, would be too stupid, bigoted, and hateful in my view for me to continue living here.
For any other election, I'd happily agree with you and might even try to change the status quo. But the risk of a Trump presidency has my insides sinking.
But right now, I'm going to vote for anything to stop that guy from winning. Even if it means voting for a crook.
> Shouldn't we all just accept the lesser evil, by however small a margin it's less evil?
That margin is an epsilon, and its inverted for people with different pressing concerns than you.
The Republican party is full of people will be voting for Trump, not because they really like him, but simply to keep Killary out. That is their lesser evil.
They are incredibly similar movements. I think we're confronting the leading edge of disgruntlement as the working class is displaced by technology, globalization, and cheap immigrant labor. Immigrants become the scapegoat when it's really more complex than that. But the defenders of remaining an open society have a hard time explaining how they would fix these. Tech and urban elites have generally done well in this new world.
incredibly stupid people with fears like immigration
I've yet to hear an intelligent argument in favor of mass immigration, especially for a densely populated country like the UK. So, "stupid" to me is forcing a country with millennia of fairly consistent demographics to rapidly [0] turn into a squabbling Middle Eastern/North African/South Asian aggregate. Stupid. And by stupid, I mean stupid to the point of being utterly baffling.
[0] By historical standards. Britain is being re-settled a lot faster than North America was for instance. That took hundreds of years.
I'm not saying that arguing against immigration is stupid... Just that the way Brexit was arguing was devoid of any real factual data or rational arguments. They were playing purely on people's emotions.
I agree, partially. Mass immigration is almost never a good idea. However, the populations you pointed out aren't from the EU so have basically nothing to do with Brexit.
Calling people "incredibly stupid" if they're worried about immigration is a bit condescending, especially if they are observing the immigrants compete for jobs with them.
That sort of attitude towards non-upperclass people on both sides of the political spectrum is why they are pissed off with the political classes, in fact. And they are not stupid to be pissed off.
Why does everyone assume that nobody here _likes_ Trump? Granted, it's dangerous to be pro-Trump her in Silicon Valley; getting beaten up for these beliefs really happens. But maybe we should all have open minds.
I'm looking forward to seeing what the web does with the presidential election. The last election I remember paying attention to was Obama's win in 2008, and that was basically just telecast on TV.
One of the things I dislike about graphics displaying live (or otherwise unfinalized) electoral results is that the viewer must know something about political geography in order to interpret them: Are the tallies I'm seeing in line with how those districts were supposed to vote? Is it just happenstance that the votes counted so far have come in disproportionately from districts expected to vote against the expected overall result?
Please, if you work on these things, try to help us understand what we're really seeing. Otherwise, your work is for naught, because we will all learn to say, "Bah, I'll check the results in the morning."
Do any of you have ideas about how better to display live results? Maybe a heat map showing the difference in the actual results versus the polled expected results?
If you watch the BBC live stream they do in fact give information on how the results fair in terms of what was expected. This information appears to be missing from their website however.
I would like to second this -- they have a rather neat distribution that shows areas arranged in terms of leave-to-remain ratio. So as some results come in, they point out where that area was predicted to come, and whether or not the results are as predicted or surprising.
See my comment below. If you are interested in this and want to get some in depth analysis check out either BBC 1 or the BBC live blog. They cover these questions.
It's hard though, there isn't much to compare as there isn't an 'expected way' regions vote. There's a rough idea, but it's seeming like these are not what people expected. My money is on Scotland and Ireland being overwhelmingly remain, Wales swinging unexpectedly to leave (partly because they are disenfranchised with the government), while in England the non urban areas going leave and the urban ones going stay.
I think that's a nice idea, but it's also exceptionally difficult to do in practice for something like this.
In the case of a general election, we have the previous election on which to base our expectations. The UK broadcasters use the "swingometer" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swingometer) in these elections, which is a useful visualisation of the change of vote share on a per-consitutency basis, indicating the meaning of the result rather than just the number.
The EU referendum has no recent comparable campaign with which it can be compared, making it much harder to do this.
Just to piggy-back, these maps often don't show urban density very well. I'm guessing that Kettering (which is reporting "Leave") has a few less people than say, London.
The Guardian is currently running an excellent live blog (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2016/jun/23/eu-refe...) which includes comparisons between real and expected results, as well as projections by experts. I wish that link were at the top of HN instead of this submission; live results are completely useless for the average observer.
I agree completely...a shining example of how there's always more data to the data. I remember in 2014, they were tracking a Senate race in which the underdog, because of the order of precincts reporting, was seemingly on its way to a massive upset. To its credit, CNN made a few caveats while at the same time talking about how exciting things were as they did Jerry-Bruckheimer-zooms of their fancy electorate map...but all the while, the NYT kept calm and steady with its prediction and as the night went on, the vote results line gradually converged to nearly exactly what the NYT's analysis predicted.
It's definitely made election night a lot less dramatic.
So we are on the brink of trade wars. If the UK leaves the EU it will start a trade war with the Continent. Meanwhile, if Trump gets elected he'll spur a trade war with Mexico and China. Interesting what that will lead to. Loss of jobs, for one. But what else?
Why are you assuming a trade war with Mexico or China would necessarily lead to a loss of jobs as if it were some universal law of physics. Cause the specific media that you watch says it would?
I've never seen a coherent argument explaining how free trade deals have helped anyone but small groups at the expense of larger ones.
In fact, the actual direct evidence of trade deals are this:
1. Massive job loss for American workers.
2. Tax losses for the communities whose factories move across borders.
3.No actual job creation in its place based on the labor participation rate (lowest since these deals became common).
4. Corporate profits at highest level since before these deals.
5. Wealth inequality approaching depression level era. Interestingly, our gini coefficient tends to approach that of Mexico and China the more we trade with them.
Not many people know that the explicit goal of the early founders of the EU was to institute federalisation by stealth. They distrusted democracy (Hitler was voted into power), and chose to disguise massive political reform as economic.
Monnet - one of the original drivers behind the formation of the EU - had this to say:
"Europe's nations should be guided towards the Super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation."
To be clear, these weren't some sort of evil oligarchs at work: they wanted there to never be another WW2, another Hitler, etc.
But the nature of the EU, from the outset, was much as its critics today contend.
Correction: that is not a quote from Monnet but a summary by a contemporary of his. He actually said:
"Via money Europe could become political in five years" and "… the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would … the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal.
I stand corrected - that wasn't a Monnet quote but a summary of his position by a contemporary.
Monnet actually said:
"Via money Europe could become political in five years" and "… the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would … the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal."
There is truth in that, and denying it would be silly. There was a definite idea in the founding of the EU that the goal was a post-nation state, closer integration, fiscal and political union and so on.
That being said, I think there is an increasing feeling within the EU that this is no longer the correct approach.
Probably worth noting that the Daily Express is decidedly opinionated on the question of EU membership; not exactly an unbiased opinion.
Not that I'm disputing the quote (I have no idea) - but Monnet was not the only person driving the formation of the ECSC, and I'm not sure any of the others involved had the same views.
No. Hitler was never voted into office. He was appointed chancellor by the countries president.
Mussolini was hired by the King of Italy at (metaphorical) gunpoint to run the country, and ultimately fired him once the gun was no longer being held to his head.
