Tobold's Blog
Thursday, September 30, 2021
 
An outdated way to watch TV

About a year ago I bought an Apple TV 4K device, primarily in order to stream services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or YouTube to my TV. That purchase included a free year of Apple TV+, and that free year is about to run out. Unlike most subscriptions, you can't cancel an Apple TV+ subscription early and still keep watching until the last day; if you cancel, you lose access, so if you want to use it until the last day, you need to cancel on the last day.

So what have I watched on Apple TV+ in a year? Not much! Mythic Quest, which was okay, with only the "Quarantine" episode being truly outstanding. Ted Lasso, which turns a rather stupid premise ("what if an American football coach would be hired to coach British soccer?") into a very watchable feel-good comedy. And The Morning Show, which is star-studded, but otherwise just okay to watch.

So, I just watch everything I want and then unsubscribe? Not so fast! Both Ted Lasso and The Morning Show are in season 2. And you can't just binge them. The episodes are released one per week, "next episode coming next Friday". Duh, really? This seems like a very outdated way to stream TV to me. Ted Lasso is on episode 10 out of 12, but The Morning Show is only on episode 2 out of 10 of season 2. If I wanted to watch the season to the end, I would need to subscribe to Apple TV+ for two months, just for that. Sorry, Reese and Jennifer, but I am not going to do that, even if it is just €4.99 per month.

Netflix clearly has more and better original content, and Amazon Prime has most of the rest. Plus Amazon Prime is essentially free if I substract the saved shipping cost of my Amazon orders from the cost. Unlike Apple TV+, there are no shenanigans with inability to cancel early, and most series are released all at once. As somebody who is somewhat cautious about being subscribed to too many things at once, Apple TV+ will have to go!

- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
 
MicroMacro - Crime City

I labeled this post as board game, but that label is debatable. MicroMacro - Crime City is a game which is played on a large city map, and doesn't really involve a board or meeples. It might be actually easier to play this with the map pinned on a wall, rather than spread out on a table. But while being very far from any other board game I own, MicroMacro is an absolutely brilliant game in the detective genre. It is easier to show than to explain, so fortunately there is an online demo case.

To some extent MicroMacro traces its lineage back to Where's Wally / Waldo? books. Finding specific characters on a large illustration full of many other characters is part of the challenge. However, in the Wally / Waldo books the challenge ends there, while in MicroMacro that is just the starting point. The city map with the many characters is not a snapshot in time, but time passes when moving from one location to another. So you can find the same character several times on the map, and follow his story. Very often the direction in which a character is going is a hint on where to find the previous image in the series, and the next one.

The game in this is that you get a set of cards that ask you questions about the story. For example you might first be asked to find a specific crime scene and be given some general directions; then you might be asked where the victim was earlier, or where the criminal went afterwards. By following all these series in time you end up figuring out the whole story of the crime. As I said, best to play the demo case linked above to understand the principle.

MicroMacro is the sort of game you can bring to a family gathering, e.g. for the various upcoming holidays. Pretty much anybody can play. After some complaints, the developers added age recommendations to the various cases; so if there are younger children you don't want to confront with murder or infidelity themes, you can find cases that don't involve anything critical. But while there is a tiny exhibitionist opening his raincoat on the map somewhere, this is all very harmless, and shouldn't really shock any children above the recommended age of 10. The big draw of MicroMacro is that you can get people to play who never play board games. And it's a very positive experience, everybody always feels happy and clever when they figured a case out on the map, regardless of age.

There are already two versions of the game out, Crime City and Crime City - Full House. In Europe they cost between €20 and €25, but looking at Amazon.com the game appears hard to get in North America. Whether you want to play it solo, with a significant other, or the whole family, this is a game I would recommend.

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- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Monday, September 27, 2021
 
RoomSketcher

Moving house is something that most households don't do very often, because it requires a lot of work, and a lot of planning and preparation. And because this is something I might be doing next year, I looked around to see what sort of software would be available to help. And I was positively impressed by RoomSketcher: There is quite a lot of free functionality to draw floorplans and put in furniture. And there are several reasonably priced schemes, either by subscription or one-by-one on demand, for other helpful features. I ended up taking a subscription, and that even included credits for a service where I just sent in the photos of my floor plans and got them encoded in the software with all the right measurements.

