Over the last 3 years, you've spent 676.9 hours playing this selection, which includes 51 items, is valued at $788.61, and requires 357.7 GB.

Eyyy, the gringos voted to Leave, ese. My job is done mang, andale andale!

Thoughts?

Say you have a 14- or 15-year-old son; there's a fair amount of controversial aspects of video games, such as GTA V's torture scene or MW2's "No Russian" mission. While these may be appropriate for an adult, they're probably not for kids/young teens.

So, would you restrict your kid?

Reserves or tax changes?

Borrowing, most likely.

LOOKS LIKE I'M GETTING A REFUND LADS

Is it shit?

FUCKING STELARIS

METACOGNITION

PURLPE DONE FROM CASTLE CRASHEERS

Quote from: Icy on August 10, 2016, 10:14:20 AM

Quote from: rc on August 10, 2016, 09:11:41 AM

We live in Florida, so it isn't legal, but would discussing this with her therapist be a mistake? I know the therapist wouldn't tell the police or anything, but could she tell our parents?

I'm pretty sure that patient confidentiality in Florida is the same as it is here in New York - and drug use doesn't fall under an exception to said policy, even for minors. Unless she is suicidal, homicidal, a victim of abuse (Sexual or not), etc, her therapist is not allowed to disclose anything your sister does not want shared.

Here's more on that policy.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar02/confidentiality.aspx

According to this, it's at the doctor's discretion...

A compromise was reached whereby the therapist would speak to Michael's mother only with Michael present. The issue of confidentiality became more complicated during Michael's junior year, when the therapist felt that certain information should be shared and Michael refused. The therapist gently explored with Michael the reasons behind this refusal. During some sessions, the therapist was direct with Michael about her discomfort with his behavior, especially the illegal activities, and pointed out the kinds of risks he was taking. Over time, Michael and his therapist agreed that Michael himself would begin to speak to his mother about these issues, and that the therapist could follow up with a phone call. At this juncture in Michael's development, it was important to discuss each and every contact between therapist and mother thoroughly with Michael, as well as to support his independent use of psychotherapy.

Seems like more of a case of the therapist convincing the individual to allow information to be passed along to parents, rather than the therapist simply exercising her judgement and circumventing him. And, even then, would your parents knowing be such a terrible thing? (I don't know, obviously, since I've never met them).

Self treatment is dangerous

Can confirm.

I had a few issues with depression and using MDMA for a short while. And I was terrible with cannabis too. It's very easy to fall into casual abuse when you have mental health issues, so I'd try and get right on top of that as soon as possible.

EDIT: By that I mean keep an open line of communication, don't be angry or openly judge her, try to encourage her to see how more 'legitimate' routes work, etc. Don't, like, take the pot away from her and tell her she mustn't use it. Just, y'know, keep an eye on it.

Thought I'd take a look at some pre-vote forecasts to see precisely what the big institutions were saying would be likely in the event of a Leave vote.

The IMF had two scenarios with varying degrees of uncertainty; one where we fall into recession, and one where we do not. The IMF did not say which was more likely.

The Treasury did forecast a recession.

The OECD predicted growth 0.5pc lower than the baseline through 2017/18, so no recession forecast.

The PwC thinks we will avoid a recession.

And NIESR predicted that we would probably not go into recession.

I'll see if I can find some more recent stuff from these organisations, to see how their outlook has potentially changed (if they aren't mentioned in the OP already).

I haven't been hyped for this since I saw the screenshots on Steam.

Thank fuck, it still looks awful.

From Simon Wren-Lewis.

After the Brexit vote, economists and others who voted Remain are quite right to say I told you so as the economic hit they expected comes to pass. The Brexit Bust needs to be labelled clearly, given the power the Leave side has over the means of communication. (Those behind that campaign are already talking utter nonsense in order to pretend it had nothing to do with them.) But those who voted Remain also need to understand why they lost.

The studies I’m going to focus on here use regressions and the breakdown of the Brexit vote district by district. [1] It is important to do regression analysis, which can look at more than one factor at a time, because influences are correlated with each other. We might note, for example, that districts are less likely to vote Leave if they contain relatively high earners, or relatively well educated people. So is it lack of education or lack of money that caused people to vote Leave? That is what any kind of multiple regression can try and sort out.

Before looking at individual studies, let me mention some things that appear to be uncontroversial. Education and age are key determinates: if you are less educated or older you tend to vote Leave. Both matter independently: although young people with few qualifications tend to vote Leave, they are less likely to do so than less qualified older people.Once you take these into account, income is not a significant factor. Geography matters in key ways. One of those is that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland were much less likely to want to leave (controlling for other factors). The other I will come to.

A key issue is whether the local level of migration has had an influence. Stephen Clarke and Matthew Whittaker at the Resolution Foundation find that the level of immigration is not important, but its recent rate of change is, in making people vote Leave. Zsolt Darvas at Bruegel also finds the level unimportant. However Monica Langella and Alan Manning from the LSE find that areas with high immigration are more likely to vote Leave, and confirm the finding that the rate of change matters too. So while two studies agree that areas with a recent large increase in immigration are more likely to vote leave, more work needs to be done on whether its actual level matters. However, even if it matters, it does not matter that much, as the large majority for Remain in London tells us.

