You are certainly confused, sun. 
lots of these companies have technologies that may have been designed somewhere and then built somewhere else. That design work is still valuable. 

Im surprised anyone could think that the U.K. economy is just the city and the housing market. 

that is quite scary as a prospect.

This again, again.

 

I will copy and paste my previous copied and pasted post.

This again. Copying and pasting my two dirhams worth from a previous thread (addressed to a roffette thinking of moving to Dubai). 

Dubai is great fun.

 

It is flashy and showy but there are other sides to it. The desert is lovely and there is some really good hiking in RAK (1.5 hours’ drive away). If you are into sport there are loads of fantastic facilities which are cheap (free) and easily accessible. The Al Qudra bike track in the desert is superb.

 

It is expensive but no worse than London.

 

Pre-Covid you could fly back to London very easily and cheaply. How that will pan out I do not know.

 

The net net tax benefit makes a massive difference – you just have more money. Of course money is not everything so if you are naturally unhappy and  a dullard then you will remain so (just richer). If you are happy and creative it gives you the freedom to do lots of fun stuff (or buy more stuff if that is what you like doing).

 

People tend to be welcoming and positive because they are rarely long off the plane themselves and they have made the leap to move somewhere new.

 

If you are a hot then there will be more than enough blokes (admittedly of varying quality) vying to bang you. If you are not hot there will still be lots of blokes who want to bang you because there is a shortage of single women who are not insta models / prostitutes.

 

You get less provincial bullsh1t than you get in the UK.

 

No one sneers at you for having a 4x4 because everyone has one. No one says “oh but they have a 4x4 and it never goes off road” because: (i) often it does go off road; and (ii) no one gives a fvck – you can spend your money how you like and no one is judgmental about it.

 

The multiculturism is ace.

 

It is very safe. No one will steal your stuff.

 

Downsides are that it is a totalitarian state and deviation from the agreed norms is punished harshly. As a female property solicitor who is interested men you will be well well well within the green zone of agreed norms.

 

There is no safety net and ultimately you have no rights. Lose your job and you are out. Unless you set up on your own in which case it is all on you – no state education and no state health care.

 

Despite what you read in the press you can shag away to your hearts content (just not in public which is fair enough), get sh1t faced whenever you like but no drooogs though mkay.

Preach

"Mountain16 Oct 21 09:50

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Please try not to rude or immature [sic] , RR: it lowers the tone, and diminishes your credibility. To perform better, at least try to attempt to make logical, evidenced arguments. Ad hominem attacks on people simply because their arguments make you feel unhappy - and you lack the facts to rebut them - simply reflects poorly on you. Many thanks."

Please try not to be a pompous arsehole, Mountain.  The long-winded "arguments" you have put forward are sixth form debating society level.  

 

I actually agree with Biggie that the Doobz lifestyle sounds ok if you’re male and unattached. 

That does a disservice to 'ok'.

Thanks, Josip: very constructive, well done. Same to you as I said to RR.

Relevant article from Matthew Parris in Friday's Times. Emphases added, focusing exclusively on long-term issues which will remain in, say, 2 years' time, by which point I hope to have escaped the UK. 

thetimes.co.uk/article/were-about-to-wake-up-to-the-mess-were-in-0d6tkcpjk

Problems keep mounting but the PM has no bearings, ministers betray confusion and voters are starting to sense panic

Matthew Parris

Friday October 15 2021, 9.00pm, The Times

We’re going to the dogs. We haven’t quite woken up to the mess we’re in yet, but we will. In the unconscious mind of the nation the dots are all there, waiting to be joined up. When the connections are made, and as his Marbella tan begins to peel, the aimless occupant of 10 Downing Street will be in for a shock.

Let me identify some of the dots. There is no other way but to hit you with a sample, but before I do, please understand this: I’m very well aware that at almost any point in the political cycle of almost any government, it would be possible to compile a depressing list of things going wrong. Things do. Some will be random, unrelated. Some will be, by any reasonable judgment, beyond the power of any prime minister to predict or control. Others will be trivial when taken in isolation. Many may be transient. But accumulated they paint a worrying picture. We’ve all of us in the sleepless hours made lists of problems and begun to feel overwhelmed by their weight. So may a nation. We add things up.