That can't be the case, since the Reichskanzler was not voted for in any way. He was appointed by the Reichspräsident.
Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reichskanzler in 1933. In march 1933 there were new elections, but this time already under control of Hitler (as Reichskanzler) and the NSDAP. The NSDAP still did not get a majority of the votes, even though there already was a lot of terror against the opposition.
Hitler was never voted into power by the Germans. Even though the NSDAP was the strongest party in the last elections, they never had the majority of seats in the Reichstag in free elections and even not in the first non-free election.
The Treaty of Rome which established the organisation that evolved in the EU we know today has a preamble that begins with:
HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS,
THE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY,
THE PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC,
THE PRESIDENT OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLIC,
HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE GRAND DUCHESS OF LUXEMBOURG,
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN OF THE NETHERLANDS,
*DETERMINED to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe,[...]*
Wow, I knew that all the non-attached parts of the UK would want to remain, but not by this much. Both the Shetland and Orkney islands voted to stay by a fair margin, about 65% Remain, but Gibraltar was far more heavily Remain. Gibraltar, for example, had 96% vote to stay, with 85% turnout (!).
This is partly because the islands are far more dependent on the EU than the mainland, but in Gibraltar's case it is particularly extreme. Without EU membership Gibraltar may not be able to have a border with Spain due to the territorial conflict. Spain already occasionally closes the border on a whim, for example when a Spanish fishing boat was arrested for illegally fishing in Gibraltar waters.
[edit] I don't want to get into a debate (w/commenter below) but basically both the UK and Spain claim that they own all the waters. International rulings so far seem to be leaning towards giving the UK some and Spain some; a lot of these rulings come from the EU courts which is yet another reason why those in Gibraltar have a very strong interest to stay.
While I'm amending my comment, I think it's interesting that there were any Gibraltar citizens who voted to leave. This shows that there is a solid 8% of the population or so that will vote how they feel is important despite a very strong economic incentive to the contrary. I'm simultaneously surprised at how few people voted to leave (only 4%!) and at how there were still people who voted to leave despite the obvious economic problems leaving would bring to Gibraltar.
The University of East Anglia have a live blog as well that updates their predictions based on statistical model [0] by Dr Chris Hanretty. Predictions are based on how results differ from the prior model. The model is explained in more detail here [1].
Maybe be glad you don't have a betting account. I wouldn't trust anyone who thinks they can model this to the point of literally attaching "p=1.0", this early on.
I am not much of a gambler, but with a spread like this it looks very tempting. The currency market boys seem to think out has won.
Anyway using my imaginary betting account I will bet a million pounds - I will enjoy the cup of imaginary coffee I will be able to buy with my winnings :)
No I live in Australia so I have to covert my imaginary winnings pounds into imaginary Australian dollars to be able to buy my imaginary coffee ;)
More seriously the model was right and the bookies wrong - it is relatively rare that you get an opportunity like this handed to you to make money with almost no risk.
I still think p=1.0 was not possibly achievable via any model at that point in the counting, which means betting based on it would have been an enormous risk. The fact that the bet would have paid off makes no difference; especially given how close the vote seems to have gone, a coin flip would have gotten it right half the time, and I doubt you'd say that a coin flipper who just declares 100% confidence has a good model.
The model was almost exactly spot on, while the bookies were still offering 6/4 on for remain at the time I originally posted. The betting market really was not adjusting to the changing data and was way off on the real odds - this is quite rare.
I certainly hope that the people who made money off Chris’ model follow his suggestion and donate to the Jo Cox fund.
The totals will go back and forth, but it's all about turnout proportionally in in- vs out- regions versus original projections. Glasgow was expected to be massively pro-remain but did Glasgow turn out in higher/lower numbers than anticipated? and did Glasgow go more or less pro-remain than anticipated? I would be very very worried if I were a British citizen in the remain camp right now.
Why does the drop from p=0.32 to p=0.03 seem crazy/bogus? Isn't that what you'd expect as the probability distribution both narrows (with more evidence) and moves toward the 'leave' side?
That Remain pulled ahead is somewhat irrelevant though. That seems to be mostly due to London reporting in, which was always expected to vote Remain. What's relevant (for this model at least) is whether the results are higher or lower than predicted per area.
If the model is being updated based on results as they come in, and the results coming in are not randomly distributed, then the updates will be of questionable value. In particular, this update came when a large number of predicted pro-leave results had come in, and no results from predicted strong pro-remain results had come in, so I'm not sure it has much value as a prediction.
Interesting he's since increased the certainty of a Leave vote even after a couple of unexpectedly strong pro-Remain votes swung the betting markets back in favour of Remain
Whether that's because he's better than the markets at modelling differential turnout or the markets know things his confirmed results data doesn't about predicted results in places like Birmingham remains to be seen...
As I understand it, the model is based on the difference between expected and actual results in each area. So the order that results come in should not affect the prediction.
> So the order that results come in should not affect the prediction.
This model uses a frequentist prediction interval, which assumes independently drawn samples, meaning reporting order must be random for the assumptions to be valid. If reporting is non-random, e.g. how early or late a district reports is correlated with things like region, demographics, population density, etc., then the prediction interval is probably narrower than it should be, especially early on in the reporting (meaning the model is overconfident in its prediction).
The headline prediction is more robust if you just want to know which outcome is more likely given current results, but the probabilities being badly calibrated due to these kinds of model assumptions is a common issue in quantitative polisci models.
Interesting because the odds react far quicker than any live blog I've found, so a sudden swing means that there's just been a surprising result announced.
Given that there will be a number of swings maybe a good strategy is to bet on the one with longer odds, wait till the next swing, sell and buy the other, rinse and repeat.
I don't care about the result. I'm more interested in how our statistical modelling tools failed us. Thoughts? Did opinions change overnight? Did the polling miss a demographic?
Lots of people say in public that they're in favor of immigration, unity, and tolerance, because lots of people will call you a bigot if you don't, but in private, harbor old-fashioned ideas about nationalism, and well, polling involves a human and voting happens in private.
I think betting markets are prone to wishful thinking; there's no guarantee that errors of reasoning toward one side or the other will cancel out, since it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that errors in one direction are more common.
There's no guarantee, but the bookie is watching his, uh, book and adjusting the odds to make sure the payouts come from losing bets rather than his pocket.
It looks like the average was around 35%:
http://predictwise.com/politics/uk-politics
Interestingly the odds went down pretty sharply as the election came closer, but it is not really fair to pick the lowest odds when evaluating how good the predictions were. But even 15% odds are not really all that unlikely, about a 1 in 6 chance. It isn't as though pundits were predicting leave.
I think that hedging would have the opposite effect. The pound is tanking (30-year low right now), so if your salary is paid in pounds, it would have made sense to bet on Leave. I'm not sure who wins economically from leaving. British companies that compete with continental ones?
Well, since we have much more information about presidential elections (which happen regularly) than we have about brexit (which is mostly without precedent), you could argue that election 2016 forecasts are probably more accurate.
I don't think that's the case though. I predict a Trump victory on the basis of a very strong social desirability bias and an immense amount of silent resentment against current social justice orthodoxy, especially as it pertains to speech restrictions on campus and in the workplace.
