If we want to solve the problem, and a whole host of other problems, perhaps we shouldn't have an open door immigration policy.

- Anglo Saxon obsession with property. There is a culture of being obsessed with home ownership in Anglo-Saxon countries. Particularly the UK. This pushes people to pay over the top for property and thus increases prices even further.

- Property prices seem to be increasing particularly sharply around London & Brighton. This is because they are wealth creation centres. Well paid jobs, tourism, industry, culture all cause property prices to go up as people want to live there.

- Weather. This one isn't written about so much. But the hypothesis is that people tend to want to live in the South because of better weather. The weather in Kent is far better than is say Yorkshire in terms of net sunlight and average temperatures.

I would be willing to bet that, in the past, property prices would have still sharply increased in certain areas even without high immigration.

Some reports even suggest the opposite, that increases in immigration can REDUCE house prices: "The University of Cambridge study concluded that an immigration inflow equal to 1% of the local initial population leads to a reduction of 1.6% in house prices".

Making unsubstantiated claims such as those of the parent is what drives the anti-EU right in the UK.

At least on HN, show me the numbers.

You're probably best off just trusting your gut instinct on these things.

Do you really seriously think that an increasing population could ever lead to falling demand for housing? How would that one work?

The charts in their "study" show clearly. Immigration increases, house prices increase.

A lot of people (Myself included) don't like to live in cities caged up like battery chickens.

And of course, one could also envision policies that actually create attraction centres alternative to London. But surely that's unreasonable to expect.

It's not /just/ a question of where to live, it's also a question of someday getting /some/ sort of pension -- it's very likely that pension rates returns are never going to be maintainable for 30 years since the gov can plunder it, and the 'age of retirement' will continue to climb (measured using the age of death of people who retired at 60 or earlier and who are dying now, and thus had a MUCH longer expectancy than us lot who'll have to work til 75 or so..)

So, houses are just investments. When I'll retire, I'll dump them, get the capital and use /that/ to live.

And yes, I know I'm not the 'typical' immigrant, but then again, I am one.

Why do people rob banks? Because that's where the money is. Where's the money in the UK? In property.

As property ownership becomes ever more concentrated, it a) becomes a more tempting target for fiscal raids and b) has fewer votes. There's a US economist whose name I forget who proposes that the big driver of property cycles isn't credit but regulation, as govts deregulate too much then finally swing back when the horrible consequences become electorally inconvenient.

Also, it'd still be a better use of money than a pension that is 1) locked and 2) unusable until perhaps after you are dead... At least you can 1) sell it and buy something else and 2) live in a house and enjoy it.

Mind you, I don't completely understand the drive most people have here to 'buy our own home' - even in their early 20's!- in france, people don't even think about buying anything until they hit 35 or more! People are quite happy to rent a flat for a long while... or forever in many cases.

Also, there the geometry problem: in france, the big majority of 'comfortable' homes are in fact in small apartment blocks, all over the cities. In the UK, you need a 'detached home' otherwise, it's no go. Needless to say, it's not terribly space efficient. Most new properties outside london are smaller and smaller 'semi detached' format that are often smaller in surface than a nice flat!

So i think there's also quite a bit of 'cultural' bias to the property crisis.

I'm not aware of any moves by uk.gov to "help people buy property" to live in. If you mean the so-called "Help to Buy" policy, that IMO had precisely the opposite effect in that it kicked off the latest round of price insanity on the perception that uk.gov would support the bubble with taxpayer money if necessary. It was an extremely cynical and damaging move with no obvious rationale other than the electoral one.

Fully agree that France does housing much better than the UK. Pretty much everyone does housing much better than the UK. We have an anti-market, designed to deliver the smallest possible number of lowest possible quality homes at the highest possible price. Yay.

The better explanation is that real estate is just about the only thing that can boundlessly go up in price without any perceived increase in quality or performance and so it tends to be a sink for surplus wealth generated by a nation. On top of that there are a lot of wealthy people competing with each other for investing in the UK real estate market (and those are not just UK residents) and interest rates are at an historic low which tends to drive up prices.

If London must continue being the ever-expanding world-beating hard-rocking sweat-soaking multi-megalopolis, then the surrounding countryside has to give. If the countryside has to be preserved, London must stop attracting people or even incentivize residents to move elsewhere.

I find it incredible that, because nobody can make a choice one way or the other, the rest of the country is forced to pay the price, as money flows to London "home investments" from more useful economic activity, the brain-drain towards the capital continues unabated, and brownfields keep rotting away.

You can build up instead of out.

And the aims are clear - to unite Europe into one undemocratic state and remove individual countries and cultures.

And it appears to be completely controlled and driven by Germany.

If by "unelected dictators" you are referring to the council, these are ministers appointed by the democratic governments in the individual member states.

(One entire commission was dismissed in 1999, a candidate was not accepted a few years back -- I think she was from Romania. Might have been Bulgaria, though.)

I'd say that as quite good as democracy goes.

The EU is controlled by Germany, and its aims are to unite Europe into a single state. There is one winner in the EU project - Germany.

