Right to reside? keeping Johnny foreigner off our benefits or discriminatory?

[OwlHoot]

.. lets get on with talking about OH's bulls/balls!

Yep, that sounds an interesting topic ..

[MyUserName]

Cretin

Chuff off, dog food breath erm .... learn some critical analysis skills before .... oh ... I don't know - insert your own insult here.

[Ticktock]

This kind of relativistic, post-modernist garbage is part of the reason why the country is in the state its in.
So according to your infantile argument the beliefs of those Islamists who murdered a soldier in Woolwich have the same validity as people who disagree. After all according to your argument, their opinion is that it was right to murder a British soldier isn't necessarily inferior to my opinion that they shouldn't have?
It's their opinion, innit? So set them free.
CUK seems to get more infested with cretins by the day.

Wow - way to take something completely out of context. I said that major decisions are not based on facts and statistics but on opinions. What I was trying to get across is that just because something is the logical decision, based on all available evidence, it doesn't mean that it is the decision that the majority of people will take. It's one reason that democracy is flawed.

My follow up to that was to try to say that, whilst you can rave and rant about how someone is misinterpreting the evidence or the statistics, or even that they have a logical flaw in their arguments, that is unlikely to make them change their decision. The fact that you have better knowledge of a very narrow area of expertise does not make you superior to them in general. It also doesn't mean that everyone will (or should) change their opinion based on you calling them cretins or "thick twats".

As I said, even though you may sometimes have valid points, you act like a complete prick, and presume you're another keyboard warrior who doesn't act the same way face to face, or you wouldn't be able to find / keep a contract, as you'd be too busy criticising and insulting your clients to provide a decent service.

As to your infantile, inflammatory example... go **** yourself. If you really believe that I was saying that the belief that brutal murder is a good thing is equally valid as the belief that it is not, and not that opinions were equally as important as logic in the decision making process that led to that point, then I think you've won the prize for CUK cretin.

[d000hg]

This kind of relativistic, post-modernist garbage is part of the reason why the country is in the state its in.
So according to your infantile argument the beliefs of those Islamists who murdered a soldier in Woolwich have the same validity as people who disagree. After all according to your argument, their opinion is that it was right to murder a British soldier isn't necessarily inferior to my opinion that they shouldn't have?
It's their opinion, innit? So set them free.
CUK seems to get more infested with cretins by the day.

So you're calling for some kind of moral absolutism, the idea that some things are inherently right or wrong, rather than changing based on the common view.

Perhaps I can help you out with that.

[MyUserName]

So you're calling for some kind of moral absolutism, the idea that some things are inherently right or wrong, rather than changing based on the common view.

Perhaps I can help you out with that.

Yeah, I could do with a fresh opponent and I am not supposed to argue with my inlaws!

[Dominic Connor]

Treat a UK Passport like a product

Being a hard line Economist reader, I believe that the success of a group, be it a programming team, blokes in a pub fight, company or country is mostly dependent upon the quality of people in it.

Thus the optimisation should be with respect to the utility of the people we let in.

UK Passports are a high value product, a holder has the right to work in the largest economic area on the planet, can choose to work in climates that vary from topless beaches to tundra, the UK makes a quarter of commercial satellites, we may disagree whether a Porsche, Rolls Royce, Ferrari or Morgan is the best car, but in the EU/EFTA you can work on the best or most lucrative of anything.

We should get more for it than we are currently getting.

So the pitch is thus:

If you pay £X, you get a passport, collected through the tax system.
So when someone has paid (say) £200 K in tax, they get a passport, unless they've been bad.

Paying tax usually means a legit job doing something that a Brit wants doing.
If they work in a sector like looking after the elderly which badly paid but a growing issue, then we adjust the numbers.

Since most non-EU migrants are coming from truly awful places, they don't have this sort of cash up front, so we have a system where a UK entity posts a bond for them, maybe the employer, maybe a specialist outfit.

The other route is an entrance exam.
Smart foreigners don't just shrug their shoulders when told they can't come to Britain and go back to their parents mud hut and eat coconuts, they either join local firms or a more welcoming country, competing against us and paying no UK tax at all, so we should grab some.

Rather than the American nonsense of a "green card lottery", we set an exam of exquisite difficulty, in English of course. The optional questions reflect whatever deep skills we think are of greatest value to UK PLC.
This is in stark contrast to the UK artsgrad nonsense currently where they must learn dippy bits of history.

This would not only be self funding by exam fees, it would be a nice little earner for outfits helping people pass the toughest exam on the planet and frankly make Britain look like a smarter place.

On passing the exam, they would be flown to the UK and get a proper swearing in ceremony in front of which ever royal happens to be free that day. Their loyalty to Britain may start off a bit random, but these are smart people who've sweated hard to pass a vicious exam and we are being nice to them, odds are we will get good value there.

[Paddy]

Being a hard line Economist reader, I believe that the success of a group, be it a programming team, blokes in a pub fight, company or country is mostly dependent upon the quality of people in it.

Thus the optimisation should be with respect to the utility of the people we let in.

UK Passports are a high value product, a holder has the right to work in the largest economic area on the planet, can choose to work in climates that vary from topless beaches to tundra, the UK makes a quarter of commercial satellites, we may disagree whether a Porsche, Rolls Royce, Ferrari or Morgan is the best car, but in the EU/EFTA you can work on the best or most lucrative of anything.

We should get more for it than we are currently getting.

So the pitch is thus:

If you pay £X, you get a passport, collected through the tax system.
So when someone has paid (say) £200 K in tax, they get a passport, unless they've been bad.

Paying tax usually means a legit job doing something that a Brit wants doing.
If they work in a sector like looking after the elderly which badly paid but a growing issue, then we adjust the numbers.

Since most non-EU migrants are coming from truly awful places, they don't have this sort of cash up front, so we have a system where a UK entity posts a bond for them, maybe the employer, maybe a specialist outfit.

The other route is an entrance exam.
Smart foreigners don't just shrug their shoulders when told they can't come to Britain and go back to their parents mud hut and eat coconuts, they either join local firms or a more welcoming country, competing against us and paying no UK tax at all, so we should grab some.

Rather than the American nonsense of a "green card lottery", we set an exam of exquisite difficulty, in English of course. The optional questions reflect whatever deep skills we think are of greatest value to UK PLC.
This is in stark contrast to the UK artsgrad nonsense currently where they must learn dippy bits of history.

This would not only be self funding by exam fees, it would be a nice little earner for outfits helping people pass the toughest exam on the planet and frankly make Britain look like a smarter place.

On passing the exam, they would be flown to the UK and get a proper swearing in ceremony in front of which ever royal happens to be free that day. Their loyalty to Britain may start off a bit random, but these are smart people who've sweated hard to pass a vicious exam and we are being nice to them, odds are we will get good value there.

The Economist used to be an good independent magazine unfortunately it was sold to a syndicate and now owned by investments banks. It is now used by the syndicate to get over their own views and slant on the news.

Reading a magazine does not necessarily make you knowledgeable and in your case it has increased your naivety. The objective of the syndicate is to increase immigration in order to push down labour costs. There are no real skill shortages in the UK, and those with real special skills are vary rare. The policy about specialist skills does not hold water. As an example; I was sponsoring a highly skilled surgeon to speak at a conference, it took two years of appeals to get his visa for a week. On the other hand loads of unskilled Bobs and Afghans are let in.