Pollsters were never confident of this result, with their adjusted and unadjusted results being all over the place, and were cautiously predicting Leave victories as recently as last week. There weren't any relevant precedents for them to test their models against, and the biggest factor in the Leave vote appears to be high turnout from demographics that rarely vote in other elections.
I've found it odd that the markets were far more confident in poll findings than the pollsters but assume that the bets were mainly placed on the simple heuristic that poll results tend to understate voters caution and attachment to the status quo.
One of my favourite part of this whole thing is seeing just how little my friendship group understand how much FB/Twitter are self-selecting echochambers.
My feeds are full of people who just absolutely cannot believe that other people hold "wrong opinions".
I think this is one of the major reasons for our awful political discourse now. Everyone self-selects into echo chambers and it gets so bad that they can't even fathom how someone could disagree with them as they pass around strawman memes of 'the wrong side'.
Then at the end of the day, you must perceive the opposing side as inherently bad in some way. It's amazing how so few people can remain friends with people who have differing viewpoints.
Never mind friends. I would settle for simply realizing that the other person has a viewpoint is different from yours, and yet perfectly reasonable.
Anytime you see calls for "sanity" or the like you know the person is completely incapable of seeing something from another point of view. I've started to use it as a code word for "don't listen to this person".
This is very true, and something I didn't even realize until I entered a period of life in which I'm simply too busy to participate in social media.
If something went viral, I used to take that as a signal or indicator of how the majority of people think. Now when something goes viral, I think, "that's roughly how a lot of men and almost as many women, age 13 to 30, who are comfortable aligning with that particular opinion publicly, think."
Then I started considering what that might mean for television, movies, print, etc.
I always knew that media was skewed in favor of attracting the youngest audiences, because they're more valuable to advertisers. Now I'm also considering that maybe those forms of media are also skewed in favor of the type of person who tends to watch a lot of television, go to a lot of movies, buy a lot of magazines, etc. I used to think everyone did that, now I know a lot of people do it far less than others.
Daytime television, for example, is full of advertisements for private colleges that exist mostly just to take your SSN so they can pocket federal loan money and list you as the debtor. That's because people who watch daytime television tend to be uneducated and unemployed.
Daytime television is nothing close to a cross-section of humanity. It's content engineered to appeal mostly to people who don't go to school and don't work.
Now, what kind of people tend to watch primetime television? Or listen to terrestrial radio? Or buy a magazine at an airport?
As a result of media producers learning more about their audiences, pretty much every form of media eventually becomes an echo chamber.
The first time I read it I was amazed at how unaffordable everything was.
But Bill Gates has said he reads every issue of The Economist from cover to cover, so they definitely know their audience. They'll be in the black as long as they can sell him and Richard Branson one Gulfstream every 5 years.
Not just that, but there are lots of people who honestly believe that no one does hold a different opinion. They attribute a failure to enact the policies they support to a conspiracy of vested interests, rather than the fact that a large fraction of country disagrees with them.
If this goes with "REMAIN", Does this still leave the possibility of Scotland wanting to "Leave" ? I've read a few articles about it and it seems the Scots were contemplating leaving
You have it backwards. The English are on the fence about it, but the Scots want to remain by a huge margin. If the UK votes to leave, it's very likely that it will trigger a re-referendum for Scotland to leave the UK and rejoin the EU.
Something I hadn't considered was the breakdown between the individual UK nations.
What happens if the UK as a whole decides to leave the euro zone, perhaps by a small margin or perhaps by a lot, but for some reason Scotland decides buy a 15% margin to stay in the euro zone.
Is there any reason to think we might see Scotland decide to stay with the euro zone it leave the UK in that case? Or are the ties so strong that the UK would probably stay together no matter what even if one of the member nations has a strongly different opinion?
I'm on my phone now, so I can't find a link. But yes, some politicians in Scotland have already said they'd have another referendum to leave the UK if it leaves the EU.
I wonder what will happen in Northern Ireland. My understanding is that it will be split in half in terms of voting leave/remain.
(Just a heads-up, the Eurozone and the EU are different – the former is the currency union under the Euro, and membership of the latter is what the referendum is about. Not all members of the EU are members of the Eurozone).
Scotland had an independence referendum less than two years ago, where the outcome was a good 45%-55% in favour of remaining in the UK. However, the majority of representatives in Scotland remain pro-Scottish independence. Continued membership of the EU was an important argument during the independence campaign – with the pro-independence side wanting to remain, and the pro-UK side warning that Scotland would lose EU membership if it voted for independence.
It's likely – but not certain – that there would be a second independence referendum in Scotland on the basis of being 'forced' to exit the EU. But it's not going to be pretty, and there have been a lot of elections in Scotland recently – no doubt everyone is getting a bit fatigued. It's not clear at all what the outcome would be, either, or if Scotland would even be able to maintain EU membership.
Thanks, thought I might be getting the "euro zone" part wrong but wasn't sure.
Honestly I was surprised when this whole issue came up because I assumed that the EU and the Eurozone where the same thing. I know the UK never decided to adopt the Euro so I just assumed that they weren't part of the EU.
It's not hard to get confused – there are a lot of overlapping groups involved here! The Eurozone, the EU, the ECHR, the EEA… they all have different sets of members and such.
The UK has been a bit frosty about the prospect of further EU integration, possibly with good reason in some ways.
SNP did not really campaign, despite having been resolutely pro-EU all the time in the past. They clearly hope Leave wins so they can get a mandate to break away for good; they'll have another referendum, which will be easily won, and say bye.
Scotland will definitely try to leave (as others have pointed out, there's a definite theory that turnout there was lower because a lot of pro-independence Scots who support the EU in principle didn't particularly mind the rest of the UK leaving the EU if it reignited their opportunity for independence)
The other interesting aspect is London: a part of the UK whose expected resounding Remain vote[1] is far from the only way it's increasingly politically, culturally and economically different from the rest of the UK...
I just like some well explained answers that's all. Why do people care so much if there are no reasons to stay? Is it the stock market? Is it immigration?
I'm not after an argument, i'm an average joe who works and has a family. Explain to me why important to vote remain, thats all.
Requesting exactly three reasons sounds quite trollish...
A Leave vote would probably negatively affect many European research projects.
The EU's framework programmes [1] are funding many collaborations and exchange programs. If the UK leaves, non-British researchers might need to to leave the UK, British universities would get isolated from the rest of European academia, long-term projects would have their funding canceled, etc.
Even if EU and UK somehow would find a way to continue research cooperations, the uncertainty will have negative consequences right now.
While this might not directly affect the average joe, it would negatively affect quite a few people I know.
Does the US or other countries not have any research or collaboration programs? Did people not cooperate in times past? I've watched some of the debates and these arguments never seem to mention that of course you can negotiate anything.
I think it's also unlikely that the UK will end up neutral on scientific funding overall. There's no fundamental reason it couldn't, of course: as Leave campaigners have argued, leaving the EU research programmes doesn't require a net reduction in funding for UK researchers, since the UK could simply put an equivalent amount of money into its own scientific funding programmes. Those of us in computing, for example, currently get a good portion of our funding from the EU's framework programmes, and another good portion from the UK's own EPSRC. The UK could keep the total level of funding for science/engineering research constant by setting the EPSRC's new funding level to an amount equal to the sum of previous EPSRC funding, plus the funds previously received by UK-based science/engineering researchers from the EU framework programmes. But will the government actually do so? I predict they will not, and that it won't even be close.
