I’m almost positive that David Beckham isn’t a citizen of the US. That’s almost definitely by choice, given that he’d meet the criteria for investment several times over.

While I appreciate the offer, I think my wife would probably not be too happy with me taking another lover. 😂

That’s absolute nonsense. Most countries have similar paths to entry. They also have paths that support specific jobs that are required by the country - something the US does not. Finally, many of them have easy and clear paths to naturalisation - again something the US doesn’t have.

Just because unskilled nationals make it into your country, it doesn’t mean that immigration in your country is easier than other countries. Every right-winger moans about the same thing in every country you’ve listed…

Haha, what do you base that on?!

My experience is the exact opposite. I’m a software engineer at a big tech company, and in this climate even they are unable to sponsor a visa to the US from the UK. Literally anywhere else? Sure, no problem at all, whether it be Europe, Singapore, China, Japan, Egypt, Australia, anywhere we have an office - except America.

Americans, welcome anywhere! We’ve got two in my team alone this year, and in 5 years they can get permanent residency. I know managers that want me on their team because I built tooling for them, but they’re not allowed to hire me because it would require a visa…

A lot of people are giving Tesla shit here, but surely there should be regulations in place to ensure something like this isn’t allowed to be released for public use?

For Future Promises, you should also be prepared to walk when these promises aren’t kept. I once worked for a company that met my previous salary, but had in my contract that after 6 months I would get a £5k increase.

It didn’t happen, and after 6 months of chasing the CEO outright said to me “we don’t have to pay you what we agreed a year ago, we pay you based on what you’re worth now”.

I should have left, but in many ways I’m glad I didn’t, because in the end they went under during COVID and I got an awesome amount of severance from them - with a new job lined up after that paid much more.

When I was at school, Sunny D and Vodka was a recommended mix to make you ill enough to throw up and miss school the next day. I can’t believe people willingly drink this shit…

My hope is that Labour are playing this smart. They’ll bang on about how Brexit won’t change, but that “we’ll look to increase economic and social strengths via our relationship with the EU”. We’ll reintroduce entry to the single market, ensure freedom of movement, and basically rejoin in everything but name - and then eventually say “well, if we want to rejoin it’s basically a tick in a box”.

The EU will likely be happy for the UK to rejoin, even without punishment. The most reliable ally in the battle against Euroscepticism is a former Eurosceptic that can say how shit things were after leaving, and how much better they are since rejoining.

In many ways, it is an obscene amount of control, and I don’t disagree that this degree of wealth isn’t ethical - even examples like Taylor Swift aren’t from “hard work”, but rather backroom deals, undercutting other artists, etc.

IMO, the best alternative is going entirely the other way. Tell all billionaires in the US that they are subject to a wealth tax, and attempts to fight it will result in freezing assets, expulsion from the country, executive removal, etc. Drive all billionaires out of the country, and let them set up shop elsewhere (they won’t).

It’s a punishment, though. Perhaps they should be punished, but IMO an easier approach is to say “well done” and to tell them that as long as this money goes somewhere for societal gain it doesn’t really matter if they decide to pump tens of billions into making public roads the best roads in the country, it’s better than them just having that money in a fund somewhere.

Where this will likely get dicey is in ensuring that this money stays in home accounts, and in defining what is taxable wealth, and fighting avoidance. That’s where the system will be gamed, but ultimately it’s different to avoid tax that goes somewhere to avoiding your money being spent by you for public good.

I can’t remember who suggested it, but they framed the question differently around taxing billionaires.

Instead of making it a negative thing, they said it should be framed as a great honour to pay these “special” taxes. The billionaire tax should be kept separately from all other taxes, it should be pooled into a limited fund that they own, and should be distributed to areas where they want it to make a real impact. They should then be given additional benefits in society based on the impact generated by their fund. It notes that capitalism isn’t necessarily about accumulation of wealth, but profit, and that wealth should be taxed.

For example, if Elon Musk were taxed 50% as a wealth tax, he is personally invited to the White House to discuss his plans with the tax authorities and the president. He gets to attend specific meetings to see where his money has gone (let’s say to hospitals), and gets public praise for pumping several billion into public healthcare initiatives. Wealth is reframed into an opportunity to help society, whereas capitalism pushes profit.

While I don’t really like the idea of billionaires choosing where taxes go, if improvements are measured on societal impact it’s still better than before where they just hoard wealth.

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All of big tech is really worried about this.

• Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
• Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
• Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
• Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.

If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.

I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.

Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…

Definitely not a US thing. Here in the UK I don’t think I’ve worked 9-5 for over 20 years…

I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.

Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.

Why would a company decide to grant you a working visa when you will primarily be remote? Furthermore, why would the government grant you a visa when you could, in theory, work from your own country?

Yep!

There is one reason I think onsite works, and that’s for relocation.

If you are from the US and you want to move to the UK, how do you intend to move via work if your work is remote?

I love remote work, but I’ve not heard a rebuttal for this other than “don’t let foreigners move here” or “let’s let people move based on their level of education”.

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I’m in the UK, and First basically hold the monopoly in my city. There are so few buses that they often skip stops at rush hour because they’re already full, or because they’ve decided in the moment that your stop doesn’t matter.

Nothing wakes you up during your commute like listening to a woman get fired over the phone because she’s going to be late for work, despite still being 60 mins early for what should be a 20 min journey.

In the UK, the training requirements for police is still surprising to me, as I had assumed it would take years to train as police.

Either way, our police meet a lot of the criteria here. The budgets are nonexistent, they aren’t armed outside of specific circumstances, and they all go through regular de-escalation training.

It hasn’t stopped many of the issues we see that are also shared in law enforcement in the states. Our force often uses force unnecessarily, there is institutional corruption and racism, and even in instances where the police have done something bad AND there is evidence it’s very hard to find justice.

I think that a degree would help, or a training programme that takes many years and involves extensive training. It’s depressing to say, but the demand for good jobs with decent pay and employment protection would probably result in people becoming police just for the pension. I would also add that a good avenue to policing would be for it to link heavily with the law profession. Add a route for police to train part-time to be criminal lawyers, or for lawyers to join the police force.