Why would I need all that? I plan to move from an apartment with one floor to a slightly bigger house with two floors. The sizes of the rooms will be different. And not every piece of furniture will move with us, the prime example being the fitted kitchen. RoomSketcher allows me to visualize the new house, in 2D and 3D. I can move furniture around easily, and for example check whether the large wardrobe in our current bedroom fits into which room of the new house. I can print out 3D plans with all the furniture to show the movers where each piece is going. Or I can do an interactive live 3D walkthrough to visualize how the new house would look furnished. It's all really quite neat and helpful.


- posted by Tobold @ 10:30 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Sunday, September 26, 2021
 
Agemonia

Agemonia is a board game which is currently on Kickstarter, with about 2 days remaining from the point I write this. I backed it, after seeing a prototype played on YouTube. It fits squarely into my preferred characteristics for board games: 
  • Playable solo or co-operatively with 2 people (in this case up to 4, actually)
  • Non-trivial game mechanics, with non-obvious choices that have consequences
  • Character progression
  • A campaign with a developing story
In addition to these main requirements, there are some other things I appreciated about especially about Agemonia: First of all, while at €99 I certainly wouldn't call the game "cheap", at least there is this €99 core level with cardboard standees; you *can* spend €50 extra to get miniatures instead, but you don't have to. Then I appreciate the "battle maps in a book" style, like Jaws of the Lion, because it is a lot faster to set up than a game based on tiles, and ends up with more visual variety. And finally, I like dice, especially custom dice with some sort of mitigation mechanics if you roll badly.

By following a number of people on YouTube that talk about board games and Kickstarter board games, and listening to them when they believe that a project is fishy, I managed up to now to only back Kickstarter projects that actually delivered. Sometimes late, but they all delivered. Still, one needs to be comfortable with paying €99 now, plus shipping cost later, for what is just a promise of a game that will hopefully be delivered in December 2022. While my board game collection isn't quite a bad yet as my Steam game collection, there is definitively a risk that I am excited about a game when I pledge for it on Kickstarter, but that excitement has cooled down a lot by the time the game is actually delivered.

Still, for me the general trend is that I am more and more interested in board games. In three week, I will go the the Spiel in Essen, which is the biggest European board game convention. And I haven't been there for decades. My gaming career started with board games, but pen & paper roleplaying games and computer games took over from that. I think credit is due to Kickstarter to have made more complex, more interesting board games for a smaller audience possible. Agemonia has currently 1,632 backers. This is exactly the sort of market that the old style retail board game market would have problems serving.

I am trying to be selective. I currently have 5 board games backed on Kickstarter (7th Citadel, Forest of Radgost, Glory 2nd edition, Arydia, and Agemonia) plus 3 on Gamefound (Bardsung, Hexplore It: The Domain of Mirza Noctis, and Lands of Galzyr). And I have learned to keep away from these very attractive looking "all-in" pledges, which tend to end you up with more game than you can actually play. Because inflation is on the rise, and people creating Kickstarter projects need to charge you next-year prices today, plus the exorbitant rise in shipping cost world-wide, board games have become significantly more expensive over the last year. Plus there is this trend I hate that some games don't have affordable "core box" pledges anymore, but the most basic version you can buy already comes with lots of miniatures and deluxe components, e.g. Descent. Between all that, and the much smaller market, the per-hour-of-entertainment cost of board games is significantly higher than that of most computer games. Still, sometimes its good to chuck some dice and play with physical game components.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:51 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Friday, September 24, 2021
 
How “far” is “far right”?

This weekend there are the main federal elections in Germany, which will determine who the next chancellor after Angela Merkel will be. Unlike the one-party system of China, or the two-party system of the USA, German voters get a choice between many different parties, from the far right to the far left, everything in between, and a couple of kooky ones, like the Pirate Party. And The Atlantic has an article about the main far right party, Alternative für Deutschland.

Now, while I don’t live in Germany anymore, I am still a German national, and I still vote (by mail, obviously). And while I did vote center left, I would like to correct some views that foreigners might have about a German “far right” party.

Politics in Germany now, and for the past decades, have been very centrist compared to most of the rest of the world. The current government is a coalition of the main center right and the main center left party. “Far” right in this context means a party that is against immigration, doesn’t like muslims very much, and is sceptical of the European Union. In other words, they are pretty much indistinguishable from main stream politicians in other countries, like Donald Trump, or Boris Johnson. Of course, given the Nazi history of Germany, people worry a lot more about such politics in Germany than elsewhere. But still, this is “far” right only on a relative scale, or on a scale designed by woke media.