407 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
Makes for great public media in many cases.
Those could very well be provided by the private market.
The Wikipedia article you link to states "The money received is first paid into the Government's Consolidated Fund. It is subsequently included in the 'vote' for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in that year's Appropriation Act, and passed back to the BBC for the running of the BBC's own services (free from commercial advertisements)."
How do you see this as "no government funding"?
What funding package is that? Did you mean EU grants?
> that each UK citizen has to pay with the purchase of a TV)
The licence fee is payable if you are in the UK and watch live TV as it's broadcast. "live", "TV", and "broadcast" are defined in statute and statutory instruments.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/search?Type=Projects
3-4 a.m. (10-11 p.m.) - Results from half of the counting areas are in
Around 5 a.m. (midnight) - About 80% of counting areas have reported results
7 a.m. (2 a.m.) - All votes are likely to have been counted and the official result is expected shortly after.
United will only be in the name of the country after today. This is the beginning of years of trouble ahead.
Probably the saddest referendum result in my lifetime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...
It was genuinely one of the worst referendum campaigns of all time though. I'm still haunted by the 'if you vote for this then babies will die' adverts.
:/
Something like Approval Voting or even better range voting would have been worth it.
http://www.rangevoting.org/
Elections, however, are not based on popular vote.
dang?
This is unlike the Scottish independence referendum which was a Yes/No vote on if Scotland should to be independent. It's not specifically about either option this time.
All that said, “Brexit referendum” is a name that's been used. (And if the result goes a certain way, well…)
Bremain! Get the hip abbreviations right :)
If in doubt, a simple click will solve any ambiguity which could arise with the Elderberry Unicorn referendum happening in Patagonia also today.
Edit: I did some math and figured it out. Thanks for the help, hehehe
It gives a different perspective to the early votes coming in...
Also, the chances are the BBC world service radio is covering it in your area.
It's not looking good for remain, but it's really early.
Regional variations are the only reason things haven't been decided yet.
It definitely seems like political discourse has taken a turn for the worse. In contrast with the Scottish independence referendum a couple of years ago which, although there was some animosity, did feel like a genuine political conversation… this one has seemed much more like an angry shouting match.
I'm particularly interested in the comparison with Trump in the US. In both cases, it feels like a nominally populist, anti-bureaucratic/anti-establishment movement (the extent of the truth in that being debatable) has been able to make a substantial impact with that platform, due in part to the abject inability of that establishment to deal with and neutralise the movement.
It's happening all over the world: Austria, France (National Front), China, Japan, Turkey, Israel, etc etc.
It's like the world forgot the lessons of the past - the curses of nationalism, populism and ideology - and nobody has stood up to remind them. The latter really angers and depresses me; nobody with a platform is making the well-known arguments about why these things are very dangerous.
It could also be, that we are doing something wrong in the society, something we did better after the last wars. Such as not including everybody in the growth of the economy.
At least I'd like to think we don't have to kill hundreds of millions of people every century, to make people remember...
Company cultures have been shifting from fear-driven-development to a more human focus. Still a ways to go (especially compared with the marketing around it), but a step in the right direction.
There is a problem with education also, we should teach our kids what populism and nationalism is, what are the consequences of radical nationalism.
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."
We are a long way from the Middle Ages; things do change quite a bit. Look at civil rights in the U.S.: Two generations ago, women needed their husbands permission to get a job, and were only allowed in teaching and nursing for the most part. Look at the spread of democracy.
Perhaps, are you alluding to SEALDs and those against revising the constitution? If so, I don't think their voice are comparably as loud as those overseas.
We've had a political class who've decided that the hoi polloi don't really matter anymore and that governance is a matter of maintaining consensus at the top. Now the working classes are lashing back and sure it's ugly but it's a predictable consequence of the last few decades of tone deaf technocratic government.
The institutions that used to provide alternatives political voices have been co-opted. So who are they going to vote for?
See Die Linke (The Left party) in Germany taking over territory perhaps once held by the SPD (Socialdemocratic party).
So the accusations are not so much that `these voters belong to us'. But: no self-respecting party should form a coalition with these dictators ever.
That taboo has been broken on the state level in East German a long time ago. But it still holds some power on the federal level, and in West German states.
Because bringing it to a halt would take precision work and even then it probably wouldn't be stable. Iterative systems oscillate. It's what they do.
Moreover, a lot of the suggestions about "how to solve it" are in fact what people are trying to do very hard, and are themselves part of the system. The obvious solutions are what are taking us in the current direction. The fact that they are obvious is why you can actually plot the cyclic progression of civilizations with some reliability. It's an interesting field of study.
(BTW, buckle up. We're almost certainly in for a period of substantial uncertainty based on those modes. But, also, you are not your government or social system. Whatever abuse those things may be in for doesn't mean that you won't come out of it. Also, while I'd say high technology shows little evidence of having eliminated the cycles up to this point, I do consider it a wild card personally. Doom is not guaranteed.)
See also http://www.livescience.com/22109-cycles-violence-2020.html , which also has some very Google-able keywords.
Bear in mind that it's a field of active research, and I'm giving those more as starting points I plucked out from Google hits than necessarily endorsing those exact theories. Personally I would only defend a somewhat weaker idea, that the future isn't somehow entirely random, but that we can indeed look to theories like this for some understanding of the next few decades, modulo the technology wildcard. Or at least a much better understanding than just thinking it's all whims of fate and everything's on the table equally. I said some reliability on purpose... it's not totally reliable, but you can still do much better than nothing.
Because there aren't any. Although I would not use the word "sane" here, I would use the word "capable", as in capable of running a political unit the size of a country. The inconvenient truth that nobody wants to acknowledge is that there are no human beings capable of doing that. Countries are simply too big and too complicated. (This is actually true IMO for units much smaller than countries, but countries is the current level of discussion.) The problem is not to find someone who can govern a country sanely; the problem is to figure out how to organize ourselves and coexist given that nobody is capable of governing a country sanely.
This cycle is completely about the ruling elite wanting the same crooked game to keep playing, and the voting public saying "You know what? Fuck you".
Yes, the Dems couldn't pull it off with Sanders, but it appears the republicans actually picked, perhaps not an anti-establishment candidate, but at least a non-establishment candidate.
The voting systems make that hard. Eg for the US any one who wants to win the primaries has to pander to their extreme base.
Moving to range voting would help a bit http://www.rangevoting.org/
In the UK, there's an intense feeling that the concerns of people in traditionally working-class communities have been ignored in preference of a metropolitan elite. There is increasing wealth inequality, cuts to public services, less job security and so on. Members of these communities are very aware of the costs of EU membership – free movement of labour being particularly damaging to these communities – and are not as convinced by the corresponding benefits.
I do place the fault squarely at the feet of the modern left-of-center political movements (Labour Party in the UK) which has consistently peddled a muddled message of internationalism mixed with social democracy mixed with unrestrained capitalism – in appealing to an imagined middle-ground voter they have alienated their traditional support. It feels like these movements have compressively failed to provide a convincing messages – instead peddling a weak compromise that pleases nobody.
