I know.
Hey, Iâve been to blyth. Spent more time in alnwick and seahouses though (just a touch north fr Blyth). Northumberland is fantastic, and Iâd love to live there.
Small world 
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I think the centre of most of the big cities is more expensive than that, certainly in Bristol youâd have trouble getting a one bed flat for that. The real problem is though that the average wage is about ÂŁ25k and with that you might just get a mortgage for ÂŁ125k, so unless youâve got a partner and you want to buy a house together, youâre pretty fucked down this way.
Quite.
Itâs been a while since I bought a house in the UK, but even back then the average wage would only just let you get a nasty house on the very bottom of the ladder and that was in post-industrial Derbyshire (and not even in Derby!)
Median houses cost between 6 and 12 times median salary, and you can borrow, what, 3.5 times?
And the prices go up quicker than you can save a deposit to make up that difference.
London is beyond a joke.
You could always commute from Avonmouth 
In fact we have. What could be closer to nothing than a few air vibrations? But storing and moving them around is the entire sound recording industry.
Once people have food, water and shelter everything beyond that is discretionary spending, and the value of it is âwhat people are prepared to payâ. Now give several billion monkeys electronic typewriters and the rest just follows.
Given. In the final stages of the industrial revolution physical materials held sway. Nowadays we type into tiny devices kept in our pockets, which soon will vanish like the typewriter and desktop computer, being replaced with some other device so that we can continue to struggle with our humanityâŚbut at lease we will not have to be stuck at home.
Ah, the freedom!
Adam Smith wrote a lot of things that would have todays right wing accusing him of being a marxist.
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So itâs celebrating that thing where people blame their increasing rent on the new neighbors forâŚcruelly forcing the kindly landlord to raise the rent, or something?
Iâve never understood where that comes from, but the landlords must love it.
If your definition of âidle richâ excludes anyone who spends lots of money, then yeah, you wonât find a lot of those.
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Not in London, the part of the UK that matters.
There is a thing in the UK called the Adam Smith Institute. Like so many of the churches, it seems to exist mainly to ensure that not too many people find out what its founder actually said.
Smith would immediately, based on his own writings, identify Silicon Valley (or the banks) as a collection of entrepreneurs combining to exploit the public. When he supported a free market, he meant one where the big traders did not have multibillion dollar thumbs on the scales - which Marx correctly identified as the effect of capitalism. If they had been around at the same time, what a book they might have written together!
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Help me parse this.
Are you a Londoner and just stating what everybody else thinks Londoners believe?
Or is this irony?
About 16% of the population of the UK live in London, and some of them live in some of the most deprived boroughs in the country. Londonâs GDP is very sensitive to how you choose to measure it - do you work on where the wealth is actually produced or where it is accounted for? - but the house prices are a bubble created by planning (i.e. restrictions on building coupled with incentives to put ever more jobs in London.)
More than one economist has pointed out that Surrey has more land devoted to golf courses than to housing, and there is ample room to expand along the East of the Thames. But the government wants to improve rail links into crowded and very expensive North London (HS2) rather than upgrade the low-voltage Southern railway to improve links to the south. It is hard to avoid the idea that the housing bubble is actually policy.
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As usual I am guilty of slight irony in my original post. We in the southwest like to suggest that the north-east is like Siberia only without the birch trees and the radioisotope generators. In fact, average max. in July and August is only about 3 degrees lower in the NE than the SW, and the NE is drier, but the winter is not significantly colder. And by Northeastern US standards, the winters are quite warm.
Shhhh, donât go telling people!
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Like the adherents of most religions the right wing never actually reads its holy book.
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My family used to take holidays to that area when I was a kid. Iâve heard it described in rather rude terms, but honestly it didnât seem more awful than most other places to me, including parts of London Iâve lived in, and Northumberland has a crap ton of interesting historical/ cultural heritage places to visit. Iâd rather own a 4 bedroom house with a huge garden outright there than have to sign up three generations of my family to pay off a 2 bedroom flat down here in the South East.
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