Which brings us to Voltaire, and the quote often mis-attributed to him of “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Which is pretty much the exact opposite of the current cancel culture. I am very much pro-immigration, being basically an immigrant myself. But I do believe that in a multi-party system, a party that is against immigration should exist. Multi-culturalism is something to work towards, it doesn’t come to everybody naturally.

Alternative für Deutschland is named as a counter-argument to something Merkel once said, that there is no alternative to her policy. And as much as I prefer Merkel’s policy in this case, I am pretty certain that I don’t want to live in a political system without alternative. What we need is political dialogue and open discussion, not demagogy. Even policy that is morally right needs explanation and persuasion. Because if we don’t do that, we end up with a political system in which there is no center between the “far” right and the “far” left, and no possible compromise.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments
Thursday, September 23, 2021
 
Gloomhaven digital release date announced

Gloomhaven is an absolutely brilliant tactical game. Apart from the core board game, there is also a “lite” version called Jaws of the Lion, and a digital version on Steam, currently in early access, but with a full release coming October 20. And, weirdly enough, you’d probably want one of these other versions, and keep away from the core game.

I am looking forward to the digital Gloomhaven full release, because that will allow me to play the full campaign digitally. In early access, the “guildmaster” mode also provides some sort of campaign experience, but with less story and different rules for the character management part between battles. With the release version having both of these modes, that is a huge amount of content. You get more content than the core board game version, but for a fraction of the price, so that is a really good deal. For me the main attraction of the digital version will be solo play. For playing the game again with my wife, I’d go back to the board game version. A board game on a table to me has far more charm than two people having to share a mouse, keyboard, and screen.

One reason we don’t play this all that often is that the core Gloomhaven box is such a huge thing with 2,600 components. It is the only one of my board games where I went and bought an insert system for orderly component storage. With my other games I either didn’t need anything like that, or could just 3D-print a simple token tray. Given that we don’t have the table space to keep Gloomhaven built up for a longer period, this means that every session requires extensive set up and take down periods.

So for anybody who wants to try out the board game version, I would very much recommend starting with Jaws of the Lion. It is exactly the same tactical combat system, but easier to learn, and easier to set up. For solo play, I’d recommend the Steam version. I can only hope that at some point in the future Asmodee Digital will make a digital version of Frosthaven. Because that will be another game using the same great tactical combat system, but in an even bigger box, that I don’t currently plan to buy. With board games, “too much game” is actually a thing.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Saturday, September 18, 2021
 
Self-destructive?

In the last 250 years of US history, there have been 1 revolution, 1 civil war, and 59 presidential elections. That would suggest that it is easier to gain political power through votes than it is to gain political power by force. Now it is in the very nature of different political parties that they believe in different things; but it seems that a party that doesn't believe in voting would be ultimately self-destructive. The world has a long history of political activists organizing election boycotts, but in the overwhelming majority of cases the election still was declared valid, and the non-participating side lost by default.

Now a very vain individual losing an election might understandably claim that the vote was rigged against him. There is no forward-looking strategy in that, it is just an expression of personal weakness to be unable to admit defeat. It gets slightly ridiculous if you claim fraud after losing an election decisively. But the psychology of trying to save face in not admitting reality is pretty clear.

However, as a forward-looking political strategy, claiming that elections are fundamentally rigged at a very large scale looks like political suicide for any party. How is a follower of a political party supposed to react when told that his vote isn't counted? He basically has the choice between insurrection and apathy. As I mentioned at the start, in the US real insurrections happen less than once per century, and have a historical 50% success rate. Smaller scale violent protest is more frequent, but has a 0% success rate. With little chance of success for violence, and a natural human preference for apathy, most people who believe that going to vote is useless will simply stay home.

Now obviously the winning side in any election is usually quite certain that everything with the vote was fine. Having won the previous election makes the supporter of a party more convinced that his vote made a difference, and thus motivates him to go voting the next time around. So the risk of a party promoting voting apathy has a potential of becoming a death spiral: In a close election the more motivated side wins, then gets even more motivated, while the party of apathy loses, and becomes even more convinced that voting is of no use. And then having made voting more difficult can really backfire.