It's frustrating, but I'm struggling to understand what the answer looks like.
Yes, but in the UK context they're voting for Farange, Johnson, et al. Who are as solidly establishment as they come.
If you live in the NW or NE it's probably down to disenfranchisement. Large parts of the NW and NE are still not out of the 2008 recession, so hearing the constant bleating about the economy, they're told is doing so well, just reinforces the emptiness of the political classes.
On Europe specifically most of the remain arguments were economic. It's quite hard to listen to those seriously whilst London is in its usual bubble and the area in which you live is still suffering. Nearly every EU economic argument is reinforcing the EU being about big business, just proving, in their minds, the disconnect with the people. People who are living in areas that have seen enormous decline in the last 30 years. Makes it harder to vote for free movement and markets when you can see the decimation of your once vibrant industry and town centres.
So nearly every argument for Remain is demonstrably untrue in their own life and region.
So, no, they're not voting for Farage, they're voting against the Westminster groupthink bubble. If they had got more regional development, or the regional economies were given better support, things could have been very different.
The UK just lost the biggest future lights out fabrics.
What does the UK plan to do?
I would hope that efforts can be made to make the UK economy more inclusive. The areas voting overwhelmingly to leave are all the areas that have been suffering since the 80s - NE, NW, Wales.
How the UK operates and competes globally now, I simply have no idea. I'm also concerned we're going to lose a lot of the protections we had in the EU.
These are Tory policies; Labor opposes them.
> free movement of labour being particularly damaging to these communities
How? The UK has had internal free movement of labor for a long time, and it didn't damage them. Blaming the immigrants sounds suspiciously like populist propaganda. It doesn't make it false, but can you back it up?
EDIT: From today's NY Times:
there was no question that while the immigrants contributed more to the economy and to tax receipts than they cost
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/25/world/europe/britain-brexi...
That's not really the case. Wealth inequality increased massively under the previous 13 years of Labour government in the UK, for example. They're more 'new liberal' policies than Tory or Labour policies.
How? The UK has had internal free movement of labor for a long time, and it didn't damage them. Blaming the immigrants sounds suspiciously like populist propaganda. It doesn't make it false, but can you back it up?
I guess I wasn't that clear – I don't actually agree with them in the aggregate, and I'm solidly pro-EU and pro-free-movement. 'Blaming the immigrants' as you say is solidly nationalist propaganda. But there is a perception in these communities – false though it may be – that 'immigrants from the EU' come to the UK and 'take jobs,' 'put pressure on public services' and so on. Many people in these communities haven't been well-treated by successive governments, particularly around immigrations. That's why they're annoyed, not because immigration is bad for the country (it isn't.)
> That's not really the case. ...
Austerity is a Tory policy ... I don't know about the rest, but Labor hasn't been in power for awhile.
> there is a perception in these communities – false though it may be – that 'immigrants from the EU' come to the UK and 'take jobs
That's the propaganda. Social services are reduced by Tory austerity, and then they blame the immigrants. Similar things happen in other places in Europe, especially blaming immigrants.
This is the inherent problem in dealing with demagoguery. Logical arguments do not matter, and the left doesn't seem to understand this. You have to fight fire with fire. Feelings with feelings. You have to speak to people's guts, not their minds.
Point being not only right wing basket cases don't like the EU. The far left doesn't really like it either. It is a project conceived by US planners and executed by the French and German elites pushed onto the rest of the continent. Whenever there is talk about the "democracy deficit" it is brushed aside as something that will be fixed once Europe has become more integrated.
Any proof of that? From a US perspective, I can't see how a unified Europe would benefit the US - neither economically nor militarily. The EU is the only state (besides China with 4x the population of the US) that can compare to the US economy. Dealing with smaller countries gives the US an advantage compared with similar deals with the EU itself.
A unified EU military would be the only state both large enough and advanced enough to pose a valid military challenge to US hegemony.
A bit off-topic, but what exactly do you hate about Bologna? I liked it that it shortened my studies (math) from 4 years to 3, although I would have appreciated a bit more depth (more elective subjects)... But then, I only have a very limited perspective, so I'm very curious about what other people think, and what possible improvements they see.
The result is as far as I can tell from personal experience that the quality of an average master students in Math and Physics is now significantly lower than that of diploma students.
They also introduced very interesting language, you study Modules, each of which give you points. In the end you are supposed to end up as a nice exchangeable semi-educated narrowly focussed cog in some big corporation.
Plus, Germany, the UK and France are the big players in the EU. Naturally the union favors their agenda and overrules smaller member countries.
The average worker in the western nations did a lot better when the cold war was in full swing than afterwards. Peaceful competition among nations and economic systems seems to work best.
Once the USSR and its satellite states disappeared, US capitalism had no fear of a revolution ever gaining hand, and the results for the middle class have been as expected.
Seems like a valid idea.
I do know that in the aftermath of WWII, the Allies, under the Morgenthau Plan, treated the German population in the West very poorly. Essentially, the goal was to keep them in an agrarian state so they'd never be able to pose a military challenge.
After it became apparent that a large ideological battle between the communist and capitalist systems among the German population was being waged, and that the western population might just begin to choose communism, should things not improve, the Allies did begin to allow the West to re-industrialize.
I watched the Grapes of Wrath (1940) a few years ago. The amount of pro-communist idealization in the film would never, ever be allowed to play in a main-stream theater in the US today.
I think most younger people don't realize that communism was a huge threat to the US Capitalist system pre-Soviet-breakup, and because of that, a very large propaganda campaign was waged until the 90's. The remnants we see today are why an effective attack on Bernie Sanders was to associate him with socialism / communism.
Obviously, young people didn't fall for the tactic. Older folks who had been taught to fear and hate communism for much of their earlier lives, on the other hand, were influenced heavily by the attack.
When people can see all around them that gender, nationality, race, and religion convey useful information about the people they meet, and they live under the rule of an elite which claims that these things are irrelevant, then when some demagogue or other comes along who acknowledges the truth about these things but who lies everything else, people are going to go running into the arms of that demagogue.
Had these people advocated a fair and humane acknowledgement of these obvious, day-to-day truths instead of adopted a posture of absolute denial of the obvious, we wouldn't have Trump in the US and Brexit across the Atlantic.
> absolute denial of the obvious
You say that as if it's assumed, but I don't agree and neither do very many others. I agree it's obviously a human instinct to think that, but that's true of many other bad ideas - we're not beasts, our intellectual abilities take us far beyond our instincts. That tribal instinct has led to terrible destruction - arguably it's caused more harm than any other idea.
Of course I'm not speaking in absolutes (and I hope you don't you mean to). There's a little bit of information there, but generally I find people are the same everywhere; there are good and bad, smart and dumb, happy and sad, capable and incompetent, kind and cruel, etc. just as much in every group. It's really the individual that matters.
It's also essential to liberty and basic fairness: An individual need to be judged on their own merits, by their own action, and not by the color of their skin, their nationalities, their religion, gender, sexual preference, etc. If we say, "people in religion X are thieves", then it will be an injustice to almost all the individuals in that religion. It leads to widespread injustice even in peace, when a skilled woman or minority, for example, is judged instead on their race or gender and denied the job.