The first skill demanded of any effective leader is the talent to stop people adding things up; to raise our eyes to the longer term; a place we’re aiming for, a plan for getting there. Thatcher had it: bearings. Johnson lacks them.

Try this next time you’re in a lurching railway carriage: meander down the aisle — you’ll find yourself jolted off your balance. Now try striding fast, your eye fixed on the carriage’s end. The faster you walk, the straighter you’ll be able to go. It’s all about the stabilising force of momentum. It’s a truth of Newtonian physics.

It’s a truth of political leadership too. Watching The New Labour Revolution on TV I was struck by something Peter Mandelson said: “The single most important thing for a political party is for the dominating agenda to be the one you set.” Fail to set that goal and direction, and voters will start looking around themselves at the immediate. They will start adding things up.

Here’s a few. Petrol queues may have faded but future confidence in being able to fill up at any time and anywhere has been rocked. Motorists took fright. We feel it could happen again.

The new queues are of ships at ports such as Felixstowe. Pictures of acres of unfetched containers have put the wind up retailers and consumers alike as Christmas approaches. A first-world problem? First-world governments are elected to take first-world problems seriously. Johnson appears not to.

We’re short of up to 100,000 HGV drivers. Nobody knows how this may hit us in the months ahead and it doesn’t sound as if the PM does. Saying “pay them more” while failing to attract visa applications from the Continent looks pitiful.

What next? Groceries? The catering industry (already blighted by post-Brexit labour shortages)? Farmers? Factories? The courts system (60,000 cases awaiting trial)? Online retailers’ deliveries? Nobody knows which, how badly, or for how long. It spooks us.

So do gas prices: some say rising to as much as £2,000 for the average household. Ministers have had to deny there may be power cuts. Will price rises feed through into inflation, mortgage costs? I’m old enough to remember both the anxieties and the animosities when some are clobbered by, others protected from, inflation.

And now Tory MPs are falling out over calls for government subsidy for hard-hit energy-hungry manufacturers. Most of our corporate suppliers of domestic gas and electricity face bankruptcy: 13 have gone under already. Meanwhile the Treasury calls the business secretary a liar for claiming the two were discussing state intervention. How is this looking for overseas investors?

We may be emerging from a nasty spat with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol, leaving the European Court of Justice still at the apex of arbitration, a ridiculous fuss over sausages, and Johnson’s chief negotiator’s dangerous stoking up of sectarian tensions. The Democratic Unionist Party, foolishly marched to the top of the hill, are left to fume.

And the NHS! More than five million delayed operations, cancer services overwhelmed, and an uneasy feeling that the whole structure is in trouble, with GPs the latest in the firing line. Add that to the care homes sector, which (beyond their present critical shortage of staff) can find little in the prime minister’s long promised “plan”. Last year’s coronavirus deaths were kick-started in care homes. The wretched story of care for the elderly has only just begun.

There’s no space here to talk about a collapse in confidence in the police, the impending failure of the Cop26 conference in Glasgow, illegal immigrants crossing the Channel, the inability of the Home Office to keep track of migrants whose political asylum claims are refused, our chronic failure to process such claims with dispatch, the tension between “green” policy, energy security and the householder’s purse, the chill in the Anglo-US relationship, the breakdown of our relations with France, or the cupboard — still bare — of “great new trade deals around the world” ...

Suffice it to say we scent panic at the heart of government. Above the voters’ heads floats an unsettled sense of official confusion. Ministers seem to be making speeches, but pulling levers connected to nothing.

Fate created Boris Johnson to be a prime minister for good times. They are not good and getting worse. Stones will be thrown at government from all directions, but until the present widespread but diffusive feeling of public unease focuses into some kind of diagnosis of the core problem, Johnson may loiter, capering for the media, in Downing Street.

The core problem is him. Directionless and without momentum now Brexit is done and Covid survived, Johnson is a giggling impediment to the unifying sense of political momentum that Mandelson describes. It may be his insouciance itself that brings him down.