My prediction still is that this isn't going to end well. Even as a foreigner just skimming US news, it is noticeable that losing politicians talking of violence as a solution to "take our country back" is on the rise. If that trends isn't reversed, they might take their country back all the way to 1861.


- posted by Tobold @ 8:41 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Thursday, September 16, 2021
 
Why you shouldn't listen to financial advice from your bank

A sizeable chunk of my retirement savings is currently on a simple savings account, where the measly 0.1% interest rate I get is way below the inflation rate. So I am losing money, slowly. And my bank is writing me that they noticed the money on my savings account, and advise me to invest that money in one of their investment products instead. Sounds like good advice, doesn't it? Not so fast!

The large majority of investment advice you get, whether that is from professional bankers or dubious YouTube influencers, is backward looking: Look here, the investment product I am peddling gained this much over the last X months! That argument is very misleading, which is why the SEC actually requires funds to write "past performance is not indicative of future results" in their prospecti. In reality often the opposite is true: If a class of investment had a spectacular run over the last X months, it becomes increasingly likely that a "correction" will happen, if not a downright crash. So if you want to decide whether to invest in shares, you should look at the Shiller price/earnings ratio. This is currently 38.7, compared to a long-term average of 16; only just before the dotcom crash has this ever been higher. If you invest in shares or a fund based on shares now, chances are that somewhere in the next 12 months this correction or crash happens, and you lose a big chunk of your investment.

So why is the friendly banker advising me to invest now? Doesn't he know about price/earnings ratios? Well, it turns out that the banker has a conflict of interest. Because he is paid by the bank, his main goal is to assure that the bank is making money, not me. And my money on the savings account isn't making much money for my bank. If I would buy their investment products, my bank would get the usual mutual fund fees. These fees are completely independent on how well the investment product is doing. In other words, the risk (which they were legally obliged to mention exists) is completely carried by me. If I buy an investment product from them and lose my shirt, my bank is still earning the same money. Advising me to invest is risk-free for my bank, but certainly not for me.

So how about alternative ways of investing? Buying meme stonks on RobinHood? Buying cryptocurrency? Well, I am not saying that one should never do that. But one has to be aware that this isn't investing. It's gambling. My personal experience with gambling is on the positive side: The one week of my life I spent in Vegas I ended up winning $700. But I had determined in advance how much I was willing to lose and set aside a $1000 pool for that. I would have stopped gambling if I had lost that, but luckily managed to win a bit instead. Fun, but not solid investment advice. Meme stonks, cryptocurrency, collectibles, or whatever else you heard on the internet was a surefire way to get rich quick are all gambling. You can win money, but it is far from certain, and most of these products can easily lose far more than a balanced share portfolio during a stock market crash. That is not the right investment product for my retirement savings. Feel free to set aside a sum of money that you could afford to lose and gamble with that, but not more!

Sometimes the best investment advice you can get is to not invest anything now. When you open your newspaper and read about a terrible stock market crash, that is probably the time to invest. Also, with inflation on the rise, sooner or later the interest rates on bonds are going to rise again. The ultra-low inflation / ultra-low interest rate era is a historical anomaly, and can't last forever. And while investment in housing for speculative reasons can be risky, investing in a house you plan to live in for years is relatively safe, if you don't get too much into mortgage debt for that. Me, I'm planning to do just that, and ignore the friendly advice letter from my bank.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:54 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments
Saturday, September 11, 2021
 
Dice Legacy

While there are literally thousands of video games these days, there are a lot less different genres of video games, and some games play very much like each other. For example Humankind plays very much like Civilization, or, even more obviously, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous plays a lot like Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Finding a game that *doesn't* play like something else is a rarity these days: This year I can think of only two, Wildermyth and the freshly released Dice Legacy.

Dice Legacy calls itself a roguelike dice-based survival city builder, which is a handful. So is the game. My first recommendation, if you want to try it, would be to play your first game on easy difficulty. Otherwise you probably end up still trying to understand the mechanics of the game while some raiders burn down your whole city. In Dice Legacy you build a city/village/colony on a world that is the inside of a ring. So your map is not very wide, but quite long. The goal of the game is to extend your city once around the ring and capture the harbour building of the enemy at the other end.