It turns out that stereotypes, however distasteful, usually do have a certain degree of accuracy: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/03/30/are-stereotypes-accur.... You may not want to live in the world where they do, but that reality is what it is.
When you ask people to deny the evidence of their own eyes, you're setting up a kind of resentment that can lead only to bad outcomes.
Of course, it'd be awful to be individually assumed to be a thief because you come from a group full of people unusually likely to be thieves. My point is that if it's a matter of fact that people of that group are more likely to be thieves, whatever the reason, and you tell people that, no, that group isn't full of thieves, and people are terrible for thinking so, then as soon as some demagogue acknowledges the truth, people will run to him no matter how bad his other opinions and no matter how ruinous his policies.
People hate liars, and even more, they hate being compelled by social forces of shame and ridicule to deny their true beliefs. It's better to have an honest conversation about these things than to repress them and create the kind of pressure cooker that explodes and makes a Trump president.
In an EU context, maybe it'd have been better to accept some restrictions on freedom of movement. Maybe it'd have been better to scale back centrally-imposed regulations on consumer goods (e.g., the EU banning traditional UK tea kettles).
Now we're going to see the EU damaged because well-meaning people tried to bring about the world they'd like to see by demanding everyone pretend it be so, and only children play pretend.
But I don't think any of that is accurate; I think your words are false and the argument rests only on the assumption that they are true.
If you want to cite something persuasive, you'll need something with more widespread credibility.
EDIT:
> It turns out that stereotypes, however distasteful, usually do have a certain degree of accuracy ... You may not want to live in the world where they do
This is an argument with a strawman that you made up, some absolutist person who says otherwise. If you read my prior comment, I already agreed with you that they have some degree if meaning.
> but that reality is what it is.
However, you don't get to define reality; maybe your definition is wrong.
You claim to want to avoid propaganda, but you are hewing to that approach closely with the assumptions, the absolutes, the lack of skepticism of your own position. My impression of Heterodox Academy is that it's more of the same but regardless, how about finding some more serious sources if you genuinely want to know?
Most of these differences are too incendiary to link here (and I'd rather not attract the wrath of dang), but let me cite one example: men are, biologically, physically much stronger than women. 95th percentile in women is 5th percentile in men. See this well-sourced quora thead: https://www.quora.com/Are-men-generally-physically-stronger-...
I think it's pretty easy to corroborate the statistics with everyday experience. Muscular strength is a function of total number of muscle fibers. Look around you, if you're in a group of men and women: which group tends to have the thicker biceps and triceps?
Now consider that quite a few people, particularly in the more blue-tribe areas of the US, think that it's a grave injustice that women do not have more representation in occupations that depend to large extent on physical strength --- e.g., firefighting.
Think about how frustrating it must feel to point out the unreality of this accusation. Imagine how it must feel to fear that you'd be fired from your job and ostracized from your social group for pointing out what the statistics and your own eyes agree in the truth. Now imagine that you had an opportunity to anonymously vote against the people who make you feel that way.
Can you imagine this state of mind? If so, you've captured why Britain left the EU.
> My impression of Heterodox Academy is that it's more of the same but regardless, how about finding some more serious sources if you genuinely want to know?
One sad effect of the current political climate is that it's become very hard to find unbiased sources --- or at least sources everyone respects (which isn't the same thing).
This is just a strawman; nobody argues women are as strong as men.
> it's become very hard to find unbiased sources
Not really, except than for ideological partisans
The parallels between our (still recent) past are absolutely striking: EU's propaganda, censorship efforts, ideological idiocy that nobody takes seriously any more (incl. economic).
But most of all, there's the scary disconnect between how real people live their lives vs what the official "party line" dictates. We're re-learning to read between the propaganda lines, again.
IMO we don't need condescending comments about how stupid everyone is (populists!), nor a platform explaining why this "central planning" ideology is appealing but very dangerous. We know very well, and we vote accordingly.
[0] "we" = majority of the country: http://zpravy.idnes.cz/ctenari-idnes-cz-anketa-czexit-de5-/d...
Wouldn't a voluntary exchange of trade, labour and policies, in place of "a feeding hand" (what a condescending remark!) be better for everyone?
By the way, the subsidies feed mostly the politicians, and the hands of their well-connected friends who are the true benefactors. And that's no coincidence -- as I said, we've already lived through the reality disconnect that is the result of top-down social engineering.
What the linked poll shows you is that normal people are telling you to take your oh-so-generous subsidies and shove them. If it means being part of a political union they have no say in.
You'll need to provide some data. It sounds like what any anti-EU propagandist would first think of asserting.
And what about the businesses with access to the world's largest market?
Regarding businesses: what about them? I happen to run a business, and dealing with EU partners and clients is actually a (marginally) greater nuisance than non-EU partners and clients. Are you aware of the complexity of the inter-EU VAT regulations and laws, especially for SMEs? [1]
[0] http://hledej.idnes.cz/clanky.aspx?q=zma%F8en%E9+dotace
[1] https://euobserver.com/opinion/129961
The fact that a majority of a country believes populist propaganda is, unfortunately, not evidence of anything but the power of populist propaganda.
It seems to me the Czech Republic has become far wealthier in the EU, in large part because of access to EU markets and due to the stability of EU institutions.
Sure, you can say that Brexit are incredibly populist and play on peoples fears, but... the Bremain side was no better. Essentially, my take on it was, that the Brexit side was targeting the incredibly stupid people with fears like immigration, whereas the Bremain was targeting the merely stupid people with fears like economy crash. Neither seemed to have any kind of justification to their main arguments, or any other sensible argument.
The situation in the US seems very similar. Sure, Trump is spewing inconsistent nonsense left and right, but Hillary has nothing to say, period. Part of me thinks that she's so embroiled in potential scandals that it's actually better for her to say nothing, and hope that Trump auto-ignites and explodes based on his speech...
I saw something (jokingly) suggesting the other day that the best thing Clinton could do with her campaign's cash would be to loan it to Trump's campaign.
Yeah, both sides have massive flaws, but isn't it stifling to keep insisting on this fact and to keep preaching it? Shouldn't we all just accept the lesser evil, by however small a margin it's less evil?
As good a point as you may have, isn't it more important to avoid a Donald Trump presidency/a brexit/a ridiculous fear of immigrants and Islam than to say what is technically correct so loudly and prominently?
I feel like if we wind up with the worse cases, people might regret having made both sides seem bad. Plus, less intelligent people might avoid voting altogether rather than voting for the lesser evil because they keep hearing intellectuals say how bad both sides are.
That would probably come as a surprise to the small army of people who have sued him over the years[0], or who have been sued by him for what seem to be vindictive or petty reasons[1].
You may prefer Trump, but the corrupting interests of business and politics very often intersect. I think it would be a mistake to assume he's neither corrupt nor corruptible.
[0]http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/donald-t...
[1]http://fortune.com/2015/08/14/donald-trump-lawsuits/
You seem to be a Trump supporter, so there you go, you're not on the both-sides-are-evil boat. I have no qualms with you other than the obvious political differences.
I highly recommend reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer . It was written in the aftermath of WW2 and tries to break down the factors that go into the formation of mass movements like Naziism and Communism.
I wouldn't say we've reached the same levels by a ways, but the parallels between the situation then and now are chilling.