But who will inherit? Does Sir Keir Starmer display that all-consuming sense of purpose that Johnson lacks but Tony Blair (for instance) possessed? Hardly. Might Rishi Sunak restore to the Tories their Thatcherite pride in good housekeeping? Perhaps, but it feels old-fashioned now, inadequate to the hour.

A feeling persists that there’s an unoccupied place at the centre of our politics. “Levelling up” won’t hack it, and may soon attract the scorn that “the Big Society” finally invited. Politics abhors a vacuum. “Watch this space” is often a lazy way of ending a column, but this time there really is a space. Watch it.

Anyway, just to provoke RR & Josip (It figures that people who confer upon themselves the titles of "ROF Royalty" and "Josip Broz", i.e. the Yugoslav communist dictator, dislike anyone impertinent enough to disagree with them) here are some more points - as ever, very happy to be told why they're wrong.

UK-focused analysis of Western political and economic trends

It’s going downhill from here. Anyone living here with half an ear to the ground in recent years must be feeling a real sense of accelerated national decline:

Already covered above:

• Higher rate taxpayers – who fund the UK – have far better options.
• Unsustainable redistributive welfare state.
• Dysfunctional NHS.
• Broken British industrial model/parallels with East Germany.
• Constantly increasing crime, particularly violent crime.

Additional points:

• Currency decline. A currency collapsing over 60 years from USD $4 = £1 GBP, to near-parity. Read: “World markets giving a thumbs-down as structural decline is endemic. Whichever party is in power.”
• Gerontocracy. The intergenerational divide is insane. Pensioners’ sense of entitlement combined with UK voting patterns incentivise governments to perpetuate that, hence, e.g., the Sep. 2021 National Insurance increase. Most people did not save enough for a long retirement, so their standard of living is funded by penalising young, working people. This is part of a wider problem:
• Property prices. The property market, in particular, is broken. It is more like an extortion racket, backed by the government & Bank of England. Either you pay half your salary in rent, never to be seen again, or else you take on massive debt, with no knowledge what the interest rate might be a few years down the line. And if you're unable to pay, tough for you but the government will use your taxes to ensure lenders are protected. The Mafia could only dream of a racket on this scale.
• ‘Assetocracy’. Due to fiscal and monetary largesse, asset price inflation during the period 2000-2020, rampant asset inflation is eroding the relative financial wellbeing of those in society who don't hold existing assets or have access to cheap liquidity. This has resulted in wealth becoming “concentrated in a group of people who now decide British elections. Before the crash, 7% of British pensioners were millionaires, as measured by household wealth. Now, it’s 25% — some 3M people. A further 3M are half-millionaires, with at least £500k. That’s 1 out of every 8 people eligible to vote. […] At each election, parties compete to bribe this demographic. Labour’s ‘winter fuel payments’ and pension rises were the start, followed by the Tory triple-lock pension. The next frontier: to guarantee that no one would have to sell their house to pay for care, no matter how rich they are. [this is a] a protection racket, where the tools of the state are used to extract money from minimum-wage workers and pass it on to the better off. […] the Tories are quite literally increasing the tax on care-home workers on minimum wage to better insulate the wealth of the people they care for.” www.spectator.co.uk/article/levelling-up-the-inversion-of-the-welfare-state
• Worthless degrees & massive debts. Crazy university debts for worthless qualifications, thanks to Blair's "50% shall be graduates" nonsense ensuing (a) brutal competition for real graduate jobs; (b) qualification inflation so that almost all jobs require first degrees; (c) an increasing rat race for supposed Masters qualifications; and (d) commercialised universities entirely subordinated to £££.
• National deficit. The second highest deficit in the G7: “In 2020/21 government revenue – from taxes and other receipts – was £793 billion while government spending was £1,093 billion (£1.1 trillion). The deficit was therefore £303 billion, equivalent to 14.3% of GDP, which is a peacetime record.” commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06167
• National debt. Unprecedented levels of debt for UK children (and their children’s children). Debt does matter and attempts to inflate it away will hurt those who have the least capacity to deal with the consequences. Most politicians and bankers know this, but per the famous quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
• Job security. Zero-hour contracts and outsourcing have led to few prospects of being able to affordably start a family. Markets will never again provide the returns that the boomers enjoyed.
• Botched Covid response. Destruction of young people's life prospects due to the Covid response (i.e. lockdowns), with education disrupted and exam results rendered worth, many of whom will now be long-term unemployed, with careers of even the luckiest permanently stifled. The primary benefit of the Covid response was saving a few % of people who had co-morbidities anyway (i.e. Covid primarily killed the frail and the fat; the latter being the authors of their own misfortune). The response was based on the implicit assumption that the event is once in a generation, but it's not: crises have happened about once a decade (Black Wednesday, Dot Com crash, GFC, Covid, etc.) and similar events will happen in future, but the UK has fewer resources to deal with them.
• Political polarisation. American-style polarisation of politics, with a dysfunctional opposition party, hijacked by identify politics and the far left (See Paul Embery, "Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class", unherd.com/2020/11/why-is-the-left-calling-me-a-fascist), and thus unable to offer a credible alternative government.
• Impact of uncontrolled immigration. David Goodhart’s 2004 Prospect essay, “Too Diverse?”, warned of a trade-off between diversity, with mass immigration, and social solidarity, via the welfare state. For citizens to willingly give their hard-earned cash to others via their taxes, they must feel affinity with those others. In the homogenous societies of old that was never a problem: citizens felt the mutual obligation of kinship. Today’s highly mixed societies strain such feelings. Goodhart offered copious data showing that people bridled at subsidising housing, education and welfare benefits of people with shallow roots in society. He warned: “To put it bluntly – most of us prefer our own kind.” Polite society excoriated him for articulating unpalatable truths, but social cohesion is diminishing.  www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/too-diverse-david-goodhart-multiculturalism-britain-immigration-globalisation
• Identity politics: the fetishization and weaponization of victimhood. The West is twisting itself in knots to appease highly vocal activists whose views are devoid of rationality or science. The world currently has three powerful ideologies: (1) Chinese/CCP totalitarianism; (2) Islamic totalitarianism; and (3) Rational liberalism. Wokeism/identity politics is destroying the third and is hugely benefiting of the first two. China observes gleefully, and continues to focus on objectively assessed merit, such as the Gaokao exam:

1. Men and women doing identical jobs are paid the same. However, they are biologically different and make different career choices: this inevitably leads to pay differences.
2. People cannot change sex; ideologues are grooming, drugging and surgically mutilating children; women’s sports are being destroyed; and women risk rape in refuges, hospitals, toilets and prisons. ‘Gender’ is a made-up concept. ‘Gender identity’ is a quasi-religious men’s sexual rights cult, driven by (i) paraphilia/autogynephilia in adult males (e.g. Andrea Chu, Torrey Peters, Grace Lavery, Aimee Challenor); (ii) mental health issues including social contagion in trans-identifying girls; and (iii) opportunism by male athletes (e.g. Alana McLaughlin) and sex offenders seeking access to victims (e.g. Karen White, Barbie Kardashian and Darren Merager). However, you can’t reason people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, so extremists will continue to poison Western politics.
3. ‘Diversity’, ‘equity’ and affirmative action are replacing ‘merit and equal opportunities at point of entry’.

• UK political disintegration risk. Even if unsuccessful, campaigns for both Scottish independence and Irish reunification risk signification disruption.
• Poor international relations.  Poor relationships with China, Russia, the EU (post-Brexit), and the USA (internally unstable, isolationist and led by a senile placeholder POTUS and a diversity hire VPOTUS).
• Declining quality of life. The UK is living beyond its means. Globally, GDP(PPP) per capita is 30^th and falling: statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-gdp-capita-ppp.php (2020). "The UK" isn't rich, because "the UK" doesn't have assets: successful people do, and they are leaving.
• Politicians’ competence. Incompetent, illogical, ideological government led by a lying charlatan. While better than the opposition, the poor-quality government reflects the calibre of those entering public life, particularly since the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal vastly (i) decreased de facto remuneration; and (ii) increased public scrutiny, criticism and distrust of MPs.

Summary. The UK is a small, mid-tier nation whose best days lie generations in the past. Project Fear will be wishful thinking.