Hopefully in our lifetimes it will all collapse as the USSR did, and we will once again have a bit more freedom.

That is, by the way, true everywhere. In Western democracies, laws are typically initiated by a government who is not elected directly but formed by the parliament, based on who has a majority or who can come up with a working coalition. The the actual text of law is created, written, by civil servants who work for the government. It is reviewed by a number of unelected parties who propose changes. Then it is approved, or not, by the parliament. You cannot really say that you'd have "elected people creating the laws".

There are exceptions, of course; most notably the process in Switzerland where direct polls actually sometimes create laws and can even change the constitution. Elsewhere, this is uncommon.

European Directives have to be passed by the EP. You can't create European Law without directly elected MEPs.

The Lisbon treaty does not cover the same things as the TCE did, only a subset of which there was consensus.

It's ok to have a difference of opinion, but please keep your facts straight.

I do not know whether you are in a position of power, but I note that this argument is often advanced by people in positions of power.

Or are they deleted from the Internet by those in power?

There is nothing to "solve" here. Let people do what they want to do.

The comparison with fashion design is also BS. For one thing, there are lots of male designers (especially the famous ones) and then the number of fashion designers is a lot lower than the number of programmers.

And this is not as irrelevant a choice as whether to play with dolls or lego: Programming is a skill which allows for social upwards mobility like nothing else. Just assuming women (and minorities) don't want that, is a bit too easy.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab33.pdf

The first thing to note, is that both the number of men and women getting CS degrees dropped: the entire field went from ~42k BS degrees to ~24k degrees. There were about 10k less men, and about 8k less women graduating in 1996 compared to 1986. The number eventually rebounded for men, but didn't recover for women until 2003. So something drove men and women out of the field, and women stayed out of it longer.

The next interesting thing is the number of masters and PhDs per gender. Neither of them dropped (so the percentage of BS graduates getting MS and PhD actually increased!). So it was still desirable for men and women in the field to get their masters and doctorates.

So the question isn't why the number of women plunged, it's what drove both men and women out of CS, and what caused it to grow for men? I would probably hypothesis that CS was seen as a risky degree, so while men are generally less adverse to risk (see all the dangerous jobs they do) and got a degree, women choose more stable degrees (though those interested remained, as I think the number of PhD and Master degrees show). Now that CS is now seen as a stable career, we can see there is more interest to join. Of course, that is only looking at the data cited by what you linked, there could definitely be other circumstances.

I don't know about that. Men consistently study fields with higher income potential than women. The current theory is that when CS started gaining prestige and power, the same thing happened as with all professions that carry power and prestige -- women were pushed out (and by that I don't mean that there was some conspiracy, but society simply started directing women away from CS).

I still feel that saying "women were pushed out" is the wrong way to phrase it. We can see from the data, that both men and women were "pushed out" of the field, with men recovering from the drop earlier. After reading a bit more, it could be that marketing in the 80's (as suggested by the NPR article) negatively effecting both women and men (which was left out of the NPR article) entering the field, but women ended up more effected.

Side note: drops like this have occurred in other fields at different times. Psychology actually ended up losing a lot of men in the 70s, while women increased. I am sure we could find a few other examples as well.

Absolutely. Many researchers compare those shifts with changing attitudes towards certain professions (say, by counting certain words when they're described in the media etc.), with women participation usually correlated negatively with prestige.

In any case, much of the distinction between masculine and feminine professions is traced back to Victorian times. Of course, similar differences have existed much longer than that and in many cultures, but the Victorians elevated the distinction between gender roles into an elaborate system of social codes (e.g. they had certain rooms in the house more appropriate for men to spend time in, and other for women).

Second (and unrelated to the discussion, really), I don't know where you get your assumption that learning to code in college is too late. I've been in this business for twenty years and some of the very best developers I know only learned to program in college. If anything, I'd say that not going to school at all and having a weak background in algorithms/mathematics is a much greater stumbling block for some software achievements than not programming before school, but even that is probably a bad generalization. Excellent developers come from all backgrounds.

IT simply attracts too many people of one kind and interest, and it's detrimental to the industry's output. For instance, we can't attract or keep people with creative design or artistic skills in the industry because of the mono-culture in many workplaces. It doesn't matter if those people are men or women; there are a lot of men who also get tired of working in a hardcore IT environment.

I have a friend who's a nurse; that sector simply can't attract men, even though there's a clear need for male power in some of the more physical demanding jobs. It's not about "equality" or "political correctness"; we need their skills.

I have no problem finding Python developers; but I can't find anybody who can do the design, usable interface and graphics while still having enough coding skills to support the project. We need more diverse skill sets and hence, a more diverse group of people. Not because they are women or black or gay or loopy artists; but simply because we could produce something better.

Projects like these might attract a more diverse group of people than stereotypical coders.

There is evidence which prooves discrimination and unfavorable bias against women in technology. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with creating organisations for women.

Fact is, several DjangoGirls "graduates" who have never done any programming have gotten programming jobs within a year. So apparently, there is some benefit to their on-boarding and motivational efforts.