Today's vote only has two possible outcomes, but please don't perpetuate the myth that Americans have only two choices in November. Both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein would serve the public better as president than either of the two corrupt charlatans that the two wings of the Status Quo Party will nominate. If we want to improve the nation, and we want to do it by voting, we will be fools if we continue to vote as we always have.
What do you seriously suggest the people do to get another person besides these two?
Whether you like it or not, the fact remains that those who vote for a third party have always been a tiny minority and have ultimately caused elections to be lost to people even they think is the worse evil. Unless of course you respond with what your plan of action is and how it will work.
This is probably too political for HN, so I'll stop now.
People who vote against their own interest and focus on over-emotional bipartisan feelings are exactly the reason America's government keeps doing things that people don't like. They're so afraid of the "greater evil" that they'll even kill the greater good in a futile attempt to avoid it. The republicans will still keep on winning every couple of cycles, just as they always have. Voting for one of the two major parties is really a vote for the status quo of alternating republican and democrat governments. It's like sports, no team is ever really going to win. They just keep switching places.
The strawmen about only voting for the winner doesn't apply.
If you want to make voting your conscience easier, support something like eg Range Voting.
http://www.rangevoting.org/
I am not so sure. I think there are other systems that can achieve this too. Eg a proportional system perhaps?
Anyway, yes, score voting is still a good idea if you can only elect a single candidate. People already understand how it works from sports.
Because I couldn't bear to be a citizen of a country that elects Donald Trump as president. I'd be too embarrassed in the face of my peers around the world. I already get made fun of enough for my country by my German, Swiss, and Korean friends for just the prospect of Trump winning. I couldn't live here anymore or represent this country when I travel. The people who surround me, my compatriots, would be too stupid, bigoted, and hateful in my view for me to continue living here.
For any other election, I'd happily agree with you and might even try to change the status quo. But the risk of a Trump presidency has my insides sinking.
But right now, I'm going to vote for anything to stop that guy from winning. Even if it means voting for a crook.
Ross Perot got 19% of the popular vote in 1992. I'd say that shows what a third party candidate can do.
That margin is an epsilon, and its inverted for people with different pressing concerns than you.
The Republican party is full of people will be voting for Trump, not because they really like him, but simply to keep Killary out. That is their lesser evil.
This is the manufactured consent of US politics.
I've yet to hear an intelligent argument in favor of mass immigration, especially for a densely populated country like the UK. So, "stupid" to me is forcing a country with millennia of fairly consistent demographics to rapidly [0] turn into a squabbling Middle Eastern/North African/South Asian aggregate. Stupid. And by stupid, I mean stupid to the point of being utterly baffling.
[0] By historical standards. Britain is being re-settled a lot faster than North America was for instance. That took hundreds of years.
I agree, partially. Mass immigration is almost never a good idea. However, the populations you pointed out aren't from the EU so have basically nothing to do with Brexit.
It's good for the people moving!
(There are other arguments, too.)
That sort of attitude towards non-upperclass people on both sides of the political spectrum is why they are pissed off with the political classes, in fact. And they are not stupid to be pissed off.
Please, if you work on these things, try to help us understand what we're really seeing. Otherwise, your work is for naught, because we will all learn to say, "Bah, I'll check the results in the morning."
Do any of you have ideas about how better to display live results? Maybe a heat map showing the difference in the actual results versus the polled expected results?
It's hard though, there isn't much to compare as there isn't an 'expected way' regions vote. There's a rough idea, but it's seeming like these are not what people expected. My money is on Scotland and Ireland being overwhelmingly remain, Wales swinging unexpectedly to leave (partly because they are disenfranchised with the government), while in England the non urban areas going leave and the urban ones going stay.
In the case of a general election, we have the previous election on which to base our expectations. The UK broadcasters use the "swingometer" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swingometer) in these elections, which is a useful visualisation of the change of vote share on a per-consitutency basis, indicating the meaning of the result rather than just the number.
The EU referendum has no recent comparable campaign with which it can be compared, making it much harder to do this.
Similarly, here is the 2012 election county map where "blue" had 5MM more votes than "red": http://politicalmaps.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-usa...
The Guardian do good election maps – this one has regional results scaled by population, so it's much clearer what's happening: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2016/jun/...
You can see a feed of results here: https://gist.github.com/inglesp/0b0ba9efcefe54f965be9b042afd...
Caveat: I'm drinking increasingly heavily.
All of the charts updated in real time based on how precincts actually voted compared to their predictions.
It's definitely made election night a lot less dramatic.
I've never seen a coherent argument explaining how free trade deals have helped anyone but small groups at the expense of larger ones.
In fact, the actual direct evidence of trade deals are this:
1. Massive job loss for American workers. 2. Tax losses for the communities whose factories move across borders. 3.No actual job creation in its place based on the labor participation rate (lowest since these deals became common). 4. Corporate profits at highest level since before these deals. 5. Wealth inequality approaching depression level era. Interestingly, our gini coefficient tends to approach that of Mexico and China the more we trade with them.
Strongly suggest picking up a few technical and historic economic textbooks.
Monnet - one of the original drivers behind the formation of the EU - had this to say:
"Europe's nations should be guided towards the Super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation."
To be clear, these weren't some sort of evil oligarchs at work: they wanted there to never be another WW2, another Hitler, etc.
But the nature of the EU, from the outset, was much as its critics today contend.
More at http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/679277/History-EU-how....
Correction: that is not a quote from Monnet but a summary by a contemporary of his. He actually said:
"Via money Europe could become political in five years" and "… the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would … the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal.
Monnet actually said:
"Via money Europe could become political in five years" and "… the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would … the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal."
That being said, I think there is an increasing feeling within the EU that this is no longer the correct approach.
Not that I'm disputing the quote (I have no idea) - but Monnet was not the only person driving the formation of the ECSC, and I'm not sure any of the others involved had the same views.
Mussolini was hired by the King of Italy at (metaphorical) gunpoint to run the country, and ultimately fired him once the gun was no longer being held to his head.
That can't be the case, since the Reichskanzler was not voted for in any way. He was appointed by the Reichspräsident.
Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reichskanzler in 1933. In march 1933 there were new elections, but this time already under control of Hitler (as Reichskanzler) and the NSDAP. The NSDAP still did not get a majority of the votes, even though there already was a lot of terror against the opposition.
Hitler was never voted into power by the Germans. Even though the NSDAP was the strongest party in the last elections, they never had the majority of seats in the Reichstag in free elections and even not in the first non-free election.
This is partly because the islands are far more dependent on the EU than the mainland, but in Gibraltar's case it is particularly extreme. Without EU membership Gibraltar may not be able to have a border with Spain due to the territorial conflict. Spain already occasionally closes the border on a whim, for example when a Spanish fishing boat was arrested for illegally fishing in Gibraltar waters.
[edit] I don't want to get into a debate (w/commenter below) but basically both the UK and Spain claim that they own all the waters. International rulings so far seem to be leaning towards giving the UK some and Spain some; a lot of these rulings come from the EU courts which is yet another reason why those in Gibraltar have a very strong interest to stay.
