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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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I don't really see the appeal for a lot of these migrants coming to the west. Indians who could be making 2000 dollars a month which goes a very long way in India become underpaid engineers in the UK where their after tax salary ends up being 3000 dollars which barely covers rent. My Indian colleagues love sharing photos of the beautiful houses they grew up in, their gardeners bringing in daily tropical fruit and all the family life they have back home. In their new country they live in a cramped apartment in a semi-ghetto.

My predictions is that we are going to see an exodus to India which won't just consist of Indians. Northern European weather is awful, taxes and regulations are high and the cost of living is through the roof. It is better to move to your Indian employees than to move Indians to Europe.

People mock Slough for being a shithole, but a random residential panorama from there looks like this.

The least impoverished state in India is commie Kerala, and a random residential panorama from its capital... let me paste that... Thiruvananthapuram looks like this, which is not a shithole, but it's not the kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism that will sway American NIMBYs either.

If we go to India proper, aka BIMARU, then the situation looks even worse: a random panorama from Delhi looks like this and I've cheated because Delhi is not technically a BIMARU state. Here's one from a random town in UP.

You're not comparing like for like here. The Slough street is a top 10% (or even higher) nighbourhood. Your first photo of India is an average to below average neighbourhood and your second and third ones are commercial areas with some residences on top rather than pure residential areas which are on average somewhat nicer and look more like your first photo. But even then, it's nowhere near a top 10% neighbourhood and we know this immediately because the street is too narrow for one.

That isn't top 10%. A top 10% neighborhood in the Slough area would be called "Windsor" or "Maidenhead".

Sure, in Slough yes but it's definitely top 10% for England as a whole (even ignoring land value and just looking at house quality).

It’s a 90th percentile (almost exactly) house by price, but this a poor comparison because incomes are so much higher in the Southeast and especially for residents of the affluent green belt suburbs, in which as @MadMonzer suggests this is probably more like 75th percentile.

In the median part of the UK, probably somewhere in the north, £600k can buy you a much nicer place than this.