To do that, you need to use your population, of which you can have only 12 (or slightly more, temporarily). But your population consists of dice in different colors. At the start, they are all peasant dice. Over time you can create citizen dice, soldier dice, merchant dice, and monk dice. Later you can even create custom construct dice. All the dice are 6-sided. You can only use the face showing up. For example a peasant has one "work" side, two "gather" sides, one "build" side, one "fight" side, and one "scout" side. Once a die is used, it becomes greyed out. You can roll your dice, which reactivates the greyed out ones, and gives you a random result on each of them.

The obvious difficulty with that is that if you need something specific fast, most often a "fight" result to battle some enemy raiders, you might not get that result on your roll and end up frantically rolling the dice several times. But each time you roll the dice, their durability goes down, and then you need to recover that with food. Basically Dice Legacy plays a bit like a worker placement board game, but with the randomness of dice, and the added pressure of stuff happening in real time.

Personally I like Dice Legacy very much. One negative review compares the game to a "timed IQ test". I would agree, but I see that more as a positive. This is *not* a casual game at all. You really need to think hard and fast to make it work in face of the randomness. The game is quite challenging, even at "standard" difficulty, and once you win a game like that, there are different ways to make it even harder.

Having said that, I'm pretty sure that I will play this for 10+ hours, and then uninstall it. Each game is only a few hours, and it does get repetitive, so there isn't all that much replay value. The "roguelike" aspect isn't really well designed: You can "ascend" dice and take up to 2 improved dice into your next game; but getting improved dice and ascending them is more or less already an end-game activity. If you set the difficulty too high and lose the game, you aren't likely to get to any ascended dice, and thus the next game isn't going to be any easier. The different rulers aren't adding much variety, and the different scenarios are more designed to be punishing in some way, instead of offering much variety.

So I definitively wouldn't recommend Dice Legacy to everybody. If you are okay to pay 20 bucks for 10 hours of very challenging puzzle gameplay, this might be the game for you. If you are looking for something more casual, or prefer action over thinking, then you might not be the target audience. The Steam reviews are "mixed" for that reason.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:08 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Wednesday, September 08, 2021
 
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous army management

I mentioned in my previous post on this game that Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has a sub-game which plays a bit like battles from Heroes of Might & Magic. Now I played that system a bit, I can say more.

Just like in Heroes of Might & Magic, you will have armies with a general moving on the main map, and once they meet an enemy army, battle ensues. Battles are on a square grid, turn-based, and your general can participate by for example casting spells. Unlike Heroes of Might & Magic, you can have a certain amount of losses and recover them at the end of the battle, so a series of battles with minor losses doesn't diminish your army size. You can hire fresh troops every week, get some troops through events or dialogue options with your adventuring group, and you general gets stronger by earning xp.

The interesting part is how the army game interacts with the adventuring group role-playing game. Basically each army has a movement limit per day, while your adventuring party consumes time by movement and resting. This forces you to constantly switch between the two games: You play your army until you run out of movement for it, then play your adventuring group until you reach the next day, where you can again move your army. The enemy armies on the main map are visible both in army mode and in adventuring mode. And in adventuring mode, they simply block the road. So you need to move your army and beat the enemy army that blocks the way for your adventuring group.

I find the system is okay as long you like both RPGs and fantasy tactical battle games. There is more "game" to the army part of Wrath of the Righteous than there was game in the kingdom management part of Kingmaker. However, just like in Heroes of Might & Magic, you better make sure not to occur permanent losses to your army, as that would seriously hinder your progress in the game. While you can turn gold from your adventuring into resources to buy soldiers, the number of soldiers you can hire per week is very limited, and rebuilding a lost army would take a very long time. If you really lose a battle, you are basically forced to save scum and try something else. The strength of the enemy armies tells you what you can beat, and that tells you where your adventuring party can go, which is an interesting new approach on progressively unlocking world map locations.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:30 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Saturday, September 04, 2021
 
Do you want to win a lot of RPG and board games?

