Nothing really. Just a snapshot from the council housing estate that makes up one half of our street. With nice crappy audio of bangs and shouts to give a flavour of the area.
The other half of our street – divided by a larger cross-street – is being ‘gentrified’ by people like me and Kate, with privately owned terraced houses rising 40-50% in value in the last two years. A 3 bed house is now worth ¬¨¬®¬¨¬£600k ($1.2m). When I was working in Investor Relations, I used to find this estate a scary place to walk through, and avoided it. Now I walk through it at least twice a day to get the bus.
When I passed this Nokia box just now, I was in the middle of calculating that the retail price of my Nokia phone was around a month’s salary on minimum wage after tax – and a quarter of a year or so on the dole.
On the plus side, I think 3 to 5 thousand people in the City take home bonuses of over one million pounds ($2m) each year, now (in addition to their 6 figure salaries, of course) – and in total around ¬¨¬®¬¨¬£10 billion is given in bonuses in the uk. So I’m sure all that will trickle down soon enough. That’s the theory, isn’t it? Strange it hasn’t happened yet. And last week our finance minister became our PM, promising opportunities for all. Things can only get better.
But anyway, what the fuck am I wittering on about my neighbourhood and the economy for? This is just a video of a dirty, broken down, badly-patched-up high tech box on my street.
Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4), Flash Video (.flv)
Trickle down economics man, what a scam. The political equivalent of those door to door scumbags that rob little old ladies of their life savings. When you put the welfare of the lower classes into the hands of large, for-profit corporations, trusting their conscience will direct them to spread their wealth beyond shareholder dividends…well call me cynical but it will never happen. This was the reason here in Cali millions of people got scammed out of billions of dollars during the energy scandal a few years back. Lets totally deregulate the energy industry, leave them to their own devices, and let the market shake things out. Let competition force prices lower and saving trickle down to the user….yeah worked out real well for everyone.
Nice slice of real life man. Gentrifying inner cities, well its good coz who wants a slum on their doorstep. But without affordable housing it just marginalizes the poor even further..
its not good complaining about brits not responding to people they dont know. you arrived out of the blue. i subscribed to you.
then when i tried to direct message you, i discovered i couldnt. which is it rupert?
open or not? you dont even have an email addy on your site i can see.
keep up the good work though. you’re mad.