On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
> just mentioning increased immigration
One of these seems like the solution to the other.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income
Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.
I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.
Just my 2¢.
A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.
This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.
People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far?
Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors.
To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.