UK faces " Randontimeinthefuturethatnobodyknows BOMB" from ageing population

Thrugelmir

kabayiri wrote: »

This is exactly what the pioneers behind Google; Ebay; Amazon; et al have done.

You mean avoid corporate responsibility. Pay as little tax as possible in the economy in which they generate sales. In Amazons case treat people very poorly indeed.

kabayiri

Thrugelmir wrote: »

You mean avoid corporate responsibility. Pay as little tax as possible in the economy in which they generate sales. In Amazons case treat people very poorly indeed.

I don't hold them up as some sort of reference point when it comes to ethics I agree.

This does not detract from their meteoric growth rates though.

kabayiri

BobQ wrote: »

...
I do not accept the implication of your last sentence that people lack ambition and drive. The bottle washers and dog walkers just do not see any prospect of advancement in this society, not everyone is an entrepreneur but that does not mean that those people are worthless.

We clearly do, apart from when it comes to a desire to appear on Britains Got Talent or XFactor. Then queues run round the block.

Thrugelmir

kabayiri wrote: »

This does not detract from their meteoric growth rates though.

Helps if the cashflow of the business gives you an unfair advantage over your competitors. Amazon's business model now looks suspect I should add.

onlyroz

Perhaps instead of bringing in the immigrants we should be shipping out the old people

BobQ

kabayiri wrote: »

We clearly do, apart from when it comes to a desire to appear on Britains Got Talent or XFactor. Then queues run round the block.

This just trivialises many generations of people, who are frustrated by the lack of opportunity. Opportunity for many people may not equate to your view of opportunity. Opportunity for some people is about security of income, being able to afford to live in good quality housing, employment that rewards them for their efforts, that they enjoy doing, the ability to look forward to a comfortable retirement.

It may not be your exalted view of ambition but not everyone can become chief executives etc and not everyone wants to do so.

N1AK

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Maybe charge everyone for all medication and keep the service itself free at the point of care. Ultimately that will give some choice to people and gives them more incentive to avoid the need for medication by looking at their lifestyle.

Get rid of child benefit alongside getting rid of winter fuel payments for everyone over a certain age, bus passes etc. Lots of money can be saved.

The issue with privatising the NHS as a solution to people not being able to afford the cost of living is that you're not decreasing the cost, just shifting who they pay from government to private medical firms. One of the biggest risks to limiting free services to lower earners is that it motivates higher earners to vote to remove/degrade the service as they are then both paying disproportionately to fund it and not getting the benefit.

The same is largely true of bus passes etc. Remove free bus passes and many, if not most pensioners, who don't even use them won't care. But the bus companies would have to vastly cut back services due to the decrease in funding the passes give them.

Cutting back funding on medication is also a pretty naive, short term solution (far more so than immigration which you critiscise as a solution on those grounds). Do we allow disabled people to die if they can't afford their own care? Well guess what we'll get when a bunch of people with Type 2 diabetes can't/don't manage the condition properly and end up requiring amputations?

There aren't easy political decisions to resolve long term financial issues because voters won't vote for people proposing things they don't like in the short term (continued moderate immigration) to deal with a long term problem which they aren't already feeling the pain from.

N1AK

purch wrote: »

Whenever we get a thread claiming there is a "Timebomb" there is never any mention of the TIME it is due to explode. :eek:

Because there isn't a known time. Changes to retirement age, pensions etc, governments, government policies all alter the projection of the economy. The likelihood is that we'll never hit the point of no return; however the longer we stick our heads in the sand and pretend everything's fine the more drastic the steps we will take to avoid the cliffedge will be.

The refusal of governments to deal with ballooning pension costs two decades or more ago is one example, but we can still see it with things like Firemen wanting to retire on generous pensions at 55 leaving them with a retirement almost as long as their period in work. Then people wonder why governments are tending to gradually outsource more and more work to the private sector to avoid having to deal with unwinnable situations that.

Graham_Devon

N1AK wrote: »

Cutting back funding on medication is also a pretty naive, short term solution (far more so than immigration which you critiscise as a solution on those grounds). Do we allow disabled people to die if they can't afford their own care? Well guess what we'll get when a bunch of people with Type 2 diabetes can't/don't manage the condition properly and end up requiring amputations?

I'm not sure it is that naive.

Pretty much the rest of the world operates the sort of model you suggest would not work.

Sure, you'd need to look at long term conditions, but the most these people would have to pay is the £100 a year prescription pass (or similar for a chargeable regime). I don't think that £100 would be so unbearable as to lead to amputations etc.

There are large cost savings to be had by charging for medication. The amount of prescriptions given old for paracetamol, warfarin, aspirin etc is mind blowing when it costs so little over the counter. Those prescriptions are said to cost us 30x the cost of a packet of paracetamol once you include the claiming process from pharmacies etc.

kabayiri

BobQ wrote: »

This just trivialises many generations of people, who are frustrated by the lack of opportunity. Opportunity for many people may not equate to your view of opportunity. Opportunity for some people is about security of income, being able to afford to live in good quality housing, employment that rewards them for their efforts, that they enjoy doing, the ability to look forward to a comfortable retirement.

It may not be your exalted view of ambition but not everyone can become chief executives etc and not everyone wants to do so.

It might seem a simplistic view, but I believe we need to generate wider job opportunities by investing in research in emerging technologies and capitalising on those opportunities. This is what American tech companies seem to achieve, sometimes on a global scale.

I agree with the chief exec comment. We become blinkered to defining progress in career as ascending some kind of management ladder.

Is it too Victorian to hark back to an era of pioneering spirit and learning?