One other area where the studies differ is employment or unemployment. Clarke and Whittaker suggest areas with a low employment rate are more likely to vote Leave, but Langella and Manning seem to find the opposite, and Darvas says any impact from levels of unemployment (which is not the same as the inverse of the employment rate) is explained by other factors which I will now come to.

There are some variables that have not been considered by all three of these studies. Darvas has one particularly interesting result: the Leave vote increases in areas where there is a lot of poverty and local inequality. Langella and Manning find that areas with long term declines in agricultural, manufacturing or public employment are more likely to vote Leave. This is also the conclusion of a team led by Bristol geographer Ron Johnston, which is worth quoting in full.

“There are substantial parts of the country where large numbers of people have lost out from the deindustrialisation and globalisation of the last few decades of neo-liberal economic policies, and where the educational system has not helped large proportions of the young to equip themselves for the new labour market. Increasing numbers in these disadvantaged groups were won over during the last few decades by the campaigns in parts of the print media, taken up by UKIP since the 1990s, linking their situations to the impact of immigration – uncontrollable because of the EU freedom of movement of labour principle. The wider Leave campaign built on that foundation in 2016, producing the geography displayed here.”

That conclusion of course goes beyond the finding that areas hard hit by globalisation tended to vote Leave, and adds an explanation that sees the press and politicians actively trying to link the experience of disadvantage to the issue of immigration. It is an argument I have also made. Unfortunately it is an argument that is very difficult to prove using regression analysis, because - as newspapers often argue - they may print just what sells newspapers, so any correlation does not imply causation.

It is also important to remember that the link between voting Leave and areas of deindustrialisation is in additional to the strong links with education and age. Education may fit in with a story where the anti-EU stance (to say bias does not do it justice) of most of the tabloid press is important, for obvious reasons. The same is true with age, as younger people are likely to get their information by other means than the tabloid press.   

There is another, very different, line of argument that tries to explain the Leave vote not in terms of class but psychology/culture. Eric Kaufmann finds simple correlations between voting Leave and authoritarianism. A story you can tell is that, for some at least, Brexit was a vote against not neoliberalism but social liberalism. The link between social liberalism and the EU is once again migration, which represents one more unwelcome change for social conservatives. Social conservatism and authoritarianism may also map more easily into nationalism and wanting to 'take control', and it was part of the tabloid 'grooming' to do exactly that. Social conservatism may also explain the importance of age and perhaps also education.

There is no reason why we need to choose between the economic and the social types of explanation. Kaufmann and Johnston et al can both be right. As Max Wind-Cowie says (quoted by Rick here):

“Bringing together the dissatisfied of Tunbridge Wells and the downtrodden of Merseyside is a remarkable feat, and it stems from UKIP’s empathy for those who have been left behind by the relentless march of globalisation and glib liberalism.”

Both these explanations see antagonism to the idea (rather than the actuality) of migration as the way an underlying grievance got translated into a dislike of the EU. But was immigration really so crucial? A widely quoted poll by Lord Ashcroft says a wish for sovereignty was more important. The problem here, of course, is that sovereignty - and a phrase like taking back control - is an all embracing term which might well be seen as more encompassing than just a concern about immigration. It really needs a follow-up asking what aspects of sovereignty are important. If we look at what Leavers thought was important, the “ability to control our own laws” seemed to have little to do with the final vote compared to more standard concerns, including immigration.

However there are other aspects of the Ashcroft poll that I think are revealing. First, economic arguments were important for Remain voters. The economic message did get through to many voters. Second, the NHS was important to Leave voters, so the point economists also made that ending free movement would harm the NHS was either not believed or did not get through to this group. Indeed “more than two thirds (69%) of leavers, by contrast, thought the decision “might make us a bit better or worse off as a country, but there probably isn’t much in it either way””. Whether they did not know about the overwhelming consensus among economists who thought otherwise, or chose to ignore it, we cannot tell.

Third, Leave voters are far more pessimistic about the future, and also tend to believe that life today is much worse than life 30 years ago. Finally, those who thought the following were a source of ill rather than good - multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, globalisation, the internet, the green movement and immigration - tended by large majorities to vote Leave. Only in the case of capitalism did as many Remain and Leave voters cite it as a source of ill. These results suggest that Leave voters were those left behind in modern society in either an economic or social way (or perhaps both).

Taking all this evidence into account it seems that the Brexit vote was a protest vote against both the impact of globalisation and social liberalism. The two are connected by immigration, and of course the one certainty of the Brexit debate was that free movement prevented controls on EU migration. But that does not mean defeat was inevitable, as Chris makes clear. Kevin O’Rourke points out that the state can play an active role in compensating the losers from globalisation, and of course in recent years there has been an attempt to roll back the state. Furthermore, as Johnston et al suggest, the connection between economic decline and immigration is more manufactured than real. Tomorrow I’ll discuss both the campaign and what implications this all might have.

Yeah I mean they are the lesser evil and all but it does kinda dissolve any incentive to save up unless you are making a big purchase.

While true, saving is probably better incentivised through a tax system that focuses on consumption and property/land, rather than income.

is there any actual sense to having negative interest rates for a bank

As far as I can tell?

We don't really know. It's uncharted territory.

EDIT: Also, those "garbage" interest rates are kind of the reason we are not in the shitstorm the Eurozone periphery is in. Perfect? No. Better than the alternative? Definitely. If only the gov't would open up the taps.