It is in the very nature of lotteries that your chances of winning are slim. But when you can enter a lottery for free, a slim chance to win big isn't all that bad. There is a Giveaway action to win a Complete 5E Book Collection + Any 3 Boardgames You Want + Tanares RPG. Tanares RPG is a Kickstarter project for 5E compatible RPG books, and as a promotion for that, Dragori Games is doing this giveaway lottery. You can improve your chances of winning by watching some YouTube videos, and by spreading the word, which is what I am doing with the link above. So the more people click on that link, the higher my chances of getting about a cubic meter of game material. Then you can create and publish your own link, and we have a nice pyramid scheme going. :) But seriously, the link gives a lot less "lottery tickets" than the YouTube videos, so those are probably your best bet.


- posted by Tobold @ 2:08 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
 
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

On Thursday, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous was released. And for once, I bought a game at release. Or, actually, a day before release, in order to get the pre-order bonuses. So, how is the game?

In a nutshell, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is pretty much the same game as Pathfinder: Kingmaker, without the kingdom management. Instead it gets a "Heroes of Might & Magic" style sub-game, but I haven't reached that yet. If you have played neither Kingmaker nor Wrath, well, Kingmaker is €20, and Wrath is €50, and Wrath certainly isn't more than twice as good as Kingmaker. Neither one of the Pathfinder games is especially beginner-friendly. Wrath has 25 classes, with around 5 sub-classes each. Unless you know the system quite well, you are likely to have no idea which one of the over 100 options to choose and end up with a premade character. Or you spend several hours searching the internet for the perfect build for your character, which makes the character much more efficient, but not necessarily more fun to play. In any case, there aren't that many fundamental roles in a party, so those 100+ subclasses are definitely overkill.

After having started Kingmaker with a cleric, and then started over with a wizard, this time I directly went for the wizard. Of course I ended up with lots of wizard-y companions and only one cleric-y companion. And Owlcat games subtly nerfed arcane spellcasters by making the story about battling demons, which are more likely to have spell resistances or elemental resistances than the enemies in Kingmaker. On the other hand, wizard is still a very fun class to play. And once you leave the tutorial mission and get into the proper game, the first vendor is selling all scrolls that your wizard might ever want to learn spells from, which removes a major disadvantage of that class.

Wrath of the Righteous, like the patched version of Kingmaker, can be played in turn-based mode. Which is what I prefer. My group is only level 3, but there are already so many different options that they have in combat, that I would find real-time combat far too chaotic to be fun. Outside combat, the game is mostly about doing quests and having character dialogue, sometimes involving skill checks. You follow these quests to various locations on the main map, each of which then is a battle map to explore and do your quests in. Wrath is to Kingmaker what XCOM 2 is to XCOM 1: In the sequel the bad guys won and your job is it to get the good guys back up again.

As I liked Kingmaker and played it for over 180 hours, Wrath of the Righteous is a nice enough game for me. I would have wished for more improvements over Kingmaker, especially in terms of loot and inventory management. But other than a button to sell all junk loot, the game is still pretty much the same here. Basically I would only recommend Wrath of the Righteous to people who already played Kingmaker and want more of the same.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:07 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Thursday, September 02, 2021
 
The pitfalls of stopping immigration

Pretty much any right-wing party in the world has some sort of anti-immigration manifest in their program. While completely incorrect, the assertion that immigrants rape your women, steal your jobs, and exploit welfare benefits are often rather popular among voters. The part that nobody tells you is the economic reality, where immigrants are often essential to fill the worst-paid jobs. So, what happens if you actually kick all those foreigners out? Well, nothing good.

It turns out that cheap foreign labor is actually necessary for the lifestyle we are leading. Immigrants not only pick the fruits, they also drive the trucks / lorries that make up the supply chain necessary to bring those fruit (and everything else) to the supermarket shelves. Rather than "stealing" anybody's job, immigrants take the jobs that the native population doesn't want, because those jobs are uncomfortable and underpaid.

So now Brexit has turned into an interesting socio-economic experiment. If Britain can't fuel their supply chains with cheap foreign labor, what are the alternatives? How much do you have to improve working conditions to make these jobs actually acceptable to the locals? And how much would for example food prices in supermarkets go up if you paid truck / lorry drivers a decent wage? First estimates are between 6% and 9%, and the average shopper won't like that.

While I am sure that politicians will blame others (in Britain that "others" is usually the EU) for those problems and the inflation that follows, it would be worth starting a more honest discussion around immigration with those voters. How much *do* they actually hate immigration? How much would they be willing to pay to keep immigrants out?

- posted by Tobold @ 8:45 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments
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