While I'm amending my comment, I think it's interesting that there were any Gibraltar citizens who voted to leave. This shows that there is a solid 8% of the population or so that will vote how they feel is important despite a very strong economic incentive to the contrary. I'm simultaneously surprised at how few people voted to leave (only 4%!) and at how there were still people who voted to leave despite the obvious economic problems leaving would bring to Gibraltar.
[0] http://www.ueapolitics.org/2016/06/23/eu-referendum-allnight...
[1] http://www.ueapolitics.org/2016/06/09/the-eu-referendum-what...
Edit: They moved their blog to Medium because of the demand: https://medium.com/@chrishanretty/eu-referendum-rolling-fore...
Anyway using my imaginary betting account I will bet a million pounds - I will enjoy the cup of imaginary coffee I will be able to buy with my winnings :)
More seriously the model was right and the bookies wrong - it is relatively rare that you get an opportunity like this handed to you to make money with almost no risk.
I still think p=1.0 was not possibly achievable via any model at that point in the counting, which means betting based on it would have been an enormous risk. The fact that the bet would have paid off makes no difference; especially given how close the vote seems to have gone, a coin flip would have gotten it right half the time, and I doubt you'd say that a coin flipper who just declares 100% confidence has a good model.
I certainly hope that the people who made money off Chris’ model follow his suggestion and donate to the Jo Cox fund.
Seems bogus.
https://medium.com/@chrishanretty/eu-referendum-rolling-fore...
>This is a big update, and I'm conscious that I may have made a terrible mistake somewhere in estimating differential turnout, but here goes:
Whether that's because he's better than the markets at modelling differential turnout or the markets know things his confirmed results data doesn't about predicted results in places like Birmingham remains to be seen...
This model uses a frequentist prediction interval, which assumes independently drawn samples, meaning reporting order must be random for the assumptions to be valid. If reporting is non-random, e.g. how early or late a district reports is correlated with things like region, demographics, population density, etc., then the prediction interval is probably narrower than it should be, especially early on in the reporting (meaning the model is overconfident in its prediction).
The headline prediction is more robust if you just want to know which outcome is more likely given current results, but the probabilities being badly calibrated due to these kinds of model assumptions is a common issue in quantitative polisci models.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/#/politics/market/1.11...
Interesting because the odds react far quicker than any live blog I've found, so a sudden swing means that there's just been a surprising result announced.
Profit!
100/4:1 is a notation mystery. 25%?
So if something is 4/1 and you back it, you'll win £4 for each £1 you wager. If you lay it, you'll win £1 for each £4 wagered.
Betfair exchange is matching up people on both sides of the bet, with a margin of commission in between the back and lay values.
http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/eu-refe...
I don't care about the result. I'm more interested in how our statistical modelling tools failed us. Thoughts? Did opinions change overnight? Did the polling miss a demographic?
(Also known as social desirability bias)
Lots of people say in public that they're in favor of immigration, unity, and tolerance, because lots of people will call you a bigot if you don't, but in private, harbor old-fashioned ideas about nationalism, and well, polling involves a human and voting happens in private.
I don't think that's the case though. I predict a Trump victory on the basis of a very strong social desirability bias and an immense amount of silent resentment against current social justice orthodoxy, especially as it pertains to speech restrictions on campus and in the workplace.
I've gone through Italian politics in the '90s. We tend to be pioneers when it comes to political monstrosities.
I've found it odd that the markets were far more confident in poll findings than the pollsters but assume that the bets were mainly placed on the simple heuristic that poll results tend to understate voters caution and attachment to the status quo.
My feeds are full of people who just absolutely cannot believe that other people hold "wrong opinions".
Anytime you see calls for "sanity" or the like you know the person is completely incapable of seeing something from another point of view. I've started to use it as a code word for "don't listen to this person".
http://www.usnews.com/cmsmedia/a5/17ab3ad562e0a695610defe001...
If something went viral, I used to take that as a signal or indicator of how the majority of people think. Now when something goes viral, I think, "that's roughly how a lot of men and almost as many women, age 13 to 30, who are comfortable aligning with that particular opinion publicly, think."
Then I started considering what that might mean for television, movies, print, etc.
I always knew that media was skewed in favor of attracting the youngest audiences, because they're more valuable to advertisers. Now I'm also considering that maybe those forms of media are also skewed in favor of the type of person who tends to watch a lot of television, go to a lot of movies, buy a lot of magazines, etc. I used to think everyone did that, now I know a lot of people do it far less than others.
Daytime television, for example, is full of advertisements for private colleges that exist mostly just to take your SSN so they can pocket federal loan money and list you as the debtor. That's because people who watch daytime television tend to be uneducated and unemployed.
Daytime television is nothing close to a cross-section of humanity. It's content engineered to appeal mostly to people who don't go to school and don't work.
Now, what kind of people tend to watch primetime television? Or listen to terrestrial radio? Or buy a magazine at an airport?
As a result of media producers learning more about their audiences, pretty much every form of media eventually becomes an echo chamber.
But Bill Gates has said he reads every issue of The Economist from cover to cover, so they definitely know their audience. They'll be in the black as long as they can sell him and Richard Branson one Gulfstream every 5 years.
What happens if the UK as a whole decides to leave the euro zone, perhaps by a small margin or perhaps by a lot, but for some reason Scotland decides buy a 15% margin to stay in the euro zone.
Is there any reason to think we might see Scotland decide to stay with the euro zone it leave the UK in that case? Or are the ties so strong that the UK would probably stay together no matter what even if one of the member nations has a strongly different opinion?
I wonder what will happen in Northern Ireland. My understanding is that it will be split in half in terms of voting leave/remain.
Scotland had an independence referendum less than two years ago, where the outcome was a good 45%-55% in favour of remaining in the UK. However, the majority of representatives in Scotland remain pro-Scottish independence. Continued membership of the EU was an important argument during the independence campaign – with the pro-independence side wanting to remain, and the pro-UK side warning that Scotland would lose EU membership if it voted for independence.
It's likely – but not certain – that there would be a second independence referendum in Scotland on the basis of being 'forced' to exit the EU. But it's not going to be pretty, and there have been a lot of elections in Scotland recently – no doubt everyone is getting a bit fatigued. It's not clear at all what the outcome would be, either, or if Scotland would even be able to maintain EU membership.
Honestly I was surprised when this whole issue came up because I assumed that the EU and the Eurozone where the same thing. I know the UK never decided to adopt the Euro so I just assumed that they weren't part of the EU.
The UK has been a bit frosty about the prospect of further EU integration, possibly with good reason in some ways.
...ya know, just in case you weren't confused enough already!
The other interesting aspect is London: a part of the UK whose expected resounding Remain vote[1] is far from the only way it's increasingly politically, culturally and economically different from the rest of the UK...
[1]Lambeth just voted 78%/21% for remain...
I'm not after an argument, i'm an average joe who works and has a family. Explain to me why important to vote remain, thats all.
A Leave vote would probably negatively affect many European research projects. The EU's framework programmes [1] are funding many collaborations and exchange programs. If the UK leaves, non-British researchers might need to to leave the UK, British universities would get isolated from the rest of European academia, long-term projects would have their funding canceled, etc. Even if EU and UK somehow would find a way to continue research cooperations, the uncertainty will have negative consequences right now. While this might not directly affect the average joe, it would negatively affect quite a few people I know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_Programmes_for_Resea...